“The blaze of his bones,” Pavel Tchelitchew’s The Cave of Sleep

In 1941, painter and stage designer Pavel Tchelitchew created elaborate, and ultimately unused, designs for a ballet. The precursor to George Balanchine’s now-canonical The Four Temperaments, The Cave of Sleep was to be a mystical battle between humanity and nature and an elaboration of the artist’s fundamental subject in this period. It was partially choreographed and announced as part of the traveling repertoire of the American Ballet Caravan. Poet Parker Tyler distilled a scenario with Tchelitchew from the designs. Echoing Renaissance medical studies, Tchelitchew flays the dancers’ figures, designing living écorchés with wings made of their own removed skin. The designs prefigure Tchelitchew’s later anatomical studies, like the 1947 drawing Blue Tiger. His is a bloody world in which the central figure, the poet, tries to kill destiny, but destroys himself. This paper explores this project in the context of broad global conflict and Tchelitchew’s preoccupations with health and medicine. Worried about his sister in Paris and “imagining [her] in turn sad, veiled, frightened, in danger, even killed,” The Cave of Sleep lays bare how the émigré artist’s vision is not a purely interior and philosophical one, but rather a deeply personal reaction to the realities of war.