Vladimir Tretchikoff; Telegraph obit (painter)

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Vladimir Tretchikoff

(Filed: 29/08/2006) Telegraph

http://en.easyart.com/art-prints/Vladimir-Tretchikoff-Chinese-Girl-103255.html

Vladimir Tretchikoff, the painter who has died aged
92, defied the canons of good taste to become one of the
best-selling artists of the 20th century.

Although his exotic, hyper-realistic paintings were
rarely seen on museum walls, they were found in suburban
living rooms, student digs and lingerie departments all over
the world.

His most famous work, The Green Girl (also known as
The Blue Lady and The Chinese Girl), is said to have been
more widely reproduced than the Mona Lisa. Ordinary people
loved it for its naturalism and beguiling mystery; art
critics scorned it as the epitome of postwar bad taste;
Tretchikoff regarded it as a work of genius.

Tretchikoff specialised in portraits; he worked in
oil, watercolour, ink, charcoal and pencil. The first series
of high-quality reproductions, by Frost and Read in London,
were sold to department stores, where they adorned the walls
of the lingerie sections.

After The Green Girl, his best known pictures include
Weeping Rose, Blue Monday and The Dying Swan, which features
the dancer Alicia Markova. Self-taught and a brilliant
businessman, Tretchikoff measured artistic success above all
in financial terms.

At his death he was reputed to have sold more
reproductions than any other artist in history and to have
made more money in his lifetime than any other artist bar
Picasso.

In the late 1990s his work was discovered by a new
generation of artists, who saw him as a precursor of their
own postmodern ironic style, much to his bemusement.

Although born in Russia, Tretchikoff spent more than
60 years of his life in South Africa, but he never gained
the recognition in South Africa or among art's elite that he
felt his international popularity demanded.

Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff was born into a
large, landowning family in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, on
December 13 1913, but fled with his family to Manchuria
during the Russian Revolution.

In his early teens he won a drawing competition which
led to a job as a cartoonist on the Shanghai Evening Post,
where he met and married Natalie Telpregoff. Later he
accepted the offer of a job with a large advertising agency
in Singapore. He was working on propaganda for the British
information department when the Japanese invaded Singapore
in 1941. Women and children were swiftly evacuated, Natalie
Tretchikoff and her infant daughter, Mimi, among them.
Tretchikoff himself was evacuated a week later, but his ship
was torpedoed by the Japanese. He was listed as "missing,
presumed dead", but he had managed to clamber aboard a
lifeboat.

For three weeks the survivors rowed the lifeboat,
trying to keep the coastline in sight. They suffered sunburn
by day and freezing temperatures at night. Half-starved and
exhausted, they made landfall on the coastline of Java -
only to discover that the Japanese had occupied the
territory. Along with others, Tretchikoff was imprisoned.

When he was eventually released, he befriended a young
Dutch artist who offered him the use of canvas, brushes and
paints. He quickly found his gift for portraiture, and
commissions followed, despite the deprivations of war.

During this period Tretchikoff met an exotic
half-Dutch, half-Malay woman called Lenka, whom he persuaded
to model for him and who became his lover. Their
relationship soured when Lenka became involved in
spiritualism, attending regular seances during which she
claimed to see images of Tretchikoff's wife and daughter.
Lenka persuaded him to seek the help of the Red Cross, which
established that Natalie and Mimi were alive and living in
Cape Town. With Lenka's encouragement, he sailed to South
Africa to be reunited with his family.

Once in South Africa, Tretchikoff wasted no time in
re-establishing his artistic career. In 1948 he held his
first exhibition in his adopted home city, Cape Town, which
attracted thousands of visitors.

Over the next two decades his reputation grew steadily
and, in 1968, his exhibition in a Durban department store
attracted 34,000 people, a third of the city's population,
in 11 days.

In 1961 he had put on a show in London, at Harrods,
which was seen by 205,000 visitors. Tretchikoff stayed in
touch with Lenka and invited her to attend an exhibition of
his work in London. She was delighted with his success as an
artist and visited him again in Cape Town some 30 years
later when both were in their eighties.

His critics maintained that Tretchikoff was the master
of "suburban kitsch", but some developed a grudging respect
simply for the sheer number of his sales. Late in his life
the prices of his originals began to soar. Tretchikoff
revelled in critical rejection. "I eat critics for
breakfast," he used to boast, dismissing them as envious,
"failed artists".

And the South African public loved his goading of the
art elite. He, in turn, loved the public's attention, which
he vigorously courted by driving a pink Cadillac and
claiming to be guided by a system of lucky numbers.

He felt that ordinary people reacted viscerally to his
paintings in a way that cerebral critics could not. "I have
found that people like to have colour in their lives," he
remarked, "especially women, whom I have known to be moved
to tears by colours alone."

In the late 1980s the critical tide began to turn in
Tretchikoff's favour. He was championed by postmodern
critics, who rejected the distinction between high and low
culture and between art and commerce. "Tretchi" became the
icon of a new generation of playful, ironic artists, who
introduced his work to a hip new audience.

Tretchikoff was surprised by this enthusiasm. He
considered his work neither ironic nor kitsch, being
convinced of its artistic seriousness.

At the close of the 20th century Tretchikoff had
broken all records for art sales and gallery attendance in
South Africa. But despite being the country's most famous
and widely collected artist, not a single national gallery
or museum had bought his work.

The snub was a perverse measure of Tretchikoff's
success. He had fulfilled his ambition to make art for
everyday life and not for art institutions; he had
established a brilliant rapport with the public and shown
that painting could be a successful career.

As the British fashion designer Wayne Hemmingway put
it, Tretchikoff had "achieved everything that Andy Warhol
stated he wanted to do but could never achieve because of
his coolness".

Tretchikoff was obliged to stop painting in 2002, when
he suffered a stroke which confined him to a retirement home
in Cape Town.

He died on August 26. Vladimir Tretchikoff's wife and
daughter survive him.