Vladimir Tretchikoff
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vladimir Tretchikoff (born 13 December 1913 in Petropavlovsk, 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 [1].
Contents |
[edit] Life and career
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 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 moved to Shanghai.
In Shanghai, Tretchikoff worked as a newspaper cartoonist, and met and married Natalie Telpregoff, a fellow Russian emigre. The couple moved to Singapore, where Tretchikoff opened an art school and worked for the Straits Times. In 1937 he was commissioned by IBM to represent Malaysia in an exhibition of international art.
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 1941, 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 Jakarta. 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 due to a book collecting his portraits of oriental women and pictures of flowers, and held successful exhibitions in Cape Town and Johannesburg. A tour of the USA followed, and a large exhibition in 1961 at Harrods in London.
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[2]. 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.
In 1973, Tretchikoff published Pigeon's Luck, an account of his wartime experiences.
He suffered a stroke in 2002 which left him unable to paint, and died on 26 August 2006 in Cape Town, his home since 1946.
The South African National Gallery never acquired an original Tretchikoff because they did not "really regard Tretchikoff as a South African artist".[3] Tretchikoff once said that the only difference between himself and Vincent Van Gogh was that Van Gogh had starved, while 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 [4].
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Art & Artists of South Africa, Esme Berman, ISBN 1868123456
- The Dictionary of South African Painters and Sculptors, Grania Oglivie, Published Everard, ISBN 0 620 12663 9
