Vladimir Tretchikoff

You see copies of his paintings everywhere in South Africa. Prints hanging on the walls in homes and restaurants, images on cushions and coasters in shops, and exotic women reproduced in jewelry and fashion. I even own a pair of earrings bearing one of his images. Vladimir Tretchikoff.

I had to find out what the connection was between this well-known Russian artist and South Africa. So I googled him. Here are some excerpts from the write-up in Wikipedia:

"Vladimir Grigoryevich Tretchikoff (Владимир Григорьевич Трeтчиков, 26 December [O.S. 13 December] 1913, Petropavlovsk, Russian Empire, now Petropavl in Kazakhstan – 26 August 2006, Cape Town, South Africa) was one of the most commercially successful artists of all time - his painting "Chinese Girl" (popularly known as "The Green Lady") is one of the best selling art prints of the twentieth century. 

Tretchikoff's "Xhosa Warrior" @ Valley Lodge

Tretchikoff was a self-taught artist who painted realistic figures, portraits, still life and animals, with subjects often inspired by his early life in China, Singapore and Indonesia, and later life in South Africa. His work was immensely popular with the general public, but is often seen by art critics as the epitome of kitsch (indeed, he was nicknamed the "King of Kitsch"). He worked in oil, watercolour, ink, charcoal and pencil but is best known for his reproduction prints which sold worldwide in huge numbers. According to his biographer Boris Gorelik, writing in Incredible Tretchikoff, the reproductions were so popular that it was rumoured that Tretchikoff was the world's richest artist after Picasso.

(Interestingly to me), international recognition came in 1937 when he was commissioned by the head of IBM, Thomas Watson, to represent Malaya in an exhibition of international art for which he produced the painting "The Last Divers."

When the Second World War spread to the Pacific in 1940, Tretchikoff became a propaganda artist working for the British Ministry of Information. In February 1942, Tretchikoff was on board a ship evacuating ministry personnel to South Africa. The ship was bombed by the Japanese, and the 42 survivors rowed first to Sumatra, which they found was already occupied by the Japanese Army. They then rowed to Java, which took 19 days, only to find that it too was occupied. Tretchikoff was imprisoned in Serang (where he spent three months in solitary confinement for protesting that as a Russian citizen he ought to be set free), and then was released and spent the rest of the war on parole in Batavia, (now Jakarta), where he worked under supervision of a Japanese artist. Here he met Leonora Schmidt-Salomonson (Lenka) who became his lover and one of his most famous models.

"Ndebele Girl" by Vladimir Tretchikoff

In 1946 he was reunited with his wife and their daughter Mimi in South Africa (they had been successfully evacuated on an earlier boat). He quickly became famous in South Africa thanks to a book that collected his portraits of Asian women and pictures of flowers, and held successful exhibitions in Cape Town and Johannesburg. His fame spread to the United States, where the Rosicrucians of San Jose invited him to launch an American tour. Around 57,000 people saw his show in Los Angeles and 52,000 in San Francisco. In Seattle, a rival show which included Picasso and Rothko was far less attended, to Tretchikoff’s satisfaction. Then he took his show to Canada, where he had an even bigger success. This was followed by a large exhibition in 1962 at Harrods in London where he decided that the Harrods art gallery was too small to accommodate the crowds. He requested and was granted the privilege of having his exhibition in the ground-floor exhibition space. He had more than 205,000 visitors to this exhibition. One of his British admirers, Leslie Rigall, bought a dozen of paintings and designed his new house in Windsor Great Park around them.

"Chinese Girl" by Vladimir Tretchikoff

His famous "Chinese Girl", a 1950 painting featuring Eastern model, Monika Pon-su-san, with blue-green skin, is one of the best selling prints of the twentieth century. Prints of the painting became widespread during the 1950s and 1960s, and the painting was featured in various plays and television programmes: Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), the original set of Alfie, with a drawn moustache in one episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus and an episode of Doctor Who. Other popular paintings of oriental figures were "Miss Wong," "Lady from Orient" and "Balinese Girl." He said of British prima ballerina assoluta, Alicia Markova, who sat for "The Dying Swan," that she was his most stimulating sitter.

Interest in his artworks underwent a resurgence in the late 1990s as part of a revival of 1950s and 1960s retro decor. In 1998 Sotheby's of Johannesburg sold an oil-on-canvas still life for $1800, double what they expected. In 1999 "Zulu Maiden" was expected to fetch $1800 but went for $10,000. In October 2002 another original fetched $18,000 and in May 2008, "Fruits of Bali" fetched $480,000 at Stephan Welz & Co in Cape Town. 

"The Dying Swan"

"Chinese Girl" was purchased at auction in 2013 by the Delaire Graff wine estate in Stellenbosch and is hanging in the art gallery there. The sale stands as the most money ever paid for a Tretchikoff painting -  nearly £1,000,000 at Bonhams, London. (The previous record was "Red Jacket," which fetched £337,250 in October 2012, also at Bonhams.)

my "Chinese Girl" earrings

He suffered a stroke in 2002 that left him unable to paint, and died on 26 August 2006 in Cape Town, his home since 1946. The South African National Gallery never acquired an original Tretchikoff because they did not "really regard Tretchikoff as a South African artist". In Esme Berman’s definitive book on ”Art and Artists of Southern Africa” he is dismissed in little more than two lines, under the heading ”popular artists.” Tretchikoff once said that the only difference between himself and Vincent van Gogh was that Van Gogh had starved whereas he had become rich.

Soon after his death the Tretchikoff Trust was established. The Trusts hosts workshops for teenagers throughout South Africa. The Trust is based on Tretchikoff's life motto "Express your passion, do whatever you love, take action, no matter what". 

The South African National Gallery in Cape Town

In 2011, the first Tretchikoff retrospective was held at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Curated by Andrew Lamprecht, it proved to be one of the most successful shows in the gallery's history."

Now I know.