Pavel Tchelitchew
www.moma.org/tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew

Among the most compelling twentieth-century presentations of immanence in Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide and Seek (shown at middle right).  This strange and somewhat scary work, executed with overpowering draftsmanship, is a consummate statement of figure-ground, the situation where an image on one side of its boundary can be reversed to become the background of a different image on the other side of the boundary. 

Tchelitchew seems to draw on an imaginative interpretation of scientific notions of relative position that are necessary to location and meaning for entities in space-time. Every visible object in the painting – tree, hand child, artery, leaf, and bird – is perceived in a state of change, reflecting the actual transformations that occur in nature.  The painting presents ground and object in a vibrating pattern, a pattern in which the ground could be object and object could be ground.

This representation disallows the presumption of empty space, which we habitually consider to surround objects like trees, birds and children.  The fluctuation pattern of figure-ground in Hide and Seek echoes the vibrating diffraction patterns that appear in electron photographs of the atom, forging a link to that reality.  Tchelitchew directs our attention to the relative way we select one object from another from the myriad of sense impressions.  I saw this painting as the most powerful and layered imaging of awe imaginable and as a masterful expression of a new cosmological outlook of the continual change of scale and viewpoint that nature actually presents.  Professor Victor Koshkin-Youritzen, in a fascinating catalogue on the work of Tchelitchew, points out how the human figures that are drawn in multidirectional perspectives and small distortions in Hide and Seek are analogous to Michelangelo’s figure groups in The Last Judgment.  Koshkin-Youritzen includes Michelangelo’s sketches showing human figures growing out of trees, and notes figure ground reversible images in Michelangelo’s great work.  Citing Edith Sitwell, he discusses the possible influence of The Last Judgment on Tchelitchew.    

Artists often devise models that illustrate some principle or idea.  The models need not literally look like the subject they represent, but they can help us to visualize conceptual and phenomenal aspects of that subject.  Tchelitchew’s figure-ground distinctions in Hide and Seek can illustrate a sense of an object’s transformation in space-time.  A hand becomes a tree and human figures diminish in perspective and are repeated at different scales and positions, as if to symbolize both passage and duration in space-time.  At the same time the hand-tree image can appear flat, like some entirely different object, perhaps a satellite photograph of a river delta.  These multiple readings can suggest a vast, scaleless yet interlocked universe. 

In their impressive presentation of the embodied mind, Lakoff and Johnson show how perception actually requires a figure-ground choice that is necessary to the formation of human concepts.  This distinction is not often present in mind-independent, objective concepts done in the objectivist tradition, in which meaning is based on allegedly “objective” truth rather than the process of human cognition.  For human concepts, figure-ground distinctions are crucial, as consciousness requires the exclusion of alternatives.  It is “this” we perceive and not “that” and the “this” requires derivation from the unseen “that.”

It would seem that all acts of perception are illustrations of an immanence-figure-ground paradigm that is necessary to understanding.  Edward O. Wilson, in his optimistic book, Consilience, about the future of science, arts and the creative mind, says that

Outside our heads there is a freestanding reality.  Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence.  Inside our heads is a reconstitution of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts.  Input and self-assembly, rather than an independent entity in the brain…constitute the mind.

Wilson goes on to say that the alignment of outer existence with its inner representation has been distorted by the idiosyncrasies of human evolution.  Natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at greater depth.  The task of science is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.  The development of optical instruments, scientific relativity, and recent discoveries in neurobiology carry us toward this correction.

I see Hide and Seek as a landmark of mid-century art absorbing such scientific realignment.  I also believe that a large proportion of the population, perhaps more than a museum curators, sense something of the relevance of showing the interior of the body underlying its exterior appearance.  I remember my first visit to the painting when a class of eighth graders was excitedly gesturing and wowing until repeatedly ordered by their teacher to move on.  Now that one can watch surgeries all day on television and see computer-enhanced enlargements of tissues, cells and organs, and that we are becoming more aware of the workings of minute organisms on our well-being, I expect a heightened intimacy with our bodily interiors to become an increasingly expected and necessary fact of human experience.  We are beginning to visualize the genetic code, hormonal flows, neuronal networks and the transmission of feelings that constitute our being.  Once again art reflects and predicts how we actually live and what we pay attention to.