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 1.6m 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.
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 1950s taste. But without a strong sense of irony, it was probably helpful to be not too sensitive to color.
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 1990s 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.
Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff, was born Dec. 13, 1913, and died on Aug. 26.
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