Tretchikoff dies
Steve Hayes
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.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://people.tribe.net/hayesstw
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Moira de Swardt
"Steve Hayes" <haye...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> 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.
I've never been able to understand why his paintings are regarded as
being so kitch, unless it is the sheer volume of the prints of his
famous four or five sold. I attended one of his exhibitions in Cape
Town and I thought his stuff was lovely.
I wouldn't mind owning any of the originals, even, and maybe
especially, the famous ones. And that's not just because of their
monetary value, but because Tretchikoff was actually a good painter.
The beauty of those paintings is probably why so many people were
happy to buy the prints.
In fact, I'm considering buying a set of the prints to hang opposite
my three flying ducks. :-)
--
Moira de Swardt posting from Johannesburg, South Africa
Remove the dot in my address to find me at home.
Steve Hayes
>
>Vladimir Tretchikoff
Vladimir Tretchikoff
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