The World of Charles Henri Ford & Pavel Tchelitchew
Curated by Allen Frame
Exhibition Dates: September 18 – October 31, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, September 18, 5–7pm
Daniel Cooney Fine Art is thrilled to present The World of Charles Henri Ford & Pavel Tchelitchew, an exhibition of photographs by Charles Henri Ford and works on paper by Pavel Tchelitchew, curated by photographer Allen Frame. The exhibition 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, he fled the Revolution with his family in 1918 and studied art in Kiev before working in Berlin as a stage and costume designer. He moved to Paris in the mid-1920s, 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 were each other’s muses. During the period of their relationship from 1933 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 budding relationship with the writer Djuna Barnes, 16 years older. Charles was 23, with blonde hair, wide-set, almond-shaped blue eyes, and a Southern accent—his family leased and managed small hotels in the Deep South. Both were bi, but presumed to be gay, and they had an intense and unconventional relationship.
As Charles writes in an unpublished autofiction manuscript derived from his diaries of the 1930s, “She’d been to bed with enough men to know that there wasn’t all that much novelty to be found in the next one. But a boy? Beauty and a Boy seemed no less poetic or mythological than beauty and a girl—let’s just say that a boy, at this point or period in her life, was more—mysterious, mystery being as much the absence of something as the presence of something.”
Ford was a precocious poet and had already published eight issues of a literary review called Blues, A Magazine of New Rhythms, which he had produced in Mississippi before leaving for New York in 1930. He became close friends there with the writer Parker Tyler, whose poems he had already published in Blues, (along with other writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Bowles.) When he returned to Mississippi after six months, he proposed to Tyler that they co-write a novel about their bohemian experience in New York’s Greenwich Village. Charles outlined its episodes, and they wrote it over the course of the next year before Ford returned to New York briefly en route to Paris. He became infatuated with Barnes, who was headed to Paris herself, and she offered to put him up in a garret apartment two flights up from her own.
Barnes already knew Paris well; she’d been a significant part of the 1920s ex-pat scene, working as a journalist and publishing several books. Peggy Guggenheim had agreed to subsidize her with a monthly allowance. Plunged instantly into the literary scene, Ford, with his wit and good looks, was well received. Tchelitchew, spying him at an art opening, was smitten, but Ford was still with Barnes, and Tchelitchew was in a relationship himself with the American pianist Allen Tanner, living together with Tchelitchew’s demanding sister.
With an invitation from a Cuban artist to join her in Italy, Charles decided to leave Paris. “Living with Djuna,” he writes in his manuscript, “had not been conducive to the production of poems. Her presence and formidable literary powers were too overwhelming. How could a small poem compete with her magnificent output, an outpouring, a flood. Where did it all come from, that inimitable style, that fiery vocabulary, piercing the unexpected like a divine huntress—Athena [Djuna] the incomparable, the incontestably supreme. Which meant there was no question of Higdon’s [Charles’], little boy from Mississippi, competing with her. The only way to compete with her was to get away—and start writing another novel. …Go away and write a great book! Poetry didn’t seem to be important to anyone, so there was no incentive to produce it. Everyone wrote prose. Prose, prose, prose. Joyce, Stein Hemingway.”
Tchelitchew gave Ford a going away party in an abandoned apartment house in Montparnasse, “an unoccupied building, four floors without electricity, on the rue Delambre…between the Dome and the Blvd Edgar-Quinet. The only expense would be the numerous candles, to illuminate the bare rooms on each floor (two large rooms to a floor.) … [and] jazz records from Victrolas…It would be word-of-mouth alert—and the word got around. One thousand guests, invited and uninvited, showed up…[including] Julien Levy, Lee Miller, and Kiki.”
Ford departed for Florence to join his Cuban friend in her villa, then went with her to Rome and Madrid, and finally, to Tangier, where he persuaded Barnes to join him. They resumed their affair, and he typed up her novel Nightwood, which portrayed her previous relationship with an American artist named Thelma Wood. Now discovering that she was pregnant, and refusing to say whether Ford or another lover was the father, Barnes broke off their relationship and returned to Paris.
In the meantime, Ford and Tyler’s novel, The Young and Evil, had been published in France, (banned in the U.S. and England) and the publisher sent him money that he used to go back to Paris himself. He telegrammed Gertrude Stein to see whether he could visit her and Alice B. Toklas along the way at their country house in Beligny, and she wired back, “Yes, if you are alone.” (She did not like Djuna Barnes.) Charles’ hair was as short as Stein’s, and one evening as she sat with her profile to him, writing in a notebook, he said, “You look handsome in that light.” “Yes,” she replied, “we are both very handsome.”
Arriving in Paris, Ford connected again with Tchelitchew, who put him up in a room nearby where Charles spent months writing the stream-of-consciousness novel, Life of a Child, about his Mississippi childhood, told from the point of view of a child going from six to ten.
Finally, he decided that the only way to pry Tchelitchew away from his sister and Allen Tanner was to leave him and return to the U.S. He felt sure that Tchelitchew would follow—he had already been offered a show at Julien Levy Gallery in New York. In fact, Pavel did follow him, and his painting of Charles as Huckleberry Finn wearing a straw hat was included in the show.
In 1940, Charles founded the art magazine View, designed and associate edited by Parker Tyler, “intended to replace, in America, the European vanguard publications that folded as World War II approached: transition and Minotaure of Paris, and the London Bulletin, the British surrealist journal for which Ford had been the American editor (and Tyler a New York correspondent.) *
View became one of the most significant American art magazines ever, with special issues devoted to Tchelitchew and Yves Tanguy, Duchamp, and Max Ernst, and 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 17 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.
Many thanks to Indra Tamang for making this material available.
For additional information, please contact Daniel Cooney Fine Art at
(505) 416-5452 or dan@danielcooneyfineart.com.