A “Ceaseless Voyage”: Scale and Embodiment in Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide-and-Seek

Writing about Pavel Tchelitchew in 1942, Lincoln Kirstein stressed the artist’s ability to move seamlessly between different planes of referentiality, stating that “In his ceaseless voyage between microcosm and macrocosm, Tchelitchew uses the tools his time provides to portray its confusion and destruction, its infantile savagery and human possibility.” This paper will build on the notion of a “ceaseless voyage” in Tchelitchew’s art from the early 1940s by considering not only the layered symbolism of his works, which weave together references to various micro- and macrocosms, but also their emphasis on embodied perception. In particular, I will discuss Tchelitchew’s monumental canvas Hide-and-Seek through its affinity to the group of preliminary drawings that were published in 1944 as a book, entitled Yesterday’s Children. The publication features twenty nine of Tchelitchew’s drawings, each supplemented by a line or a verse of a poem by Parker Tyler. The book’s imagery draws the reader into the microcosm of children’s play and carefully guides him or her through the physical experience of reading. By contrast, Hide-and-Seek engages the viewer in part through its monumental size, which requires one to alternate between the distant viewpoint and close looking. By considering the painting and the book together, this paper will examine the role of scale and medium in Tchelitchew’s work and address the ways in which his art physically engages the audience in order to encourage a prolonged and laborious mode of perception.