Pavel Tchelitchew’s Gertrude and Alice

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.”