Vladimir Tretchikoff
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Vladimir Tretchikoff (Владимир Григорьевич Третчиков) (born 13
December 1913 in Petropavlovsk, Russia, now in Kazakhstan; died 26
August 2006 in Cape Town, South Africa) was one of the most commercially
successful artists of all time - his painting Chinese Girl (popularly
known as "The Green Lady") is one of the best selling art prints ever.
Tretchikoff was a self-taught artist who painted realistic figures,
portraits, still life and animals, with subjects often inspired by his
early life in China and Malaysia, and later life in South Africa.
Tretchikoff's work was immensely popular with the general public, but is
often seen by art critics as the epitome of kitsch (indeed, he was
nicknamed the "King of Kitsch"). He worked in oil, watercolour, ink,
charcoal and pencil but is best known for his reproduction prints which
sold worldwide in huge numbers. The reproductions were so popular that
it was said Tretchikoff was second only to Picasso in his popularity.
Vladimir Grigorievich Tretchikoff was the youngest of eight children
in a wealthy family in Petropavlovsk, an industrial city in Siberia.
Upon the Russian Revolution in 1917, the family abandoned their property
and fled to Harbin, a city in China with a large Russian presence.
Tretchikoff worked as a scene painter at the city's Russian opera house,
and studied at the Manchurian College until the age of 16. A year
previously, he was commissioned to paint portraits for the boardroom of
the Chinese-Eastern Railway, and with the money from this commission he
joined the community of Shanghai Russians.
In Shanghai, Tretchikoff worked as a newspaper cartoonist for the
American owned Shanghai Evening Post, and met and married Natalie
Teplougoff, a fellow Russian emigré. The couple moved to Singapore,
where Tretchikoff opened an art school and worked for the Straits Times.
International recognition came in 1937 when he was commissioned by the
head of IBM, Thomas Watson, to represent Malaya in an exhibition of
international art for which he produced the painting The Last Divers.
When the Second World War spread to the Pacific in 1940, Tretchikoff
became a propaganda artist working for the British Ministry of
Information. In February 1942, Tretchikoff was on board a ship
evacuating ministry personnel to South Africa. The ship was bombed by
the Japanese, and the 42 survivors rowed first to Sumatra, which they
found was already occupied by the Japanese Army. They then rowed to
Java, which took 19 days, only to find that it too was occupied.
Tretchikoff spent the rest of the war in a Japanese prison camp (where
he spent three months in solitary confinement for protesting that as a
Russian citizen he ought not to be imprisoned), and then on parole in
Batavia, (now Jakarta), where he worked with a Javanese dance troupe.
Here he met Leonora Schmidt-Salomonson (Lenka) who became his lover and
one of his most famous models.
In 1946 he was reunited with his wife and their daughter Mimi in
South Africa (they had been successfully evacuated on an earlier boat).
He quickly became famous in South Africa thanks to a book that collected
his portraits of Oriental women and pictures of flowers, and held
successful exhibitions in Cape Town and Johannesburg. His fame spread to
the United States, where the Rosicrucians of San Jose invited him to
launch an American tour. Around 19,000 people saw his show in Los
Angeles and 51,000 in San Francisco. In Seattle, a rival show which
included Picasso and Rothko sold fewer tickets to Tretchikoff’s
satisfaction. A million Americans finally saw his paintings, which then
went on to Canada with equal success. This was followed by a large
exhibition in 1961 at Harrods in London where he decided that the
Harrod's art gallery was too small. He requested and was granted the
privilege of having his exhibition in the ground-floor exhibition space.
205,000 people attended the exhibition and one of his British admirers,
Leslie Rigall, bought ten paintings and designed his new house in
Windsor Great Park around them.
His famous Chinese Girl, a 1950 painting featuring an Eastern model
with blue-green skin, is one of the best selling prints of all time.
Prints of the painting became widespread during the 1960s and 1970s, and
the painting was featured in various plays and television programmes:
the original set of Alfie, with a drawn moustache in one episode of
Monty Python's Flying Circus and an episode of Doctor Who. Other popular
paintings of oriental figures were Miss Wong and Balinese Girl. He said
of British prima ballerina assoluta, Alicia Markova, who sat for The
Dying Swan, that she was his most stimulating sitter.
Neck and Neck, Tretchikoff's depiction of a horse race, which hangs in
the National Horseracing Authority in Turffontein, Johannesburg.In 1973
Tretchikoff published Pigeon's Luck, an account of his wartime
experiences.
He suffered a stroke in 2002 that left him unable to paint, and died
on 26 August 2006 in Cape Town, his home since 1946. He is survived by
his wife and daughter, four granddaughters and five great-grandchildren.
The South African National Gallery never acquired an original
Tretchikoff because they did not "really regard Tretchikoff as a South
African artist". Tretchikoff once said that the only difference between
himself and Vincent Van Gogh was that Van Gogh had starved whereas he
had become rich.
TV personality Uri Geller is a big Tretchikoff fan, as is designer
Wayne Hemingway, who has compared him to Andy Warhol.
