Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

signed and dated Pavel Tchelitchew/1925 (lower left)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Collection of Allen Porter, New York
Sale, Sotheby's New York, The Estate of Mrs. John Hay Whitney, April 22-25, 1999, lot 34, illustrated
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale
EXHIBITED

Paris, Salon d'Automne, 1925, as Basket of Strawberries
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Tchelitchew: Paintings, Drawings, 1942, no. 3, p. 36, illustrated
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography, New York: Fleet Publishing, 1967, pp. 31, 305, 309
CATALOGUE NOTE

The present composition marked a major turning point in Tchelitchev's career, as it made his reputation as an easel painter. It received much acclaim at the 1925 Salon d'Automne, leading Florent Fels, a seminal critic at the time, to highly praise Tchelitchev's talent, "a little still life representing a basket of strawberries," declared Fels in L'Art Vivant, "forces us to note the name Tchelitchew, still seldom heard" (Florent Fels as quoted in Tchelitchew, Museum of Modern Art, p. 13).

Parker Tyler recounts the following anecdote from Tchelitchev's life, "having previously been chiefly concerned with the theatre, he now first felt his destiny as an easel painter. Gertrude Stein had rather dramatically discovered him and elected to be his patron, slyly playing him off Picasso. Once the latter found himslef seated at Miss Stein's dinner so as to face, on the opposite wall, a work by the newcomer Pavel Tchelitchew; when Picasso would not respond to the gambit, Miss Stein brought up the impression Tchelitchew had made at the last Salon d'Automne with his Basket of Strawberries; Tchelitchew always claimed this work was the matrix of the Shocking Pink that in later years became fashionable in the domain of cosmetics and clothes" (Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, p.31). In Tyler's view, the strawberries in the composition can be seen as "a direct prophecy of the eggs and the human "egg heads" of the same year" (ibid, p. 305).