October 2008

Photo of Gertrude Stein seated in “Godiva,” Tchelitchew and Allen Tanner by Alice B. Toklas (Belley, France about 1927)

Self-Portrait by Pavel Tchelitchew (1925). Oil on canvas.

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, “Variation 2: Quasi toccata”

At about the same time as Diaghilev was about to commission a mythological ballet (Zephyr et Flore) from Vladimir Dukelsky, Gertrude Stein was about to ignite the equivalent of automatic writing in the painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. In Gertrude Stein Remembered, Linda Simon published a transcript of the Martin A. Ryerson Lecture at Yale University given by Tchelitchew in 1951.

Here he alludes to Stein as being a kind of Robert Gravian Mother goddess to him. Her great interest, as a student of William James, was in the functioning of the human brain, its reactions. He began a process of automatic drawing which led to thousands and thousands of drawings. He says that she knew her poetry originated in a magic of the bygone days and that the prolificness in his drawing was due to her. He gives the etymology of the word “Orpheus”–-aur (light), and rophoe (cheering health)—a healer by means of light.

“She wanted to know through the automatic writing the language of our psyche, ” he says. “Art is revealed life or psyche, through sounds, words, or forms…the sensory nerves, are for a quick, automatic, immediate reaction in our brain, in the hieratical reaction.”

He heard about Gertude Stein and about Alice Toklas from Jane Heap [then partner of Margaret Anderson of the Little Review], and met them at the Salon d’Automne. “That is the annual exhibition where you have to do it at least once in your lifetime. It is sort of an official appearance, like a debut, so I have to make that debut, too…

So I sent the picture and it was accepted, and there was among those pictures The Strawberry Basket, which you probably saw reproduced. And on the way back with Jane Heap from the vernissage on the Pont Royale just going to the Tuilleries, I saw Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They were coming in their little car, that was, I couldn’t find out really what it was because I think it was a Model T Ford.

When she bought that car, after the war or during the war, that car was just stripped to the essences, it was naked, that’s why the car was called, ‘Lady Godiva,’ because she was naked.”

Portrait of Alice B. Toklas by Pavel Tchelitchew (Paris, about 1927)

Gouache on paper, circa 1926–1928
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, “Theme”

Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) was not the only one of his circle who would go on to work with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe.  So would another aristocratic Russian, the painter, Pavel Tchelitchew.  They originally met in the same YMCA in Constantinople as ex-patriots where Vernon Duke first discovered Gershwin’s “Swanee.”   Oddly, too, Duke had known pianist Allen Tanner from New York as part of Gershwin’s and Eva Gauthier’s circle.

Allen Tanner was your narrator’s cousin and used to speak at length about Pavel Tchelitchew when I was a young teenager.  He also opened up the photo section of his copy of Parker Tyler’s The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, revealing the cover of the theater program that Tcheltichew designed for the premiere of Diaghilev’s Ode and for which he did the set designs.

Vernon Duke went home to No. 150 Blvd. Montparnasse and told Allen and Pavlik the news about auditioning his Piano Concerto for Diaghilev. Tyler gives us a view of this scene from both Tchelitchew’s and Dukelsky’s eyes (pg. 303):

“It is in the midst of expanding evenings at  No. 150 that Vladimir Dukelsky, the pianist from The Lighthouse in Constantinople, renews his acquaintance with Tchelitchew and meets Tanner. In the “big, untidy” flat, where Pavlik paints in the living room and Allen plays on an upright (or, while the other is at work, on his piano muet), Dukelsky thinks that Tchelitchew, “all golden hair and plump rosy cheeks,” and the “pale, willowy” Tanner are an “odd pair.” They certainly are a pair of busy hosts, even if sometimes for customers who come to look at pictures and leave without buying…

Dukelsky finds at Tchelitchew’s the “small, silent” Pougni, the “pugnosed, peasantish” Tereshokovitch, County Lanskoy and Boris Shatzman. Nicholas Nabokov, with his tossed mane and visionary eyes, is already a friend of the house. One day Dukelsky (or rather Duke as he come to call himself) is introduced to “Valitchka” (Walter) Nouvel, Dighilev’s manager. Another day he plays his concerto to the “odd pair” and catches Pavlik, amid his compliments, giving Tanner a large wink.”

In 1923, Tchelitchew began to paint portraits of all  the Paris avant-garde and gay elite.  Gertrude Stein noticed his works in the 1925 Salon D’Automne, Basket of Strawberries (1925) and bought the entire contents of his studio.  Tyler says on page 305 of The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, “To Duke, a casual observer, Tchelitchew is still manipulating a Bakst-Soudeikine manner, but this impression must be owing to pictures, possibly old stage designs, left lying around the studio…”  It was in this ambiance that Vernon Duke would come to write Flore et Zephyr for Sergei Diaghilev.

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, “Theme”