Vladimir Tretchikoff; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Lime green and lurid - the trademarks of an artist the
public loved and critics hated
Michael McNay
Wednesday August 30, 2006
Guardian
Vladimir Tretchikoff, who has died aged 92, once said that
the main difference between Van Gogh and him was that Van
Gogh starved whereas he had become rich. He was, it was
routinely remarked in profiles, the wealthiest artist in the
world after Picasso: rich beyond the dreams of avarice, with
fast cars, lavishly appointed homes, an admiring public, and
suites in the best hotels of the world when he travelled,
which was frequently, particularly for hugely popular
exhibitions in the US and Canada.
It can only be wondered at that he languished in second
place: prints of his Chinese Girl, with her blueish tinted
skin, scarlet lips and flaming orangey red background, must
surely have sold better than reproductions of Picasso's Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon? His Birth Of Venus, with a lime green
goddess, in what seems to be a lime green bathroom, and with
water streaming down lime green breasts sporting coronas of
livid red nipples, makes Botticelli's Venus seem merely
pallid. His Balinese Girl with a great swatch of green
turban, scarlet lips (a Tretchi trademark, this), brilliant
yellow bodice, and a turbulent background of lurid purple
and yellow is a Giaconda for our times. It must be simply
one of the best-known images in the history of the world.
The western world, that is. For though Tretchikoff's
experience as a young man was garnered in the East, the
faces and exotic costumes that served him for his art hardly
registered the facts of poverty and deprivation, hard-won
livings and desperate circumstances among the indigenous
populations: the natives, as they were then disparagingly
known among the empire-building nations. Tretchikoff's
sultry and glamorous orientals - and later, the noble
savages of Africa - are a myth, something he disarmingly
acknowledged.
"I don't do portraits," he said, explaining that portraits
were of real people, but his people, his women, were symbols
of womanhood summoned from the riches of his own imagination
and at most inspired by a model or a passing face in the
street.
And then there were to be bestselling flower pieces and a
painting of the British prima ballerina Alicia Markova in
Swan Lake which found a ready audience in a nation hungry
for culture after the war.
Tretchikoff's life was as romantic as his art, though the
story relies heavily on his own telling. By this account, he
was born in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, but the Russian
revolution broke out when he was five and his father and
mother with their eight children left their landed estates
and fled to Harbin in the Chinese part of Manchuria. As a
schoolboy there Tretchikoff helped out with scene painting
and became proficient enough by the age of 16 that he
received a commission from the Chinese-Eastern railway for
portraits of its executives.
On the proceeds he took himself off to Shanghai and became
cartoonist for the English language Shanghai Evening Post.
There he met Natalie Telpregoff, another Russian refugee
from the Communist regime, who at 17 was a year younger than
him. They married in 1935 and moved to Singapore, where
Tretchikoff pursued his career as a cartoonist with the
Straits Times.
By the late 30s, he was working as a propaganda cartoonist
for the British authorities in Singapore, an idyll abruptly
ended when the Japanese invaded in 1941. Natalie and their
daughter Mimi were evacuated, but the later boat on which
Tretchikoff escaped was torpedoed; the survivors rowed their
lifeboat for 21 days before making landfall in Java to find
the Japanese were already there. They were interned, with
Tretchikoff held in solitary confinement for three months
after asserting his rights as a Soviet national.
On release, his courage and charm in the face of adversity
caused the admiring conquerors to release him to resume
work. He made good use of his time, painting a collection of
oriental beauties, including Lenka, an exotic
half-Malaysian, half-Dutch woman who became his mistress.
After the defeat of Japan, he discovered through the Red
Cross that Nathalie and Mimi were living in South Africa,
found them, and went to Cape Town and had his first
exhibition there in 1948, then settled there for the rest of
his life.
He stood 5ft 3in in his socks and was pugnacious with it.
South Africans liked this quality in his character and, en
masse anyway, loved his art.
Even his greatest admirers, who not unreasonably included
himself, would not have called his paintings subtle. "If I
wanted to convey ideas through my paintings, why should I
obscure the subject?" he asked persuasively.
By 1948 Tretchikoff was already a huge success, financially
and in public acclaim, in South Africa and abroad. His
reproductions were usually to be found in the lingerie
section of department stores, but in 1961 Harrods cleared an
exhibition space for him, and his show pulled in more than
200,000 visitors.
In the new millennium, when he stopped painting after
suffering a stroke, his prints became retro-chic. The
sophisticates who bought his work quite often appeared to
think that a Tretchikoff and three flying ducks on the wall
above a coal-simulation fire encapsulated 50s taste. But
without a strong sense of irony, it was probably helpful to
be not too sensitive to colour.
Tretchikoff himself impatiently dismissed those critics who
voiced this sort of reservation. "They are all failed
artists anyway," he said. And about criticism as a practice
he was trenchantly to the point. "Bullshit," he said.
In the 90s he refused to allow one of his paintings to adorn
the cover of a book on kitsch. His work, he maintained, was
symbolic realism. But when he was asked who was the greatest
artist in the world, he answered "Winston Churchill" - so
perhaps he was endowed with a sense of irony after all.
Tretchikoff's wife and daughter survive him.
· Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff, artist, born December
13 1913; died August 26 2006