Russian artist and theatre designer Pavel Tchelitchew was BOTD in 1898. Born in Dubrovka in the Russian Empire to an aristocratic landowning family, he grew up in luxury and was educated by private tutors, expressing an early interest in ballet and art. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, his family fled to the Ukraine, settling in Kiev where he studied painting at the Kiev Academy, becoming a disciple of the newly-popular Constructivist and Futurist movements. After graduation, he designed sets for theatre productions in Odessa and later in Berlin, where he formed a relationship with American pianist Allen Tanner. They moved together to Paris in 1923, befriending Gertrude Stein and becoming a regular at her and Alice B. Toklas‘ literary salons. Via Stein, he met and socialised with socialising with Jean Cocteau, Natalie Clifford Barney, Serge Lifar and Francis Cyril Rose, who included him in his group portrait of Stein’s circle, L’Ensemble. He also formed a close friendship with English aristocratic and writer Edith Sitwell, who fell in love with him, despite his being a rampant homosexual. Inspired by the Modernist and Surrealist painters, his work shifted towards a neo-Romantic style, incorporating multiple perspectives and elements of surrealism and fantasy. In 1929, ballet impressario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned him to design the sets for the ballet Ode, with choreography by Léonide Massine. In 1934, he left Tanner for the American writer and artist Charles Henri Ford, moving with him to New York City. They became one of the glamour couples of Manhattan’s artistic scene, joining a largely homosexual social circle including Carl Van Vechten, Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Parker Tyler, Charles Boultenhouse, Cecil Beaton, Salvador Dalí, and the art critic Lincoln Kirstein, who helped champion his work in the United States. He collaborated again with Massine on the 1938 ballet Nobilissima Visione, and with Jules Perrot on Ondine, ou La naïade. In the 1940s, he helped design the influential Surrealist magazine The View, edited by Ford and Tyler. He and Ford moved to Italy in 1952, settling in Rome, where he continued to paint. He remained with Ford until his death in 1957, aged 58. Know best known for his portraits of Stein and Sitwell, his work appears in the permanent collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.