Mr. Tyler has written a luminous and deep book; no other kind would have served to approach Tchelitchew. He has also written a new kind of book. It is a biography and it is also a novel, but it is, as well, a discursive book that explains the paintings, traces their growth and analyzes their meaning. He calls it a divine comedy because Tchelitchew consciously di- vided his work into images of hell, purgatory, and heaven, and culmina- ted each mode in an enormous paint- ing, much as Picasso has always ter- minated his periods with one defini- tive painting into which all the skill and meditation of many individual paintings are brought to a perfection.
The hell painting is so terrible that few have looked at it, or been given the opportunity to. It hung for years in the Ringling Brothers Museum in Sarasota (since it depicts side-show freaks). With whatever irony and point, Tchelitchew willed it to his native Russia, to “the Soviet People,” who, when he last saw them, had just appropriated his father’s estate and vast forests. The Tchelitchews crossed Russia like a band of gypsies, reach- ing the Black Sea, where they made a brief stand with the White armies. Then they fled to Turkey. Tchelit- chew’s life thereafter was exile: Ber- lin (where he began to design for the theater), Paris (where he was taken under Gertrude Stein’s wing), Lon- don (here Edith Sitwell became his patron), New York, Connecticut, and eventually Rome, where he died in 1957, just short of his fifty-ninth birthday. No one knew quite what to do when it was discovered that he wished Russia to own the panorama of freaks and monsters he called “Phenomena.” Lincoln Kirstein un- dertook to deliver it during a cultural
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