Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Pavel Tchelitchew is best known for his grotesque, anthropomorphic "tree" painting, Hide-and-Seek (Cache-Cache) (1940-42) in the Museum of Modern Art. For many years said to be MoMA's most popular work, it is an enigmatic image with a central tree form resembling a winking male face when viewed from a distance and disembodied children's heads, arms, legs, and feet floating around the periphery. Is it a "tree of life" or something more sinister?

Tchelitchew started to explore this theme in 1934 after drawing an old tree on the English estate of the Surrealist poet and patron Edward James. Over the years, a series of drawing show how the tree branches slowly began to morph into hands, the roots into feet, and the gnarled bark into human visages. Although this drawing doesn't appear to be a direct study for the painting, it reveals the process by which Tchelitchew transformed a real tree into "a signature of myself."