Oil and gouache on paper, circa 1940. 700x940 mm; 27 1/2x37 inches. Signed in gouache, lower right recto.
Initially drawn to avant-garde artistic influences while living in Paris in the early 1900s, Tchelitchew soon eschewed futurism and constructivism, developing a personal style marked by dream-like landscapes and figures and becoming the ideologue of a small group of artists whose work was coined Néo-Humanisme. Tchelitchew exhibited a painting, Basket of Strawberries at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1925 which caught the attention of Gertrude Stein and he thereafter became her protégé. Into the 1930s, Tchelitchew's style became increasingly more surrealistic and he continued to pare down his palette to earth tones and shades of gray and black.
The current work was likely completed around the same time as his most celebrated painting, Hide and Seek, 1940-42, now at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (he was given his first retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1942). As with Hide and Seek, and central to Tchelitchew's mature style, there are repeated figures in the current work and an ambiguity in imagery. This appears to be a spiritual scene with Christ and the cross in the upper left, and perhaps the three Marys in the left foreground. There is a central "path" leading to what appears to be either Calvary or Christ's tomb in the distance, while the right side of the composition is even more dream-like and challenges direct interpretation.
