The World of Charles Henri Ford & Pavel Tchelitchew

The World of Charles Henri Ford & Pavel Tchelitchew
Sep 18, 2026 – Oct 31, 2026

United States United States — Art Gallery
1600 Lena Street, Suite F5
Santa Fe, NM 87505

Daniel Cooney Fine Art presents The World of Charles Henri Ford & Pavel Tchelitchew, on view from 18 September through 31 October 2026, an exhibition of photographs by Charles Henri Ford and works on paper by Pavel Tchelitchew, curated by photographer Allen Frame. The show offers an intimate portrait of an enduring artistic partnership and the extraordinary cultural world they inhabited in Paris, New York, and Rome from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002) was a writer and artist whose creative life encompassed poetry, fiction, photography, collage, film, publishing, and drawing. Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957) was an admired and influential figure in the European and American avant-garde. Born in Russia to an aristocratic family of landowners, he fled the Revolution with his family in 1918 and studied art in Kiev under Aleksandra Exter before working in Berlin as a stage and costume designer. He moved to Paris in 1923, where he created sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe and made figurative paintings that combined elements of Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism.

Ford and Tchelitchew met in Paris in 1933 at an art opening, when Ford was twenty-four and Tchelitchew thirty-five. "I've found a genius," Ford wrote to his friend Parker Tyler at the time. During the period of their relationship from 1934 to Tchelitchew's death in 1957, Ford photographed Tchelitchew extensively and Tchelitchew painted Charles. They were a remarkable duo and were both, in turn, photographed by their notable artist friends, including George Platt-Lynes, Cecil Beaton, and Carl Van Vechten, whose photographs are included in the exhibition.

Ford came to Paris in 1931, via Mississippi and New York, at first pursuing a relationship with the writer Djuna Barnes, sixteen years his senior. He was a precocious poet who had already published eight issues of a literary review called Blues, A Magazine of New Rhythms, produced in Mississippi before leaving for New York in 1930. In 1940, Ford founded the art magazine View, designed and associate edited by Parker Tyler, intended to replace the European vanguard publications that folded as World War II approached: transition and Minotaure of Paris, and the London Bulletin.

View became one of the most significant American art magazines ever, with special issues devoted to Tchelitchew and Yves Tanguy, Duchamp, and Max Ernst, including art and writing by Man Ray, Magritte, Joseph Cornell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Paul Bowles, Mina Loy, Andre Breton, Henry Miller, Borges, Sartre, Genet, and Camus. Tchelitchew was given a retrospective at MOMA in 1942, his visionary painting Hide and Seek acquired by MOMA that same year, but by the late 1940s he felt pushed out by the rise of Abstract Expressionism. The war now over, he and Ford moved to Rome, where Tchelitchew died in 1957.

Ford published seventeen books of poetry and exhibited photographs, drawings, paintings, collages, poem posters, and sculptures. He remained deeply connected to the art worlds of successive generations, introducing Andy Warhol to his first film camera and making his own experimental underground film, Johnny Minotaur, in Crete in 1971. He moved to Kathmandu in 1972, where he met Indra Tamang, who subsequently collaborated with him in Paris, Crete, and New York, remaining a close friend and invaluable assistant until Ford's death in 2002. Tamang's memoir, My Curious Years with Charles Henri Ford: The Autobiography of Indra B. Tamang, written with Romy Ashby, was published in 2024.

Image: Charles Henri Ford. Peter Watson and Pavel Tchelitchew, London, 1930s © Charles Henri Ford, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.


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