BALLET CARAVAN INC.

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
Director

Pavel Tchelitchew, Esquire
R. F. D. 1, Box 200
Norwalk, Conn.

Dear Pavlik:

I am sorry not to have come out to Westport, but unfortunately I have been extremely busy right straight through. I leave on tour for the south now and will return in February. I wanted very much to come out over a week-end, which is the only time I could do it, but I understand that your house is usually full then so I will see you later on.

I suppose you have heard all about George's affairs. I only hope that you can prevail upon him to do *one* interesting thing. I have urged him to collaborate with you, as I feel very strongly that his programs are not of much artistic imagination, and that the Stravinsky ballets will not produce a very profound effect. I am absolutely divorced from George both professionally and emotionally. When I talk to him I feel I no longer know him. I only hope for the sake of the school and all our futures that his work in these ballets will be good. However, he is so sure of his success on Broadway that he thinks he can do the same thing from another point of view. This I am not sure of, when I consider the distinguished talents of Rodgers and Hart, Dr. Bender, Volodine, Kopeikine, Dukelsky, and Irene Sharaff. You have always blamed me for my dirty independence, but I'd rather shoot myself than be dependent on that rogues gallery. I don't think that George's genius is an eternal value. He has it only when he works with great collaborators. I feel you have a responsibility in making him work with you.

I wrote something about you in Town & Country. Did you see it?

Yours ever

January 9, 1939

LK/L

637 Madison Avenue • New York City • Telephone PLaza 3-6188

["FRANCE - TELEGRAMME - VOIE TELE FRANCE - TELEGRAMME

KIRK EST MORIBUNDE VIVIANO A GAGNE HUIT MILLE TERRIBLE TABLEAUX

PERLIN TRES ACTIF BON CLIENTELE JAI TERRIBLE BESOIN DO TOI SOUFFRE

AFFREUSEMENT SEUL ICI EN PENSANT BALLET CHAMPS ELYSEES OUR NOUS

PAGE THREE

NOUS RECONTIONS TRENTE TROIS TOUS CE QUE JAI APPRIS DEL ART ET

DE LART THEATRALE VIENS DO TOI VIENS SAUVEZ NOTRE COMPAGNIE

INSPIRE NOS JEUNES GRANDS POSSIBILITIES MALGRE AFFREUSE SCENE

MAIS AVEC BETTY ROSENTAL GEORGES MARIA TANNY ET TOUTE COMPAGNIE

PEU TRIOMPHE DITES SHOURA PRIEZ POUR MOI PEUT ENVOYER ARGENT

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MAINTENANT ACHETER VASO DORO FIDELMA ME JOINE TOUS AMITIES

MONTRE CECI BALANCHINE CAGE

LINCOLN

Golden Leaf; he and Butch have had a serious fight; it has been brewing for years. George is thoughtless and wilful and snobbish about Butch; but that is his limitation. George wants to leave the apartment and is trying to find something else. Muriel Draper had a paralytic stroke and is probably a helpless invalid; this is a frightful thing to happen to anyone; she has many friends. It is horrible to think of her as I first knew her and as she now is. I am terrified, with Mother's death, of these physical possibilities. The reward of hard work, disinterested service (however misapplied the energy), and the White Goddess is certainly a fairly frightening girl; I have read all Grave's novels and they are AMAZING; particularly King Jesus; maybe he could do an opera libretto on a subject from the White Goddess.

We have been too tired what with Mother and moving to even go out to the Island. We hope to get away in the middle of this week.

Give my love to Charlie; ask him to type me the Fleur Cowles piece; do you want any packages of tea or something?

Dearest love,
1

September 1st 1952

Dearest Pavlik :

Thank you very much for your very sweet letter about my
Mother; you understand it all very well. Muriel Draper died last week;
she had had a paralysing stroke, and it recurred. At her funeral, I saw
people whose existence I had forgotten but who once meant a great deal to
me, as indeed she had. Since the Spanish War, and the death of her son
in the war, she had gone so wildly political that I saw her less, but she
still had a marvelous face, and she was very funny, and we laughed a very
great deal. Donald Gallup has all her papers, and her story is not neg-
ligible. I'd like to get back the drawing you gave her, with my jealousy,
but I guess it goes to Paul, poor man, who is deracinated and at loose ends

I hope you feel better; Europe maybe a little hard to adju-
st to; I would not despair of it yet; I only hope you can work. I simply
cannot write to Alice de la Mar, myself, as she promised me to send the
money. Do you need it now.? If so I'll see what I can do. Kirk has not
been around at all. I think he has had a reconciliation with Stephen Greene
as if it made any difference.

The ballet was a success in Edinburgh and is now in Berlin;
Balanchine feels old and tired and is coming out to spend a couple of weeks
alone at Natasha Molo's house on the Island; whether or not he will marry
Tanny, I simply don't know; I hope he doesn't. Then he goes out to the coast to see Stravinsky for plans on THE RAKE. Money is very limited this year for any new productions in the ballet. Balanchine doesn't seem to want to do anything; Nora has left the company to go into the Bette Davis revue which Jerry Robbins is doing. Melissa will dance her roles. I have spent the summer on trying to extricate the opera into some sort of order, and make it on the equivalent scale as the ballet. I have plans for a new opera house, which in ten years will come as true, I am certain as the ballet did, from the perspective of twenty years ago. I hope you will be wanting to do something for the opera house. The auditorium will be a dome like a combination of Hagia Sophia and the Planetarium, but all controlled by circuits of light; the basement, shells, water-things,; the orchestra floor, earty; the dome, air and lit with small fires. Kelly and Philip Johnson are going to make a working model. I could have you paid for ideas and whatever you would want to do; Fernand Leger has done the hideous murals in the U.N. building; he made small water-colour maquettes and a commercial painter enlarged them for the wall, which was not a very great technical problem; they are brutal and boring.

I am temporarily stopped on the essay; I have not got past
Berlin, and only wish I could have talked to you more about your attitude
about the theatre, your first meeting with Americans, and the West, etc.
Anything Charles has for me would be useful. Fido has been making beach-
plum jame, very good, but its so damp it won't jell. I gather Herbie
Bliss has been having a bad time psychologically again; but there is noth-
ing to be done about it; Bobbie Barnett looks after him.

I am seeing Rene d'Harnoncourt about the City Centre. Julius
Fliesichmann and Minnie Astor went on the Board, and a lot can be done.
Esteban refused to do ANYTHING, and nothing can be done about nim; he real
ly is preposterous; yet we have no one else. I have found an Armenian, who
benaves like Esteban, but who is far less talented. I am eriously thinking
of getting Jenson Yow into the Union; at least he could work. Alvina Colt
had a DIVOONE time in Europe, and she has an ENORMOUSE snow etc etc.

Have you ever read Dionysus the Aereopagite on the Heavenly Hierarchies, - the principles of Thrones, Dominations, Powers, Angels, etc? If not I will send it, as it really is quite staggering, and applies 200% to your last work; I long to see the shadow-boxes. I hope you will send photos.

Kirk spends most of the time in the country; his first show, - two boring girls, is a bore; Stephen Greene stayed with him, after all, - but who cares?

We all send love; I miss you very much; I hope Grottaferrata will be much better for you. Please write,

L.

March 24 1953

Dearest Pavlik :

I have not written to you for so long simply because I could not. I
have had a very trying period in my life; perhaps the most important six weeks I have
lived through, much worse than the war, invasion etc, which I once thought nothing
could be worse than. I have had a terrific fight to keep my hold on the Centre to
impose my will and discipline and capacity for taste and creation on the Board and on
the staff at the Centre, and I have won; being rich, they thought I was an amateur/
No one wanted a first-rate thing; they were easily permissive in shabbiness and vanity
and I had to behave like a monster, finally, to whip them into order. Betty Cage,
Jean Rosenthal, Albie Marre, Balanchine and Eddie Bigelow were an enormous help; and
now the ideas of the ballet have triumphed over the drama and the opera; the cost in
terrible rows, shrieks yells intrigue and screams you can only imagine. But I am
richer than they are (which they knew, and mistook it), and I also have less vanity
and more energy than they have. I had frightful battle with Mr. Baum. I have made an
alliance but kept my independance with Bing at the Met. I have my Board with me.
The future is more or less secure. Its been very hard on Fido as I got terribly over-
wrought through sleeplessness, and behaved more or less out of control; rather I util-
ized hysteria towards constructive ends, but I can't ever afford to do this again, be-
cause the border-line between hysteria and sanity is so close that one could really
go odf for good. Fido recognized the symptoms and since she has been there herself she
guided me across the trapeze.

Albie Narre is the best theatre man since Orson; his season was savage
attacked but he lost no money, MISSALIANCE is running on Broadway, and he was voted
carte blanche for the future; he has taste, courage and real brilliance. He has not
the vanity or silliness of Jack Houseman; he cares only for the classics; he has a real
mas cry of people; we are planning next year right now, and he is the biggest find I
have made since I met Balanchine twenty years ago.

I now have control, information and domination over all the finances
for the opera, ballet and drama; I did not want to bother with this, but I had to.
I have a new staff; I am not essentially worried about money or the critics; Albie's
production of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE was annihilated, yet the house was packed every
night; our public is an intellectual public; they want to see the classics done, and
Albie does them.

I have found two very good scenic artists: Reuben Ter-Arutinian, a
cousin of Tousia's at Karinksa's; he has done a DIVINE La Cenerentola for me, and did
a brilliant HERZOG BLAUBART and L' Heure Espagnole. Then there is a little American
boy called Peter Larkin whom Karinska absolutely adores; very serious, not quirm,
draws quite marvelously, and he has done a beautiful ballet. Balanchine is remaining
in Milan where Tanny is starring in La Baiser de la Fee as you doubtless know; Balan-
chine will do Prokolveve's LA GUERRE ET LA PAIX for the Maggio Fiorentino.

Kirk has simply collapsed. Andy Wyeth's gallery shut and he tried to
get him, but Andy was disgusted with the atmosphere of the gallery. Seligman left,-
they have that SHIT Frank Duncan, no one cares about anything except pricks. Andy
went to Knoedler's. I am furious at Kirk; he wasted a great chance; he has a lousy
effect on every artist he touches; he is neither clean nor serious.

The boy at the Oxford Univ. Press who was doing the book on you was
fired. The status of the book is obscure, but I am rather relieved. What I wrote I

don't at all like; it was in the line of the Museum monographs and I am going to do it all over again this summer the way I want to; an essay by me on your origins, and I feel the whole thing more deeply and I can do it right now. Monroe will publish it, I think, for the Museum, if I put up a certain amount of money, which I can get from Minnie, Alice and etsy Whitney. You are quite right that what I wrote is a bore. But I was so overwhelmed by the subject that I could not organize what I felt. Now I have all the material and I can write it from the heart. Wystan read what I wrote and like it but felt that it was in a strait jacket.

The history of the RAKE'S PROGRESS was a toute une histoire. I think it is a sublime and divine piece, touching gloriously beautiful; I heard it eleven times; for me it stands after DON GIOVANNI; it is not what Virgil thinks, a pseudo Mozart; it is Russian opera, born from Offenbach, from Tchaikowsky from E T A Hoffmann; Wystan and Chester's book is magnificent; but the Metropolitan shat all over it suffocated it; Strawinsky's money-hunger, need, - not greed betrayed him; Reiner's conducting was constipating to the singers; but I heard it in a small house in Philadelphia, and it was ravishing; it is NOT grand opera it is small; but the melodic genius, the rythmical mastery, the human situations are absolutely overwhelming; one cannot hear it without tears. Naturally Horace's sets were awful, but that is what Bing wanted; one day we can do it at the Centre; only Balanchine got good notices; everything else was pissed on. But they hold it in repertory next year; Strawinsky said that he didn't care how awful it was; it was only a repitition genereal for the recording on discs which he conducted.

Osbert is here, his disease quite a lot worse. He shakes so badly he cannot light a cigarette; David H is horrible, runs off for two weeks at a time and leaves him to dress himself. Edith had a sort of success in Hollywood but her only real story is her quarrel with Hedda Hopper. Osbert sees Danny all the time; Danny was a naval medic during the war and he knows how to take care of Osbert without depressing him; he has a new doctor but they know nothing about the disease. Christabel Aberconway's son, married to Rose Maclaren killed himself and this was rather upsetting.

Paul Cadmus did not go back to Italy; Jerry French is there alone finishing a sculpure I don't much like. Paul is working on a series of plates for Butch. Jen and Butch have done very well. Jen has done some beautiful protrait studies of a little juvenile delinquent; Fido says he is Spencer Tracy in the film, BOY'S TOWN; the delinquent has not made off with the silver, but for a while we were worried; he is a little tame snake; he was an asp but has been gentled into a garter snake. Wystan is teaching at Smith; he sees Edgar Wind all the time who is currently trying to get Russel Hitchcock out of the Museum like he did Jere Abbott, and the next two directors. One day he will overeach himself and all his glorious erudition and suave analysis will be as significant as Berenson and Santyana, - finally aesthetics. His mind will not save him; he has a vanity the size of sclerosis of the liver. Alfred Barr is more the dried turd than ever, but unlike dog shit it never disintegrates. The eternal crap. Jim Sweeney has turned the Guggenheim museum into a branch of the New York Hospital and shows glorious examples of the most inglorious epoch of art in five thousand years; at least its all sterilized and CLEAN. Monroe has now been struck by Divine Providence; one side of his face is paralyzed, one eye closed from 'Strain'. Glenway had a small cancer of the lip; and people do not believe in metaphysics!!!

I am still very tired and overworked but I will be alright; I hope you are working well, and CF is ok; Ruth did a stupid thing by taking the Faulkner play away from Albie, but it is much better for me; she was sore she couldn't play Portia. But out of pique she has lost a great director; devotedly, -

L

April 7 1953

Dearest Pavlik :

LA CENERENTOLA was a huge success, and established me firmly as an opera
producer; it was really very lovely and nobody ever believed that Americans could sing
colaratura so marvelously. It also looked beautiful; but the fiendish opera-directors
tried to cancel the wigs and gloves, the singers refused to be made up 'ugly', like the
ugly-sisters etc. etc. but I guess it was worth it. although I am morally exhausted from
figthing like mad day and night; fortunately I have Betty Cage and Jean Rosenthal, and
Lady Abdy's son, George Jongeyans (calls himself George Gaynes) was a marvelous Dandini
and he was a great support because he let Arshansky make himself up, and he looked like
the most heavenly valet de coeur. Fulco, even he, said it was better than any Italian
buffo performance he had seen and Wystan and Chester adored it. I want to do LA SOMNAM
BULA next fall, but lack a strong soprano. Mare Blitszeins's REGINA was also done; I
only supported him in his rehearsal demands; it was a big success, too, but on marxist
chauvinist grounds; he has no ounce of musical gift and only the most rudimentary drama-
tic power, but the work was brilliantly accomplished and I am glad it is out of the way.
Virgil is on my neck for THE MOTHER OF US ALL. I hope to, I'll have to do it next spring.
I have a very good new designer, young boy who has been in the union ten years, but
only as a scene-painter; his father teaches art at Smith; he was brought up in France,
and he really is a superb technician with real elegance, Peter Larkin. Ter-Arutunian
is also very good, simple and yet chic; none of them want to be PAINTERS, just scene
painters, thank God. You are the only painter I want to work with; Esteban refused to
do Faust for the Met and Carmen for me; he has gone to sulk in Mexico; he simply does
not want to work; in five years what has he done ?

Ruth Ford was in error about Albie; she was not available for Portia, and
the quarrel was not about that but about the Faulkner play; she made a big mistake, as
Albie is the first person since Orson with power, authority and magnetism. Also, he does
not dissipate, he does not want to act himself, and he is delighted to let others direct
and star. Ruth has always had the conception of herself that you gave her twenty years
ago, which has been in no way fulfilled. Il faut preciser des choses.

Ollie will send the check and so will I sometime next month; I have had
terrible problems about money as the season has been fierce apart from our crashing
successes which are not reflected in the box office. I have also had a savage fight in
the box-office management situation which I won't bore you with. But, since I adore the
theatre, I must also be a business man in order to manage it, and if I have not control
of everything, I can really do nothing at all.

Sauget is here; la petite Virgile is making lots of legion d(honneurie
about it; the ballet participates (modestly, at the Museum of Modern Art concert-
hommage); but we do not do a ballet in repertoire. Balanchine has gone to Florence to
stage Proklovie's War and Peace. Gian-Carlo is there doing Amahl, and Balanchine will
help. Gian Carlo is a raving genius compared to Marc Blitzstein; at least he loves music
and theatre; Marc loves his unachieved success. Virgil is thinking of retiring from the
paper and spending his remaining days in composition; this would be a good decision to
make; a question of money,- commissions that Mina may help solve.

Osbert was terribly upset,- a. by his illness, a good deal worse; he
can't control his right hand at all; he fell badly in Florida and fumbling for the
faucet in his shower was badly burned; David Horner behaves with the most exact cruelty;
he leaves Osbert alone, deserts him when he is bored etc/ B. Lady Aberconway's son,
that very attractive boy John MacClaren killed himself suddenly, with all the attendant
horror.

Edith was impossible; she tried to make a great cause celebre about Tennessess; but its rough trade and how M. de Charles blows Kilroy in public, only its also about F(art) and ROMANCE, and Alice Bouverie won't speak to me when I refused to sign a manifesto to help support it; Eith Sitwell wrote one of those letters she writes; but the play is lousy, essentially, hoked up Lorea, weak Wilder, and piss-poor Williams in the most horrid baby-shit colours by Lem Ayers, who is (possibly) one of the worst characters and designers since Oliver Smith; a really frightening character.

Edith is now passed over into quiete another country of glory and fame; she is shakily tri-
umphant but I hate to think of what will happen to her if anything becomes of Osbert abd
she and Miss Horner are left alone together. Don't tell me that there is not a Divine Prov-
idence. Speaking of monsters, Edgar Wind is now in full fettle; throwing Russell Hitchcock
out of Smith Museum; Madame Spiteuse is a big nervous girl who is no match for Master Wind;
he is giving a great lecture on the religious feeling of Rouault; he thinks he is God, and
alas while he may be a Rabbi (a learned man), there are certain elements of common humanity
to say nothing of uncommon divinity which are absent from his malicious vindictive aesthet-
icism; Wind is only another stream-lined Berenson, a rich-man's Santyana. As for Rouault;
Monroe has done a huge show; very interesting for the early pictures, under the direct inf-
luence of Gustave Moreau, but the late things are depressingly thick and sticky; there is
nothing happening in the Museum of Modern horror except photos and posters; Monroe has a
terribly painful nervous affliction; shingles and his eye is closed and he really is in
agony. PAS UN MOT PAS MEME UNE PENSEE. Wystan says that Glenway is much kinder since he had
his small cancer of his inner lip removed, but I don't want to test the improvement.

Paul Cadmus has been working with Butch and Jen making some silk-screen things as he is very hard up, and is trying to get enough money to go to Italy this summer. I have taken the house on Fire Island again; the ballet will be in Hollywood, and I have to be here to try to rest as I am really more tired than I think; I don't want to see anybody or talk to anybody; I am going to finish a first draft of the book about you, and I will offer it to my own publisher if you like it; I know exactly what its going to be like now; I am going to make it very personal; it will be my memories of you for twenty years, how I have been affected by your key ideas; for example :

Ballet 1933, the introduction to theatre, mine (and your early theatre years.)

Phenomenon (and everything that proceeded it, dialectically, and your youth; the sense of hierarchy, the Byzantine inheritance

Cache-Cache, the world of childhood and transformation (fairy-tales)

Interior landscape (anatomy, geometry and space/

The world of Light. (present work;

It will be in five parts and while I will not personally be involved, the form will release
me to embroider more vividly the whole thing, a la Baudelaire's essay on Constantin Guys.
Please let me know what you think of this; it will seem to be memoirs, but it will be my
memory and understanding of YOU, with me left out. I can do this in three months, if I am
not interrupted. The Tenth Anniversary of the City Centre and the Twentieth Anniversary of
the School of American Ballet takes place in November so I have to prepare for this too.
Particularly I cannot bear to see people or new sights (the marvels of the past in Europe).
I have my work; it is in the one theatre. I have no energy outside of that, except for you.

With love to Shoura and Charles.

L

June 1 1953

Dearest Pavlik :

Robert Melville sent me photographs of your new pictures. THEY ARE DIVINE. I showed them to Balanchine and Paul Cadmus and Minnie Astor & everyone was enraptured. Balanchine, of course, wanted at once to think of them for ballet. Jean Rosenthal was out of her mind. I am certain that if you do a big picture of the stars and night and time, Alfred and everyone else will fall flat. It is almost time for everything to change. These pictures of yours are the ultimate colarutra on a tight rope; they really blaze like diamonds. I do wish you would come back here.

I wrote to Melville that if he arranged for a book to be printed in England I would pay towards it, something at least. I don't quite see why you persist in trying to force a show down the teeth of the French who are really in a terrible state of nerves and exhaustion; until Picasso is dead, canonized and buried your whole direction will be resisted up to the hilt. I am certain if you come home here, where your most wonderful work has been done in the last forty years, that you will find a readiness that you have not expected.

Next winter Balanchine wants to do the final great Schoenberg & 12-tone symphony; it has a whole new sound, not like anything heard before. He would adore to work with you. I can get money for this one project, and even send it to you, I think, if you will accept the commission. Balanchine will be at La Scala from the 10th of September. There is a plan to give him the legion d'honneur sur le plateau de la Grand Opera in late November. We open here in N.Y. on Xmas night with the whole CASSE NOISETTE.

I have had a terrible two months about money; see the enclosed. It has been hell. I took all Fido's money, all the school money. I have nothing left byt the Centre is still open and the ballet season has been good.

Robbins has done a wonderful apres midi, for Tanny; Jean has done a silk room like Paul C.'s ballet picture Ollie Jennings has, and she lit it like ERRANTE; the wind blows on que. It is a ballet practice room, very sweet. Todd did a really stupid thing, very pretty to look at but idiotic with John Colman's music like a typewriter. Jacques d'Amboise became a star over night in Lew's old FILLING STATION, which Paul C. did all over; it was very much liked. For the Coronation we have outdions ourselves. Robbins has done a most wonderful big FANFARE; a court of music, with all the instruments of the orchestra courtiers, and then the symphony of the big Furcell fugue at the end. Lew and Balanchine are both taking class every day; Balanchine is amazingly young and dances very well; we have some new boys and girls and the company has never been so brilliant. TIME magazine is doing a cover story on Balanchine and his plans for next year.

In the Fall, the opera will do DER PROZESS, the Kaffka opera of Gottfried Van Einem, and Hansel und Gretel; we have a wonderful forest projected., Albie Marre is doing the Midsummer's Night's Dream, Piranello's HENRY IV and Shaw's GRAT CATHERINE and A Man of Destiny. I have money, for commissions only, from the Rockefeller Foundation, and I can do quite a lot. I honestly think you should seriously consider whetheher or not it would not be useful to come back to America for December until Spring, show your work and then return after working with us; I assure you you can be paid. Andy Wyeth is having his first one-man show retrospective at Knoedler's in November. Kirke is furious at me because I made Andy go to

Knoedlers, but Durlacher's has become a real disgrace, a disatster; its AWFUL. Kirk is boring and cynical and shows such shit as you cannot dream of. Everyobe is tres decu, si and Madama Snob-slug just shows any old thing she trips over.

Paul Cadmus has been working at the press with Jens and Butch; he has done something for them very lovely. Andy also is doing something. George Tooker has moved to a whole house in Brooklyn. Fido is going out to the Island and will spend the summer painting. We have been spending any spare hours in our gaden; you always told me that we should have a garden; well you were right. I have turned into a passionate gardener. We have a terrace, off from Fido's room, and there is a lovely small ivy and rhododendrom garda off our living room that Jens has transformed and it is like a country house in England

Osbert is sitting in the Queen Mother's box for the Coronation; he is not at all well and he is very depressed. I hardly see Alice Bouverie; she paid $200,000. in two years to John La Touche but she is fed up with him now. I told her very frankly what I thought and she was sweet but nothing has any reality for her. I see Minnie a little; she is also preoccupied and in some other world. The only people that help me with money are those that have none.

Betty Cage is terribly over worked, tired and near a collapse; the ballet is a cannibal it destroyed Francis Hawkins and Betty is on the same road; yet without her we would be lost. Balanchine and Tanny are very happy. This is the first season in 13 at the Centre when Balanchine has not done a New work; 2 by Robbins and 2 by Lew and 1 by Todd. But he is resting for next winter WITH YOU.

I honestly think that you should plan to come back and re-work your magic for the theatre. I have a whole staff and a whole theatre; I control the opera, the ballet and the drama. Imagine what your inspiration could do; imagine what your stars and skies could look like. The source of all this is FIRST in New York; what we do in N.Y. is then done at La Scala and at the Opera. You are in error if you think that Paris or Rome any longer makes taste; you yourself sweat under the dictatorship of Picasso and Matisse; why ?????

I will be alright about money in two months, I think.

With love to you and Charlie,

L

Hyatt Mayor has made a marvelous show at the Met and your things look wonderful next to Leonardo and Michaelangelo

June 14 1953

Dearest Pavlik :

I do wish that you would consider your career objectively, as if
you were a cardiac specialist and your career had a heart murmur. I will diagnose
it for you, because I love you and admire you as much as anyone you know.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES TO ME FOR STAYING IN EUROPE ?

a. Inspiration from past monuments and greatness ?

b. Inspiration from younger generation of painters and poets ?

c. Inspiration from one scholar or scientist ?

d. Overwhelming eagerness on the part of dealers to give me a show ?

e. Money

f. Pleasenter atmosphere in Italy, France or England ?

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES TO ME FOR GOING HOME ?

a. Band of friends who would support you HERE, who forget you THERE

b. Need for NEW gallery : either Curt Valentin or Knoedler's, probably the later; I can arrange a retrospective show in the two big galleries leading up to the NEW work

c. Realization by many Americans of your true position; articles in LIFE which I can get.

d. Collectors of your work who HAVE and WILL and ARE collecting your work.

e. Possible future work in the theatre, not how, perhaps, but inspiration may come from our theatre.

As for a show at the Cite Universitaire; I do not know the real situation in Paris, but I know the place well; it is way out of the run of things; it will be interpreted as an usual admission of defeat; that you could not get a show at Maeght or Leiris or etc. so you have to seek refuge at a place not strictly for pictures; and you will have the disadvantages of being considered as a sort of excentric demonstration, a sort of amateur Pythagoras; I could write the French reviews; I cannot understand why you persist in trying to buck the chronological situation. Until Potcassee and Mapisse are dead ten years, the eyes and ears of the French are packed with a dirty wax of chauvinism, prejudiced taste, preconception and disinterest; it'est une spec-tacle permanente, as you told me after the war. A QUOI BON ????????????

We have had a terrible and boring time; I hate raising money; Alice Bouverie, having given John LaTouche something like $200,000 to amuse her for the last three years now realizes it was a mistake; she has nothing to show for it; the ballet from Fred is howeve, still in the repertory. But now I am coming out on the other side; we will get the money; we will go on. Nora Kaye is leaving; good riddance; she lacks Tudor, and Tudor has not an idea in his head.

Butch and Jen are working very hard; we have re-capitalized the press, and they are forging ahead. Jen is a great comfort to Fido and me; he is a wonderful gardener, too and we have two small gardens, on her terrace and downstairs a small patio. I have an offer from Billy Rose to do Orphee aux Enfers; money and amusement, but I finally won't do it, as its not my world and takes too much energy and he is really so awful; but I was tempted. Balanchine is very happy, benevolent and calm; he has done no new ballets; Jerry Robbins FANFARE big hit; Lew has done two works, one very

charming professional Rossini with wonderful bravura dancing by Jacques d'Amboise, the first real male dancer for years. Herbie is in a wild passive rage; Michael Maule is leaving the company ob account of Jacques; Melissa left on account of Nora; Maria would leave tomorrow if she could go anywhere else; she is vain and stiff; she is powerful but she lacks grace and does not please like Margot or even Janet Reed; she is full of resentment that Balanchine is happy with Tanny, fearful of Tanny, too; stupid, but there they all are, and brainless and idiotic, and they don't work hard enough or care for anyone but their idiotic selves. Thank Go! for the School; they make new dancers a dime a dozen.

Hyatt Mayor's anatomy show a great success and draws much attention: we are trying to make a book out of it. With Bittner; I wrote Robert Melville about OUR book to be done in England, possibly.

Please write me sensibly about your attitude towards coming home, towards Knoedlers etc with much love,

Lincoln

August 3 1953

Dear Pavlik :

I was distressed to get your last letter. I wish I could talk to you as letters often give false impressions. I have had a rather serious falling out with Kirk; I think I could help you at Knoedler's, but I do not know what your official position is in relation to Kirk and they will do nothing if you have any links with him.

The Rockefeller grant-in-aid was fine as far as it went; however, it was hedged around by so many restrictions that we can never spend the money. We can order designs, but we cannot pay to have them executed; we can commission music but we cannot have the money to play it. In the meantime, I have had a hellish summer trying to get the plane-fare to send the ballet to La Scala which I daresay somehow I will get but which I have not got yet. In the meantime, the City Center owes $100,000 which I am committed to get. In the last year I have thought about nothing day or night but the survival of the City Center and the further existence of the ballet company. I cannot begin to tell you what it has been like. If anyone thinks I have a delightful position he is welcome to it. In the meantime, I have to fight for the artistic integrity of the Centre because if I did not, they would have a whoer house in there to make money; as it is, they went over my head and put in Jose Ferrer in Charlie Aunt etc, to make money, which I bet it does not.

The ballet had a big success in Los Angeles, but it made nothing over expenses. Strawinsky had a serious prsostate operation; he is commissioned by Edward James to do a cantata on a text by E.J. called THE TAX COLLECTOR. He refused libretti by Wystan and Dylan Thomas.

The enclosed letter is from the best English printer, as I wrote Robert Melville I would like to help getting your book published at the time of your show. What do you want me to do about it. If I put up money for this it will be all I can do; would your rather have the money yourself ? Please send the letter back to me as I have no copy of it.

With love to you and Charlie,

L

January 19 1958

Dear Pavlik :

As you have imagined we have been busy here. My responsibilities have
very much increased in the last year, and in order to secure the ballet at the City Cen-
ter, I've had to take the obligations for the drama and opera; and since we have not got
enough work to keep the theatre busy for 52 weeks, we are now starting a light open-
ra company and a film program. This makes a great deal of work, not all of it inter-
esting.

I have had several long and serious conversations with Coe Kerr, Harry Brooks and Leila Wittler at Knoedlers; they are quite prepared to handle your work if you want them to; naturally, it is necessary to make a clean break with Kirke. They won't touch it if there is any possibility of recrimination or charges that they stole you from Durlacher's, but they would do a big retrospective show in their three large galleries and have drawings upstairs, publish a catalogue etc. They did a magnificent job for Andy Wyeth when they took him over from Macbeth, and the same for Tamayo when he left Pierre Matisse. Bernard Perlin, however, and Maurice Grosser are dissatisfied with them as dealers; they should be dissatisfied with themselves as artists; Bernard is going to Kirk and Maurice has gone to Hugo. If you want to go to Knoedler's it's simply up to you. Kirk is absolutely impossible; he is neither serious nor distinguished any longer and it is a complete degringolade. As you know, Knoedler's cannot hope to make money on you, but they don't have to, and Leila Wittle is a very decent woman and Harry and Coe are alright; at least they sell to the rich. It is not necessary for me to do anything more; they will give you a big show whenever you want it, as long as they know a year ahead. However, if you don't want to do it, you'd better let them know as it puts me in a poor position to try to press your work there when you really may not be interested. The Cremonimi show is alright, but she has very little prestige, the galler y is not as accessible as Knoedler's and she cannot do what they can; but its up to you.

As for your remarks about the ballet; I know quite well what you mean.
I have known it for fifteen years. I don't understand whether you are interested in
Balanchine or you are not. If you are, you certainly don't make it any easier for all
of us in regard to an eventual working together; I don't think you've had a good word to
say about him since 1933. Since you think everything we do is weak, hideous and in bad
taste, how can I inestrest you in letters about our activities ? On my part, I have oft
tried to be of service to you in practical ways. But I certainly haven't the energy or
desire to disagree with you or justify what I have to do. As time goes on all of us
are increasingly interested in ourselves and our respective egotism to some degree pre-
vents us from feeling disappointments, - personal and professional, which might otherwise
very much hurt us. I cannot concieve of your being in the least interested in our work,
but that does not stop me from being admiring or curious about yours.

I hope you are working well. Fido sends love as do I,

April 29 1954

Dear Pavlik :

I think you should very carefully investigate your legal
position as an American citizen. Since you are naturalized, under the
recent McCarran Act, you have to spend as much time in the U.S. as abroad
or you forfeit your citizenship. Wystan Auden just found this out when
he went to re-apply for his visa to Ischia. It is a very serious thing,
and is all mixed up with the recent hysteria about McCarthy and communism.
You had better ask the consulate in Rome about it. It means that you
cannot leave where you are if you are not careful. Ollie Jennings had a
friend who got in an awful mess over it. Tell Charlie to take your pass-
port into Rome and find out.

The ballet season ended triumphantly; we lost very little, and
the ballet now carries the house. The opera opened with a good Salome, a
new girl, very talented. This week is Aaron Copland's opera; next week
Chester's version of Falstaff, which is very well done. Osbert and Edith
are here; his tremor is worse and she has an awful cold and is huge and
unhappy. Balanchine and Tanny went to Florida with Nick and Roy.

Andy Wvesth was here and asked for you, and sent his love.
He is trying to overcome the thinness in his form; he paints even less
but the pictures are busy. Paul Cadmus had done a large drawing with a
lot of figures about Americans in Italy which is skillful and hór ible.
George Tooker is doing Gian-Carlo(s opera in the fall. Steinberg we hope
is doing Balanchine's new ballet, finally; all the difficulty about the
union exams etc. Fido is working on a new picture; everyone likes my port
rait very much. Elise, our maid left, got married and moved to the South
and its a great relief. Wystan is lecturing at Harvard; he is called the
good gay poet. Butch and Jens are reorganizing the Press in a big daring
move, with Woody Taulbee, I hope, so they can be independent. They have
done some lovely things recently.

Please determine your legal status under your passport.

With love,

L

July 16 1954

Dear Pavlik :

we were all thrilled to hear of the great success of your exposition in Paris, and only hope that London will surpass it. It must have been a relief that Paris had something to look at for a change; nothing in the magazines has any interest except museums of the old palaces. Here it is the same; the loveliest thing in New York is the Japanese house that Blanchette Rockefeller had transported from Tokyo; it makes all modern architecture look vulgar.

I can't imagine what happened to the letters I sent you that you didn't get in clouding the one about Ollie Jennings money which I deposited in your bank and never heard whether you got it or not; at least he should be thanked by you. I also asked you to be sure to keep your passport in order as all sorts of people are having a hell of a time with their papers under this present hysteria in Washington.

Butch and Jens are expanding the Pippin Press and are doing good work. I have been busy as a janitor for the City centre which is in itself a big bore, but it makes it possible for Balanchine to do what he wants and for the kids to stay together; they are now in Hollywood for the second summer and are doing our Nutcracker there. Balanchine has done a very strange new ballet to music by Charles Ives who recently died and I think you would like it.

Fido is on the Island and working a little; the weather has been lovely and go out weekends. Everything here as is usual; no fascinating changes; Wystan is in Ischia; he has done a wonderful thing about Master's and Servants called BALLAAAM'S ASS. I have not seen Kirke since you left; I don't think he much improves and the gallery surely doesn't. Edith is now a Dame; David Horner is her on a nuptial flight which I think is not very kind as Osbert is so ill. and alone. But maybe it's a relief.

We are very happy that everything goes so well for you; you certainly deserve it, and I'm only sorry we couldn't see the pictures. I hope you sent Ollie a catalogue; also Coe Kerr and Leila Witler at Knoedler's. Wystan has made friends with Cremonini. Panofsky has written a wonderful new book on the van Eycks. The Morgan Library has bought the manuscript of Perrault's fairy stories, which is lovely, with his pictures. Virgil has returned to conduct at the Stadium; he had a world cruise with Roger Baker. He goes back to Paris, I guess; people say he is leaving the Tribune and going on to the New Yorker.

I have been working with Menotti on his new opera, which will be very effective, and which Esteban will probably do. It's a big improvement on everything that he has so far done. George Toker has done some lovely pictures and always speaks of you. As we all do, because we miss you, which I doubt if you will believe. However, when you return, you will find all the kittens turned into grey cats and they will be glad to see you.

With love to Charles,

L

August 25 1954

Dear Pavlik and Charlie :

I hope this reaches you; I cannot quite read Mr. Ford's distinguished handwriting. I will be delighted to meet Isak Dinesen when she calls. She is a good friend of Leo Lerman's who saw her in Denmark.

The ballet returned from the Coast; they lost no money and made none; they did Nuteracker for 2 weeks and that was a success. Nick and Roy split up; Roy has a new kid called Jonathan Watss, real chicken jail bait, about 17, the youngest boy in the company, and Nick is very unhappy, but he was too jealous etc. and I hope they can work out a menage a trois. Nick looks badly and he hardly tries to dance any more. Balanchine has done a very strange and quite wonderful work to the music of Charles Ives who died last year; its more odd than the Schonberg of last year, has the whole compaby in it. We are planning a big season in the Winter, and Esteban will do Pulcinella, and Strawinsky has done a new work called AGON, a contest of dancing in his late spare style. Carlos Chavez has done a Toccata for perrcusion intruments which is most interesting, too.

Betty Cage and the Bigelows have got a little house near Nyack to flee to. Balanchine is doing On Your Toes again for Brigitte, to support himself. Naturally its an agony for him to waste his time, but if it runs for a year, he doesn't need to worry. George Tooker is designing the new Menotti opera, it was a terribel bore with the Union, who refused to admit any easel-painters, inclu ding Steinberg, but we finally solved it. He has done some very strange and lovely things.

I am working on the Shakespeare Festival which will open next summer at Stratford, near Westport; very beautiful land on the mouth of the Housatonic and Jean Rosenthal does the technical part, with Quale or Glen Byam-Shaw, I suppose as director. We have the same stage-opening as the Center and we will try to make a permanent classic company to exchange in the two theatres. Gian-Carlo has a wonderful group of singers for his SAINT and he is very happy with George Tooker.

I suppose you heard Curt Valentin died. No one knows what will happen to the gallery. Ed Hewitt has a lovely new place on 65th st, two nice rooms in the parlor floor of a big old house; Kelly did his lights, and it will be fine. Butch and Jens and Woody Taulbee have their new place which will open afther Labor Day; they have very fascinating designs and I think they will make a go of it. Peter Buckley will prob ably get a job in the restoration dept. of the Metropolitain Museum through Hyatt Mayor; he has very Holbein-type beard. I saw Alice Bouveriex; she got the house next to her for her children; she is more vague than it is possible to be and still remain in this world. I hope your work goes very well and that the London show will be a big success, bigger than Paris. With love,

.L

Rigidified light

Tchelitchew seems to belong very much to New York these days, but a show of his new paintings at the Hanover Gallery recalled the years before the war when he had many links with England. Edward James and the Sitwells were among those who collected his work, and Dame Edith Sitwell opened this new show. From her notebooks she produced a typical piece of curious learning: Tchelitchew's work reminded her of words by an eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher and scientist, Lorenz Oken, who said, "matter is rigidified light." This evokes the quality of the 1954 Tchelitchews, with their intricate crystalline forms defined by hard glowing lines which are like, to quote Dame Edith again, "the secret rays of the universe."

The theme common to the paintings is fruit, but fruit opening out into luminous and arbitrary systems. They are, as Parker Tyler observed of one of Tchelitchew's anatomies, reversible, showing in- and outside. This continual interplay of expanding surface and revealed interior gives a kind of transparency-universality equation. At one moment the crystal lines are like a diagram of Gothic vaulting, at another moment they are like Baroque penmanship—with radioactive paint. The encasing of fruit in ambiguous charts of ideal proportion gives a typical Tchelitchewian paradox of schematic fertility.

LETTERS TO THE EDIT

JET AGE MAN

Sirs:

Permit me to congratulate you and Ralph Morse for the cover photograph (LIFE, Dec. 6). It is far and away the most striking photograph that I have ever seen.

WILSON ROGERS

New York, N.Y.

Sirs:

To those who insist that art is being replaced by the camera, we suggest a glance at the enclosed cut (right) of a drawing by Pavel Tchelitchew whose contoured delineation of a human face drawn in 1947 (LIFE, Jan. 29, 1951) seems to have foreshadowed your excellent camera study of a jet pilot on your Dec. 6 cover.

ERLE LORAN

Berkeley, Calif.

CONTOUR DRAWING

December 29 1954

Dearest Pavlik :

Last night was the opening of Gian-Carlo's opera, and it was a triumph for him, and for all of us associated with the production.

I've never seen a more integrated production in the American theatre; everything was right, and well-prepared. The casting of the singers, the decor and lighting,— Jean Rosenthal and George Tooker outdid themselves,— Gian-Carlo's direction was really stagger ing. So much so, in fact, that everyone was left a little dazed and they didn't want to leave the theatre. It goes to show that one can sometimes approach a sort of spehmeral perfection in the theatre if the personnel you are working with love each other and have mutual respect,— in spite of money, the unions, the state of the commercial theatre etc. It shows George Tooker as the best stage designer since you found Esteban Frances. I hope one day you may care to return to the theatre and do the Sleeping Beauty for Balanchine.

I am now hard at work on the Shakespeare Festival for Stratford next summer; we think we will do Romeo, King John and Much Ado About Nothing. John Burrell who did the Olivier season at the Old Vic in 1945-6 will run the school, and we have some young kids who are very gifted. The theatre I hope will be as good as we can make it; I long to have someone to work with who is at once a painter and an architect, and they are hard to find. I want to have three whole decorations for the theatre itself, transformable overnight into a kind of baroque opera-house for opera and ballet, an Elizabethan forestage and balcony and a simple classic amphitheatre for Greek tragedy. The interior decoration of the theatre will be really scenery extending out from the stage to cloak the auditorium.

The enclosed sketches are just renderings by the architect but he will not design the actual facings of the three decorative schemes; I don't know who will. Cecil Beaton was here and I even spoke to him, but he is not really amused by so much architecture, and the modern architects like Phil Johnson have no knowledge of historic style so they can not transf rm them in a modern way. Phil is building an enormous skyscraper for Park Avenue with Mies van der Rohe; very handsome and mineral.

Alice Bouverie is busy marrying Romana to Lord Hamilton, a pleasant blonde boy the nephew of David Herbert who will get Wilton eventually. She is very well, has two houses connect ed through the kitchin of one, for herself and her kids. I had a cable from Peter Watson wanting Edward James address; but no one knows where he is; probably Mexico; he had a sor of nervous breakdown a year ago and quarrelled with the Strawinskys. Love . L

March 28 1955

Dearest Pavlik :

I am very sorry I have not written you before this, but there
have been telles histoires, and I am bored to death with people defending and
attacking me, and it is of no interest, and I never want to hear the name of
the City Center mentioned again. I don't hate anybody, I love everybody, I just
never want to think about raising money or horrible German opera-directors etc.
It was all intensely disagreeable, and in a way still is; but in time it will
pads. I had no idea people would care so much,- either way.

THE SAINT OF BLEECKER STREET was a success for Gian-Carlo and George Tooker; it was the most consistent theater we have had here and it is still running; every body is in disagreement; the Church cannot claim it, and everyone tries to figure out what Gian-Carlo believes in (life, love, death, - like all Italian opera). It is rich and handsome and was well produced. It is being done at La Scala with the American principal singers and George Tooker's sets on May 4th. I doubt if you would like it, but it is not an inconsiderable work; it has had 84 performances. It will play through June. But it is not a hit, by any means.

Balanchine's house is built, now, a pre fabricated jib, across the road from us,
up the hill from the house you had. Our house is also finished, and we hope to
live there by May. The Shakespeare Theatre at Statford is half-built and should
be finished by May 30. I am very much excited by the possibilities. We have 2
very good Englishmen, one to run the school and one to direct the plays. The
theatre itself is not perfect, but it is capacious, like a provincial opera house
and the conditions will be favorable outside of New York to do unlikely things.

We had a very good ballet season; the company leaves by plane for Monte Carlo the 1st of April; they will be in Rome in May. Balanchine is doing La Belle au Bois Dormant with Esteban Frances; our 5 week season was a big success, financially as well as artistically; Tanny made big strides ahead and we have our first jeune premier in Jacques d'Amboise who you will agree is sensationel. Wystan is flying to London and Ischia next Thursday; he is very well, has a wonderful new book out and is doing 3 lectures, very funny, for the BBC.

Osbert sails in 2 weeks; he is much worse. David Horner has behaved like a shocking bitch; but Osbert needs him, and I suppose he will return. Osbert needs 2 canes and cannot light his cigarette or dress himself; he says he is going to be at Montegufone in May for a month. Edith is huge, sad, lost and shaken but she keeps up the appalling jewelled Elizabtehan front and curses David in alchemical curses. Its really distressing in every way. Dan has been an angel to Osbert & he spent five miserable weeks at Joe Reeds in Flordia, and thought he would go mad, but he is painting a picture of the horror of it so maybe it will come out for something. Nothing is lost.

Paul Cadmus has been doing some of the best drawings he has ever made; he has a
wonderful model that freezes, and he is also finishing a large picture of hell;
a nightmare of memories of Americans in Italy. Hideous, but very brilliant. But th
drawings are divine. We all, long to know what you are doing. I suppose Kirke
must have photos but I never go near Duralcher's; its full of high art. I thought
Carlyle Brown's show was handsome but over-stuffed and a bit of a bore; can't he
do anything but those bottles.

I hope your work goes well. I wish I could see something that you are doing. We all do. A man from Bittner's wanted a drawing. I told him to write you or go to Kirk; I didn't know who to send him to. Kirke's daughter was married; big party at the Cosmopolitain Club; Osbert and Edith went.

I am always dreaming and planning for a big new theatre, and I see Wallie Harris-
on quite frequently and we talk and he is making some rough drawings; also the
young grandson of the old Toscanini, Wifredo, is an architect and I have been
speaking with him, and someday it will happen.

Ed Hewitt is having a lovely show of the Nadelman marbles, noen thet have ever been seen; he has done very well in his new gallery on 65th stree; it is handsome and large and looks quite lovely. Chester Dale bought a ghastly Dali Crucifixion for the Metropolitain; Gala is in the corner photographed by Miss Cecilai Beatoni and such cheezy color and wretched pancake-makeup surfade you cannot begin to imagine; it is hung next to P. Casso's Gertrude Stein which has its lips curled.

Jens sends love; he is busy at the press, and he does gynacological illustrations of cervix and pelvis and vagina, and all the money goes to his juvenile delinquents and their constantly increasing families; pretty but dangerous. He has a new red motorcycle.

I wish you could send me some prints of your pictures. With love from Fido,

Love, LINDA

April 16 1955

Dearest Pavlik :

I was very glad to get your letter; we saw John Marshall, with his news of
you; he was most enthusiastic about the pictures that he saw. I assume you got your pass-
port extended and that you will stay abroad another year, at least. Catherine Viviano has
done very well for Carlyle Browne; he had a 'handsome' (boring) red cupboard that the Whit-
ney bought; its all rather a crashing bore, with his bottles and scissors, but he is more
skillful and solid than before, I guess. Noth that I care. I never see Kirk; actually I
have not been into the gallery twice in the last three and a half years. I get no impression
that he is interested in pictures, but rather that he is busy socializing, his country estate
and getting his daughters married. Knoedlers is just a kind fo Bergdorf-Goodman of painting
with pictures by Mainbocher-Buffet and Palenciaga-de Stael. They make a lot of money and the
would handle you; they did well with Tamayo. I feel that Catherine Viviano is a nice woman
but she is not very strong. Besides, have you any pictures to sell ?

The ballet opened in Monte Carlo, successfully. Maria Tallochief joins them
in Italy; I hope she won't make trouble; we need a ballet-master and hope eventually to get
Freddie Franklin; Betty Cage is tired, discouraged and bored with the ballet. I h o p e to get
her into some srt of new angle of the work, maybe helping me at the Shakespeare Festival at
Stratford. The theater is half way up, and I hope it will be nice. We have an interesting
English director; we are doing the TEMPEST and wish you were here to design it.

We are approaching the time when the house in Weston will be ready to live
in; the land is quite divine and the spring is already filled with dogwood and the dog-vio-
le; are coming up. Fido aores it, and later I may build a little house so that Paul can live
there if he wants to. He has done some beautiful drawings of a marvelous model; an ugly boy
who poses like a dream; he has done his best drawings. He is doing a god-awful picture of the
Americans in Italy; its very good in his style. There was a savage review of the policy of
Alfred Barr in the Times Lit. Sup. I gather by Douglas Cooper. Very good and funny.
The museum is filled with photographs, Indian textiles and abstract art. Phil Johnson is
building a synagogue with three domes, quite amusing, and an enormous Park Ave. skyscraper
with Mies van der Rohe.

Wystan has gone back to Ischia; he did 3 excellent lectures on poetry for the
BBC. The Sitwells left; David Horner appeared at the boat, finally and Dan M aloney's deseri-
tion of the meeting and the farewell was really terrifying. Edith is huge and very strange.
She is naturally terribly worried about Osbert and the future and hates David. Dam was a
miracle of kindness and attention, but he finally had to draw the line as he would have
turned into a trained nurse if he hadn't defended himself. Tennessee Willimas has a big
success with one of his ambiguously queer hot Southern sweaty horror family money and fucking
plays that I will never see. Its shocking, -like shit.

Jim Fosburgh did a big sketchy-type portrait of Osbert that I have not yet
seen; he and Minnie have a lovely house, all done over from architectural details from the
Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga. The new director of the Metropolitain will, I hope, be Jim;
Rorimer.Gian-Carlo is in Milan, preparing the Siant of Bleecker Street. George Tocker had to
redesign everything for the Scala, but he didn't finally want to go there without Jean Rosen-
thal; he felt they would resent an American designer, and he doesn't ever want to do anything
more for the stage, anyways. He spends all his time painting.

I hope everything goes well for you in Milano. Let us hear from you; love

1

October 11 1955

Dearest Pavlik :

At 1:15, this MORNING, the doorbell rang, and who do you suppose it was? An old friend of yours, fresh from the hangars of the international airport, clean with greasy pants and an eager-beaver expression; it was Al Winkler. His wife doesn't understand him; she hasn't been able to have a baby; her sister

October 19

has three babies. Al wants to be serviced regularly, but he is less interesting than when you knew him; nice Kittnes grow to be disappointing cats as you said about Don Windham. Since a week, there have been bad floods in the country. Our road was washed out; the Obrien house was under five feet of water; Alice dela Mar's is a wreck, the whole place is a disaster.

I enclose some clips which may amuse you.

We are preparing the new season; our 17th at the Center. Esteban is doing a new work, and we are doing Sam Barber's piece that he wrote for us. Balanchine is fine, completely recovered and he loves his place opposite ours.

The ballet company will be at Covent Garden again, for the third time, this July, and then will tour Scandinavia and Germany. There is talk about Russia, but I doubt it. I will be working at the Shakespeare Theater again; Langner, the Theater Guild boss, is out, and Joseph Reed and I will run it. We have quite different ideas than Langner. I have no interest in going to Europe; my work and life is here. I know Europe as a museum, and a marvelous one. Nothing I've seen evidence of makes me believe I am missing much by not seeing what is being done in Paris and London.

The worst of it is, I can't think of anything here that would amuse you. There is the Tanguy show at the Museum; some lovely things but monotonous. Walton's opera is being done; Cecil is doing a ballet at the Met for their company; very pretty; white on white and lots of cut out palm trees and no painting on it. Jim Sweeney has a big Brancusi show. We have a good new negro boy, called Arthur Mitchell, who will scracely replace Jacques d'Amboise, but we can't compete with Hollywood.

With love to you and Charles,

1

November 2 1955

Dear Pavlik :

Either I can't read your handwriting, or else I don't understand you. What is the price of the VASE D'OR ? How much credit do I have with you ? Does it have to go through Durlacher ? Is the picture in America ? How much is it ? How much do you want to sell it ? I have not bought a single picture in four years, as all my money goes either to living, the ballet or Shakespeare. Now the ballet school has to move from our old building to West 82nd st at Broadway; we have a good place but it will cost over $35,000 to rearrange the space, and this wipes out the cash reserves for the school, and of course I am responsible for the imminent pensioning of Vladimiroff, Oboukhov, Doubrov ska, etc. when they can't work any more.

I just feel George Lynes is a human disaster and not even to be spoken about much less, to. I have known him 35 years and it is really very sad, but what can you do? Monroe feels the same way about it, and so do Jens and Paul Cadmus.

The new ballet season is about to open. Esteban Frances has done a lovely set for Balanchine. Karinska is being destroyed by enlarging her scope and working like crazy for Sonia Henie and the ice-shows. She can't even do our dresses any more. Todd Bolender, Miss Bird Brain, has done a really quite charming 1914 ballet to a score . Reuben Ter-Arutunian, the Armenian designer, with whom I did La Cenerentola and the Kaffka is doing the decor; its very ingenious with an art-nouveau elevator, made out of wicker. He is also doing the Magic Flute, for NBC television which Balanchine and I are producing with Wystan and Chester's verse version. He is a good boy, very hairy, but he draws very well, and has a way of making people believe in him.

Jo Reed and I are reorganizing the Shakespeare theater entirely, having got rid of the Theater Guild and its sinister influence. We are finishing the theater, in details, changing some things and developing the landscaping of the grounds. The single unqualified success of the first season was the theater building itself, and this is some personal consolation to me.

The Met Opera, the Philharmonic, the Juillard School etc. are merging into one big Performing Arts Center at 65th st and Broadway within the next two years. Wallace Harrison will do the over-all plans. I want you very much to do a big decoration and I am already working on it. I know that Harrison wants the place to be handsome and well-done, but of course he is queer for Leger (mort, au moins), Lipschitz etc. and Noguchi that mongrel. But I am talking all the time to Harrison.

I look forward to seeing Fabrizio Clerici, and will what ever I can for him. Cecil had a success with the Enid Bagnold play, and he did an all white paper-cut out set for Solov at the Met which Jens really made; I did not see Cecil; he was busy and I had nothing to say to him, but he is hard working and returns in the spring. I find I stay alone every chance I can get as I like Weston so much and the weather has been so lovely. There has been a lot to patch up after the damage done by the floods. They fixed Alice's road, and Peggy O'Brien moved to her place, again. Pichenot's house is really gone; the second time in 2 months.

I adored the Comedie Francaise; a really perfect group of players; very handsome decor and costumes by Suzanne Lalique who ever she is. It was an enormous pleasure. Orson returns to do Volpone, Lear and Moby Dick, probably at the City Center. Balanchine is full of ideas; he has two new scores of some interest, and our chief energies are now to prepare for the spring season. Maria is not very happy; but she was not born to be; on the other hand Tanny and Georges are angelic. With love, L

December 9 1955

Dear Favlik :

George Lynes died at ten o'clock last night; we had been at the ballet and
Monroe called at midnight. He had been in a coma for a week, his brain was affected, and the
whole thing etait une triste histoire. I have no idea what will happen to his negatives;
he destroyed hundreds of them. The whole thing could not be more distressing; it makes me
feel a million. I met George in boarding-school in 1922. Glenway had spent the afternoon
with him, but he recognized nobody. He told Margaret French last week that the worst of it
was coming out of sedation.

Clerici is here; he came to the ballet a couple of times. His show has a big
social success. He is staying at Genia Berman's apartment; Genia is away. I don't much care
for the pictures and he is surrounded by Davidova and Lanfranco Rasponi, etc. but I will try
to take him to the Cloisters and to see some pictures if he wants to.

We are all working very hard on the ballet; we did 3 new works, and are reviving
Nutcracker with two casts of children; we are giving a gala for the Sadlers' Wells company
on Sunday night; they are back here televising the Sleeping Beauty. Alice Bouverie who spends
her time and money now entirely on psychic research, suddenly announced she was giving a
arty for Fred and Margot; I have not seen her in months and I gatehr nobody else has. Minnie
has turned into a very quiet domesticated housewife for the great painter, Mr Fosburgh.
Its what she has always wanted. He is a nice man, too.

We think we have John Houseman for the next Shakespeare Festival; Orson is back
here doing LEAR and VOLPONE at the City Center. He is very persuasive; I talked about Malfi
etc. but he has his career, whatever that means to him; he says he is reformed entirely and
is very responsible and a good boy; he has married an Italian and he makes a lot of sense in
conversation but what he plays like, one can't ever tell.

Fido sent you the Xmas present but it may get to you late. I hope you both have
a good year and come back to America in the Fall of 1956.

With love,

1

March 7, 1956

Dearest Pavlik :

I understand perfectly how you feel about ONDINE. I felt like telling Bel Geddes and Edith what you told me, but that I did not feel I had the right to do it. They will of course understand and will see you in Frascati, this May.

I have to go now to the first rehearsal of Virgil's MOTHER OF US ALL, which I am producing for him with Alvin Ailey; and tonight there is a new big ballet of Jerry Robbins. Balanchine has done a lovely piece for Maria, a concentrated pill of classic dance and Nicky had a very well-deserved success in it; we have two good new boys, out of the school, a very elegant, well proportioned negro and a very thin blond boy, both excellent. The company has never danced so well in all our 18 seasons at the Center. Todd Bolender has done another small work, but it is quite good.

I should love to have the Vaso d'Oro, and I will send you $ 500.00 in a week or would you simply let me deposit it at your bank ? Please write, and then the other $ 500. in June. I should actually rather have the Vaso d'Oro than the Tattooed Boy, but George Dix thought that you could more readily sell the new picture and it would be more of a help, but I would much rather have the new picture, because I can have it in the house so Wallace Harrison has some indication of what you can do. Please let me know when I can expect it ? I am sorry not to have seen Charles but we are both so busy.

Jens is working at the Morgan Library; he is learning how to repair vellum manuscripts and is working on a purpureated Byzantine codex with gold letters. I think he loves the atmosphere of the library and he will travel all over the country in the fall with a show of their great manuscripts. I will try to see Iolas about the Crystal Skull; I hate him and I have not been in his new gallery, but I will go in. Love, L.

Poor Danny Maloney is a real saint; he took him to Charleston, South Carolina for ten days, and had to dress and undress him. Osbert won't have a nurse. David Horner is scheduled to return to England with Osbert at the end of May, but I think Edith will kill him, of he does, or indeed, if he doesn't; its too painful to talk about. Jim Fosburgh has completed the portrait of Osbert which he started last year; it will be unveiled to all present, formally, on Friday. I asked Osbert what it was like; he said he thought it was better last year.

The ballet plans are these; next year after the NY season, Japan and Australia will come and we are supposed to enter the Met organization in the Fall of 1957, and do a big work for their subscription season. You once said you would help a pupil or disciple of yours to do THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, Maybe then you'll have found someone you like or would work with Esteban.

We adore our house in the country. The bulbs we planted have come up, in spite of the fact that I planted them upside down. We have made a lovely path by a little brook, which I develop each weekend by removing the small stones and following Japanese gardening and landscaping ideal. Fido removes a half hours worth of poison ivy morning and afternoon. I removed about thirty trees from around the house so its not so clautrophobic. The trees are quite big and tall and keep out light. They are starting to repair the roads and bridges that were destroyed by the disastrous floods of last fall. Our dam is fixed. Alice de la Mar has built a beautiful new stone wall all along from the four corners at Mimi Benson's house up opposite your house.

Butch and Peter have a house nearby at Ridgefield. The Pippin Press is very busy indeed and they can turn out nearly 200 rolls of handprinted paper in a day. Butch is quite bald, but very faithful and devoted. It is a great satisfaction that they have done so well. The Metropolitain bought a very fine picture by George Tooker for $2,000. Its a nightmare of bureaucracy. The subway inspired Gian Carlo for the third act of the Saint of Bleecker st.

I think that the article on the elcerton microscope is absolutely fascinating. If anybody wants to know what you are doing, tell them to read it. I am depositing $500 in your bank today.

With love to Charles,

1

June 23 1956

Dear Pavlik :

I deposited $1000.00 to your account as per the enclosed
reciept on June 19th, 1956. I hope this secures the Vaso d'Oro for me ?
I have been very busy, first with the Mozart Festival and then with
King John and Measure for Measure which John Houseman has mounted for
us at the Shakespeare Theater. They are a big improvement over last year.
It takes a long time to build a tradition of classic acting in this
(essentially uninterested' country, but one works for oneself as one can,
to the limits of one energies.

Strawinskyt grown very old and frail is on his way to Greece
and I think Vera made him go out of boredom; he would have been happy to stay
at home, but he has his Sanint Mark's Passion forV enice in the Fall and
he has never been to Greece.

Kirk told Leila Wittler that your show was arranged at
Durlacher's, only he didn't establish the date. The gallery is no longer
what it once was, but you probably find it a conveneince, and the pic-
tures are what is important not the dealer.

We are permanently living in Weston. We are across the street
from Alice but we never see her. Balanchine has planted masses of roses as a
hedge and he has done lots to his house which is very sweet. The ballet
opens in Salzburg in August, then Vienna, Germany and Scandinavia. Four
performances at the Grand Opera in ovember; then home. They want us for
the Far East next year.

Love to you both,

1

November 20 1956

Dearest Pavlik :

I saw Phillipe Jullien at Leo Lerman's great soiree for Maria Meneghini Callas, and was so happy to have direct news of oyu. I long to see you. I have missed you for five years; my ideas have had only the focus of reading and thinking, but without you I am an unfertilized weed. When do you come and for how long ? I spoke to Alice de la Mar before she left for Palm Beach; she has the various houses and if you want one for next summer you had better write now. It would be wonderful if you were there near Balanchine and me and John Houseman. We are doing Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. Houseman had wanted Tanny to play Titania and Diana Adams to play Hippolyta.

The tragedy of Tanny is so terrible and so far reaching that I cannot bring myself to discuss it. Balanchine is at the hospital all day because she is under drugs and they never know when she might want to see him; he is living all winter in Copenhagen at the Hotel d'Angleterre. I suppose you must have written him. This will be the first season since 1935 that I have not had Georges to plan with; we have ten weeks in New York and I have to improvise something. Fortunately Gian-Carlo Menotti is working with me and he has done a very beautiful, big and long madrigal-ballet with chorus, a fable called THE UNICORN : THE GORGON AND THE MANTICORE. It is his best work and we are working like cracy on it. His friend Dario Cecchi is here; I guess for a show at Iolas.

Enclosed shows how far the big scheme has gone; It is important you get to know John Rockefeller and see Blanchette. The chance is very great now and the Happy Smearers are on the run; even Emily Genauer that cunt of hell has turned on them. They are all too dreary to be spoken about; a huge memorial show to Jack the Dripper, the late Jackoson Pollock, but it is balanced by a big Balthus show.

Lya na sha Minroe may get this memorial next week on Friday, Thursday and Sunday at 7 p.m. George Platt

I am having a big memorial show made for George Platt Lynes in the very nice new and big gallery at the City Center; Monroe says there is absolutely no chance for the Museum of Modern Art doing anything about him. I think Henry McIlhenny will help me. I am getting small paragraphs from poets and writers about George for the Album : Marianne Moore writes :

George Lynes- in a way that is emphasised by absence- contributed to my knowledge of art. Not art merely, but to my knowledge of art as behaviour. His ironic idiosyncrasy of understatement made preliminaries painless, professionally and socially. His understanding of light and impatience with retouching as a substitute for focus, imparted to his work a glow in which naturalness is not sacrificed to versimilitude. He had style, created style; this impression strengthens with time.

I wonder if you would please write a paragraph, as a painter about how you feel about George's photos, not necessarily about the ballet-pictures, because I want to show everything, nudes, portraits, fantaises, which had so much to do with your influence and theater-pictures. Jens is doing the dark-room work. Edwin Denby, Osbert, Wystan, Christopher, Carl van Vechten Cecil, Glenway etc. are doing short paragraphs. Would you please do it for me as fast as you can as we have to go to press very soon since the ballet season opens on December 18th.

I thought the walnut-brain in the Paris Review fascinating and the bull, too. I was thrilled when Eddie Bigelow brought me the catalogue of your Paris Show which I hope went well, and saw my name attached to the Vaso d'Oro. Love to you both. Please write about George Platt Lynes; one hundred words only. 1

Tanaquil LeClerq
Out of Danger

COPENHAGEN, Nov. 15 (U.).-

Tanaquil LeClerq, polio-stricken ballerina of the New York City Ballet, is out of danger but will have to remain inactive for a long time, her doctor said today.

"Miss LeClerq is no longer in critical condition, but she will not leave the hospital for a long time," Dr. Torkil Hendriksen said. "Later, she will have a long period of convalescence."

Miss LeClerq fell ill Oct. 28 while the ballet was performing here. Her husband, choreographer George Balanchine, has been passing most of his time at her bedside since she was stricken.

26 1956

twlik :

Please write a word to George Balanchine, Hotel d'Angleterre, Copenhagen. Tanny is somewhat better but it is unlikely that she can make a full

Everyone is rallying around like crazy; Menotti is a great help; he two pieces for us, both powerful theater. Todd Bolender is doing a small all the kids are working well. Nicky has the lead in Gian-Carlo's madrigal-opera. An Italian bou ex-friend of Gian Carlo's very cultivated and crazy called Dario Cecchi is doing the decor. Cecilia Beatonia is here, having a show of taste-ful drawings at Sagitarius. I mist say he is elegant and kind and a good profession-al friend. Jens is doing a lot of work for him very well; also some small sculpture. He has done really marvelous work at the Morgan Library and is promoted to be finally conservateur. He repairs drawings under the microscope, rebacks old manuscripts with mulberry-paper etc. We all miss you very much.

I am going back to the City Center as Managing Director as they all want me, and this time I will have the power I lcaked before. I want Gian-Carlo to assist me as Artistic Administrator of the Opera Company. The Rockefellers will help; Tanny's illness has put into a lurid high-relief the sacrifices we have all made; it seems to be of positive value in the scale of life and death. I do not think money will be our problem,- but only the lack of real fantasy and genuine imagination.

We need you; we meed you badly, to aid and inspire us, and teach us. I know you will not do decor, but you can teach those who want to. Esteban Frances behaved like the most revolting and loathsome pig. After Karinska forced him on the Met for ERNANI (which was HIDEOUS), he preferred charges against her in the Scenic Designers' Unions, saying she had altered his designs, when as a matter of fact, she had saved his life. The Met, nor I will ever use him again.

Fidelma is 50 years old on December 12. Please send her a word. She looks lovely but feels 200, she says. I will be 50 in May; as my poor mother said when I told her I wanted to marry Fido; Why, - that woman is old enough to be your mother.

Alice wants you to have the house in Weston; come back for the summer, at least; we have a Strawinsky Festival in May-June, 1957, and I will remount the Rake at the Center next Fall, and Virgil's opera. You can spend 1957-58 winter in Italy but we need you here as soon as you can come. Money will not be the problem. In these terrible times, all friends must help. I need help. Love,

1

April 6 1957

Dear Pavlik :

I would have to have all the necessary documents from doctors, passports, etc. before I could really do anything here. I can't institute any request which would really mean anything, that would not be forwarded either to Rome or Paris for their disposition. I am terribly distressed that you are so unsettled and wish I could do something, but I feel hamstrung since I don't know the essential documentation. I'm going up to see Kirk this morning to see what he can suggest, as he has been in touch with the Roberts etc.

I don't know what to say or do : if you have the strength to go to Paris, which would seem to me to be unwise from a political point of view, that is if you want to stay in Italy another year, I am afraid that the consulate will say that you are well enough to go to America. I suppose an alternative would be to renounce American citizenship; I don't see what particular good it does you. Then you could stay in Italy indefinitely, and visit here for as much time as you would care to.

I cannot think of anything to interest you; Tanny seems to have made a considerable improvement since her arrival here and her stay at Lenox Hill Hospital; she likes her therapist very much, and has been fitted for her belt and braces. The problem now is to let all the muscles develop simultaneously without the strong ones taking over the work of those now weak, which could become strong. She is beginning to see people, even girls, and does not seem emotionally exhausted. Balanchine is very much aged, but cheerful and realistic.

Everyone adores the Vaso d'Oro; it puts all the lights out around it; Fido and I hope you will be much better soon; if I can do anything positive, please let me know.

Worried about you.

1

May 21 1957

Dear Pavlik :

We are all very distressed that you are still not well, and hope that
your improvement is sudden and lasting. I hope Charlie's show went well in Paris.
I would love to have a catalogue. We are in Weston about half the time. The ballet
company finished in Chicago; Balanchine did not go; he went to place Tanny at the
National Polio Center at Warm Springs where she now is, getting the best of care
and being out of doors a good part of the time; they make no prognosis of the future
but she is being fitted for braces. Nicky and Diana came for the weeken and they
all planted lilacs. Georges had sort of a temporary let-down after finally placing
Tanny in Warm Springs and we were rather worried about him, but his lungs are alrigh
The fact that he has only one has caused the position of his heart to fill up the
empty space in his chest so its lop-sided. But he recovers quickly from these things

Everything is now in abeyance until the Fall; we are trying to think through what we can do with the company; 20 years of improvisation and no money has been finally a bore, and facing the next ten years without much chance to develop, except to work blindly is not the most invigorating landscape to contemplate. Georges will be working at the Shakespeare Theater at Stratford with Houseman; they are doing the Merchant of Venice, Othello and Much Ado About Nothing with Katherine Hepburn as Portia and Beatrice. I have grown very fond of the theater itself; it looks like the inside of one of my father's cigar-boxes. It smells like resin.

We have had a very delayed, cold, dry spring, which has suddenly broken into tor-
rents of rain; our land is so rocky that I spread thin layers of top-soil on every-
thing hoping it will grow. Only weeds flourish and we are so happy to see some
trace of green that Fido won't let me cut anything. The dog-wood was luxuriant and
fortunately violets seem to adore bad soil. The violets grew in enormous clumps
at the side of the brook next to your old house, as big as small pansies. I have
been planting iris and day-lilies and the bushes I put in last year came back.

Stravinsky is being prepared for his 75th birthday; a series of concerts all summer and he is much better; he seems almost too well, and has accepted to take over all the concert-dates cancelled by the illness of Bruno Walter. He has sent us the score of the new ballet which will have its orchestral premiere in Hollywood on his birthday which is June 17.

Butch has done very well with the press; he spends a lot of time in the country
in his little house where he can work as well or better than in New York. Osbert
and Edith left; both of them have aged considerably; his tremor seems to have been
arrested; at least it is no worse; she keeps falling down and went on the boat in a
wheel-chair. She did a very long and difficult tour; I never know if she has to, or
if she wants to.

I wish I could write you something interesting or cheerful or funny. Actually, this
is only to send you my love and Fido's and hope you will be out and home soon.

Devotedly,
1

PAVEL TCHELI TCHERW

To introduce in a dozen pages, the work of an important artist relatively unknown to a new, yet cultivated audience, is most difficult. Ultimately, only his work can speak for him, but it is perhaps easier and quicker in first appreciating the unfamiliar vision if it can be related to other aspects of its epoch, which are more widely familiar. In order to place the work of Pavel Tchelitchew in our history, we must know first that he is Russian by birth, was self-trained through early contacts with theatre and ballet, through museums and through contacts in Western Europe since 1921, and that he has done his most significant painting in the last ten years, during which time he has largely resided over the North American continent, in New York, New England, Florida, the desert of Arizona, and the island of Bermuda. At present, after an absence of a decade, he is renewing European associations.

In the last fifty years, dominant movements in the plastic arts have derived almost entirely from Paris. International culture which anciently set its capitals in Athens and Rome found its seat by the Seine over a century ago. The many great artists working there may have been Spanish, Italian, Central European, American, as well as French, but it is the materialist philosophy of Protestant rationalism which has determined the basic thought of our Twentieth Century School of Paris.

For this generation, the first problem of painting (and sculpture) was the release of structure from content; the substitution of plastic means and personal idiosyncrasy for a universal system of reference. After Cezanne, the long rebellious descent from Descartes triumphed. Mind and matter as separate entities found their absolute apotheosis in the researches of Cubism and Abstract Art. Progressive painting became subjugated, after a long consolidation, to the new

Tchelitchew : 2

Academy governed by Pablo Picasso, just as Jacques Louis David controlled the
taste of his time. The plastic means required to achieve painting are now
accepted as the legitimate ends of art. In 1949, a century which was inaugurated
by a general rebellion against representational art by a group of "wild men"
(les Fauves), has reached its half-way mark with all the savages tamed, canonized
by dealers and journalists, with their individual and hard-earned styles diluted
by a second generation of dependent painters. The dead Minotaur of representa-
tional art is still slaughtered daily by darts stolen from Picasso's magical
quiver.

The taste of the School of Paris is primarily decorative, improvised, frag-
mentary, narcissistic, emotional and charming. Individual handwriting (coriture)
is now prized far more than realized, frank, representational statement, an
a ttitude while admitted as the basis of the greatest art of the past, is now
dismissed as the property of naive anecdote. Personal styles marking chapters
in the lives of fashionable artists renewed like shifting modes of civil costume
seem more attractive than intellectual or metaphysical attempts towards a general
synthesis of art, science and morality. Painting, which was once the solid fusion
of hand, brain and spirit, has become the sophisticated impersonation of innocent
or irresponsible caprice, - of the child, the savage, or of the insane, and has
resulted chiefly in automatic writing or interior decoration. Paintings are run
off in mindless series, like bank-notes, each signed with the recognizable name of
a negotiable bond.

In absolute and relentless opposition, Pavel Tchelitchew is a Centrifugal
artist. His paintings are intellectual, unencumbered by a preoccupation with the
artist as Self; his talent flies out from the subjective focus of his individual
and accidental personality, attempting to find general correspondence and reference

Tchelitchew: 3

in the huge systems of our objective natural universe. The style in which
Tchelitchew has chosen to work is the legible tradition of Western art. This
insures him a certain anonymity. What he has painted is far more important
than how he paints (although he handles his brush magnificently and is an incom-
parable draftsman), or who he happens to be.

The Centripetal artists, however, a tribe released only after the Cartesian
Renaissance, are predominantly interested in protest, rebellious self-assertion,
and idiosyncrasy. They seek their centres. They are the legitimate heirs of the
Protestant Reformation. Their protestation has raised self-interest, or self-
pity (as in Central European Expressionism) into a badge of narcissism. Hals
(who painted Descartes)*, Velasquez, Manet, the masters of matiere and brie, of
la peinture comestible, are the ancestors of our centripetal painting, an art
which makes the surface or quality of paint its ultimate end, which preserves the
superficies of the picture-plane, which denies no matter what subject in favor of
no matter what treatment, and finally, and fatally, frames only the limited Self.

Tchelitchew is a Centrifugal painter, but this does not mean he has been
ungrateful for the impressive and ingenious innovations of his epoch, in Cubism,
in Abstract (or Non-Objective) art, or in the camera and other gifts of measureable
science. Born in Moscow, two years before the birth of our century, he was to
benefit enormously from the capital contributions in the formal metaphysic of
Cubism (but not of Expressionism). Although he never studied in studio or academy,
he sat for a while in the ascendant, ubiquitous School of Cubism. But very early,
Tchelitchew recognized his instinctive predilection towards a humane and repre-
sentational art. Cozanne's massive lesson of the fulcrum of cone, cube, and
cylinder, he learned along with the rest of his generation, but this Russian

* A portrait attributed to Hals is in the Louvre, but the original sketch is in Denmark.

Tchelitchew : 4

refugee never forgot an older Master of the Circle, - Raphael, whose divine means of plastic rendering, mild, anonymous, precise, - has always been his criterion, as it was the standard for Ingres, Degas, and the early Picasso.

By birth an aristocrat, educated by tutors in a liberal political milieu but attached to the atmosphere of the imperial court and the court-theatres of opera and ballet, Tchelitchew's adolescent work was accomplished under the influence of revolutionary Russian Constructivism, deriving from the early compositions of Fernand Leger. He learned the practical application of elementary spatial relations by creating decor and costumes (often with his own hands) during the Civil War in Russia, and later in the Levant and Berlin, where he had an astonishing success at the Staatsoper as early as 1922. In his childhood he had longed equally to become a doctor and a dancer. On the one hand, the smell of the operating-theatre nauseated him; on the other, his father forbade him to prepare for the stage. In his subsequent life as painter, he has continually been inspired by the fabulous arena of the human body and the miraculous anatomy of circus and ballet.

His decorations for George Balanchine's three choreographic masterpieces, *Alma Errante*, the *Mozart Concerto*, and Strawinsky's *Apollon Musagete*, have been admired together with his luminous decor for Jouvet's production of Giraudoux's *Ondine*, by all Buenos Aires. The lyric, or non-realistic, theatre has served Tchelitchew continually as a laboratory in which he has first essayed new systems of spatial balance; his spectacle for Serge de Diaghilew (*Ode*, Nabokov-Massine, 1928), first gave him international fame. In the illusory and ephemeral realism of the theatre, Tchelitchew has been able to create as a sculptor, in three

* Performed at the Teatro Polytechna during the season of the tour of the American Ballet in 1941.

**Created for the Teatro Colon in 1942.

Tchelitchew : 6

completeness. He has seen form and volume, or the composition and combination
of masses as the flesh and bone of representational art, not as pure, disassociated
design. He has also recognized the amazing correspondence of human figures and
faces to other shapes in nature as superimposed or punning metaphor. Mountains
are sleeping lovers (Fata Morgana, 1939-40), and clowns are costumed and constructed
from ordinary kitchen utensils. In Tchelitchew's "Laconic" arrangements there is
a simultaneous and static fusion of objects in multiple images, and a kinetic
progression of identical images which seem to move in their sharing of arms and
legs (Three Masks: Portrait of Serge Lifar as 'Albrecht' in Giselle, 1930).
Tchelitchew's portraits natures-mortes also have their lyric double exposure:
Penelope:1930 is built up out of (never broken down into) the loved domestic,
daily objects that recall the wandering husband to the waiting, spinning wife.
From the classic ballet (danse d'ecole) Tchelitchew first learned, and still
continually gives expression to, a strict essential meaning of expressive gesture.
He has transformed its flowing movement, its moments of apparition, its fixation
of glorious revelatory positions into a sequence of forms which read as motion,
but which are benignly static within their given frame.

Briefly in 1926 a number of younger painters in Paris banded together and
held an exhibition at the Galerie Druet, which has since entered the histories
as the initiation of Neo-Romanticism. As Soby has written in his unique study
of Tchelitchew,\* Neo-Romanticism in the pictures of Christian Berard, Kristians
Tonny, the brothers Eugene and Leonid Berman, and Tchelitchew (who was early
recognized as the chef d'ecole) actually meant something undoubtedly new:

However disparate their talents and ambitions, they were allied in
a faith that art must return to its ancient concern with men and his emotions,

\* Tchelitchew: Paintings and Drawings, by James Thrall Soby, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942. Page 14.

Tchelitchew : 8

avant-garde painting, by trying to substitute concepts of metaphysical order for the usual preoccupation with matiere, des jolies taches de couleurs, and plastic preoccupation, as such. After this, Tchelitchew's greatest support has come from England, where he was first sponsored and passionately protected by the eminent scholar and poet Dr. Edith Sitwell, by her distinguished brothers Sir Osbert and Sachaverell Sitwell, and from many collectors and museums in the United States.

Tchelitchew benefited enormously from his early discipline under the Cubist ideas, as he benefited later from his first vision of Italy in 1935, his discovery of Giotto, and Fra Angelico to whom he paid a splendid tribute in *Nobillissima Visione* (Hindemith-Massine, 1938), a ballet based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He now progressively explored new possibilities in aerial perspective and human proportion, which had scarcely interested Western European artists since the commencement of the Baroque. The *divina perspectiva* and study of human and abstract proportions, discovered in the dawn of modernity by Ucello and Fra Luca Pacioli*, the fascinating territory of optical illusion and geometrical poetry, piercing the picture-plane (so jealously guarded by the Cubists), was a realm of research which Tchelitchew alone, for our time, knew had by no means been exhausted. Now he, with an awareness of the difference between the human eye and the camera lens, proposed a *characteristic* perspective (Bathers : I, 1935) in which the psychological and lyric essence of a human figure could be further accentuated by the angular incidence of its precipitation (Bullfighters : 1934). He had numerous precedents for using multiple vanishing points, established within the same frame, notably that of an earlier Greek Orthodox exile, Domenico Theotocopuli, — as in both St. Maurice and the Theban Legion (Escorial) and

*Buenos Aires edition. Please give collation of excellent edition of Paciolo, B.A. 1947.

Tohelitchow : 13

The lower right-hand quarter, devoted to Winter in Cache-Cache was the germ of the Interior Landscape. It was followed immediately by The Golden Leaf: 1945, a large gouache of a three-quarter-length standing nude, seen through from the back, which promised all his subsequent work. The striking stance, the humanity in the inclination of its quivering silhouette, the solidity inside its complexity fuse in a sense of living completeness within a transparent, fluent luminosity. The profile flickers steadily, like an alcohol flame, but the interior also, muscle, bone, nerve and lymph flow with light. The figure is no scorche; its binding element is not blood, but light.

Paul Valery said: "We speak of ..... the body as of a thing which belongs to us; but it is not so simple, for the body belongs to us a little less than we belong to it." In the Renaissance, for the first time, artist-scientists opened dead bodies to discover how marvelously we are made. Now, after five hundred years of investigation, not only in gross anatomy, but also in cellular and nuclear structure, in psychology as well as in the formal development of plastic expression in Western painting, we are led to observe the internal man as a living exteriorized symbol. He no longer needs to be thought of as dead to be comprehended. The secrets of nature are living secrets, and Pavel Tohelitchow may have given us a key to their heavenly countries.

Lincoln Kirstein

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

MEDEA

2.

c. <u>The Mechanization of the Life of the Bees</u>

Under the terrible aspect of a Dictator whose mask is a combina-
tion of von Mackensen and Caesar-Mussolini, clothed in the black skulled
uniform of the Death's Head Hussars, the bees are forced to march in
goose-step, parade in military manoeuvres, become inhuman automata. The
chorus sings senseless marching songs. The emphasis however is on the
imminent nativity above.

d. <u>The Birth of the Twins</u>

Terrible cries are heard. Two great legs emerge wrenched apart
from under Medea's gown. She gives birth to two lace pillows. Chorus
of midwives to an accompaniment of low peaceful moans from Medea.

The Dictator at once demands the two children. He announces he will
educate them on a new principle or kill them. Medea refuses to surrender
them. The Dictator also demands her for his mistress. She again refuses.
She emerges, comes down out of the mountain, her twins at her breast.
Dressed in white, like the Virgin Mary, she walks on the top of the two
arms of the amphitheatre watching the agonies of the bees inside, as if
she were descending to Limbo to succor the damned. Swearing revenge for
the martyrs, she climbs the mountain.

When she arrives at her room, there is a messenger from the Dictator,
waiting on her with an invitation, which is a command. That night he is
giving a ball which is the anniversary of the triumph of his coup d'état.
Her presence is compulsory.

e. <u>Recitative and Aria of Revenge</u>: Her voice is mixed with that of another large, terrible impersonal <u>spoken</u> voice which insists she come to the ball or the children will be killed.

It is night. Medea takes her children and sings a Lullaby to them. They are always at her breasts. Accompanying noise-choir of all natural phenomena: Leaves in the forest, wind, birds: It becomes more and more soft and calm. The night is indigo. She hides her children in the mountain and quits the scene.