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 traveled, 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 Tretchikoff 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.
PHOTO: AP
“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 best-selling 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 1930s, 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 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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