“Vibrant Matter”: The Countermodern World of Pavel Tchelitchew

The Russian émigré Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide-and-Seek (1940–42)—acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1942—has received almost no contemporary consideration despite the interest it garnered in Tchelitchew’s lifetime and his prominence within the transatlantic artistic culture of the interwar years. Beloved by the public, the work has been neglected in histories of modernism. Analysis of the artist’s rich philosophical world, informed by premodern cosmologies and by histories of exile and global war, secures Tchelitchew’s place in the project of modernist reenchantment, at a time of ever more bureaucratized forms of knowledge.