Born in 1898 in Dubrovka, Pavel Tchelitchew left Russia after the October Revolution and received his earliest formal training in Kiev. His flight from the advancing Red Army took him through Odessa, Berlin, and finally Paris in 1923. In the French capital he supported himself through portraiture and theatre design, forming close relationships with Gertrude Stein, Eugène Berman, and Christian Bérard. Stein, an important early patron, encouraged the development of his style, which in those years adopted a more earthen palette and a monumentality reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Rose Period.
The human body lay at the core of Tchelitchew’s artistic preoccupations. Our Male Nude Seen from Behind belongs to a concentrated series of male nudes – principally studies of the back – produced by Tchelitchew in the late 1920s. A similar drawing was exhibited by Richard Nathanson in London in 1974 at an exhibition dedicated to the artist. On these sheets, the stark economy of colour is counterbalanced by a near-sculptural attention to volumes, which suggest an inner vitality that remains present despite the absence of the sitter’s face. Within this corpus, our drawing relates closely to the male nudes Tchelitchew produced around 1928, notably Adam (fig. 1), for which he developed several figure studies. These explorations reveal his attempt to conceive the body as a fully volumetric form, viewed almost in the round, with his treatment of line and contours recalling Pablo Picasso’s early drawings.