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Who Is Tcheltchew's Hide-And-Seek

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The Hide-and-Seek painting which was completed in 1942 is the most celebrated work of Pavel
Tcheltchew . Even though it was completed in 1942, he had been working on various images since 1934 that were incorporated into this painting. Tcheltchew was born in 1898 and was raised in Moscow until the Russian Revolution forced his family to flee. He had various jobs working for local theatres building stage sets while he also worked on his paintings. In the 1920’s he changed the focus of his art to one of using multiple images which sought to reveal both the organic substructure of an object as well as its place in space and time. He intended to reveal “not just the illusion of an object as seen by the normal eye but the sum of inner knowledge …show more content…

However, this picture was strange and somewhat scary. The painting presents an apocalyptic vision of the childhood game. The canvas is dominated by a large tree and has profiles of children with their mouths open in horror. The painting offers double or multiple readings; the game of hide and seek where children are depicted in the work and by the viewer who can make endless discoveries embedded in the dense thicket of designs. Words that come to mind when looking at this painting have dark connotations. Words such as burning, fire, horror story and hellish have been used to describe feelings that may be experienced when looking at the painting Upon close inspection of the painting, there can be found images that cannot be seen from a distance. An example is the vein in one child’s face that has a faint dandelion that served as a pedestal for another child. This kind of imagery is understandable because of the time period in which it was painted, during World War II. The design in this painting is a consummate statement of figure-ground, which is 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. Every visible object in the painting, tree, hand, child, leaf, and bird is perceived in a state of change reflecting the transformations that occur in nature. The

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