Scoff till you’re blue in the face ...
But countless delighted fans of Tretchikoff’s work will flock to see his ‘Chinese Girl’, which was unveiled at the Delaire Graff Estate in Stellenbosch on Friday, writes Oliver Roberts
LOOK, let’s not pretend — the art of Vladimir Tretchikoff is bloody awful. Some of it, anyway. Log on to his official website — go on, do it now — and marvel at the brazen tackiness.
Behold the Weeping Rose (a depiction of a rose that has fallen foul of its glass of water). “Another symbol of the sensitivity of flowers,” laments the explanatory text. “The tears of the rose have fallen in two distinct drops of melancholy at its estrangement from nature and its death in exile.”
Consider the Phantom Horse (a white horse galloping through a forest): “Symbolically portraying the transitoriness of life, the riderless phantom horse roams the plains of eternal darkness.”
And look at Journey’s End — an astonishingly tasteless portrayal of a couple of laceless boots, an old cigarette, a tram ticket, a broken pot, an empty bottle and a sensitive flower, all within trite proximity of a municipal dustbin. “The rich man (symbolised by the orchid) and the poor man (the old boots and tram ticket) must,” grapples the text, “at the end of life’s journey, meet death, the Great Leveller, and their material worth becomes victim to the fate of all discarded objects.”
It goes on. Naked girls covered in water droplets. That famous one of an orchid sobbing on some steps. Dying swans. Fighting zebras. It is all really quite gauche and prosaic.
But there are two things that redeem Tretchikoff from banishment into the artistic Siberia that artists such as Irma Stern thought he deserved. One: he knew people thought his stuff was kitsch, but he did not care and he devised clever ways of converting poor taste into vast riches. Two: as much as he painted a lot of horrific works, there are also a great number — specifically his portraits of Eastern women — that have an exotic, glowing, Gauguinesque quality to them.
The most famous of these — and reputedly the most copied image in the world, outdoing even the Mona bloody Lisa — is
Chinese Girl, which was purchased in March this year by British jeweller Laurence Graff for R13.9-million. Graff, who is worth about $2.3-billion (about R23-billion), has been named as one of the world’s top art collectors, so one hopes he knows a good painting when he sees one. In fact, Chinese Girl may be responsible for his prolific collecting of art.
“It was the first piece of art that made an impact on me,” he said, “and I believe it ignited my interest and passion for art. You can imagine my surprise to have learnt of the sale of the original painting and, of course, my decision to buy it was immediate.”
The painting, which Tretchikoff did in 1950 in Cape Town,
Vladimir Tretchikoff devised clever ways of converting poor taste into vast riches
was recently returned to South Africa and unveiled on Friday at the Delaire Graff Estate in Stellenbosch, where it will be on public display. Until now, the painting — which has appeared in many films and music videos — has spent most of its existence in a house in Chicago.
Christopher James Swift of the Tretchikoff Foundation, who is also the husband of the painter’s granddaughter, said: “When Tretchikoff went to the States in the early ’50s, he took
Chinese Girl with him, and a woman got all her pennies together to buy it. The daughter of that woman is the one who auctioned it. I heard a story that she actually saw a copy of her painting on TV and she said to herself ‘I’m sure I’ve got that painting’, and she went to check it out. She had no idea of its worth or its iconic status.”
Swift said that once Tretchikoff had settled in South Africa, the artistic establishment, including Stern and JH Pierneef, continually tried to undermine him. He joined the Association of Arts shortly after his arrival in 1946, believing that its gallery would the surest place for his first exhibition. However, two weeks after booking the gallery, Tretchikoff received a letter from the committee telling him that it had been decided that his paintings were inappropriate for display.
“This only made him more ruthless,” Swift said. “He became commercially successful and this was something that seemed to drive a bigger wedge between him and the other artists, because the more successful he was, the more they got to say ‘well, you’re a commercial artist; you’re not really an acclaimed artist’ — whatever that is. There was this kind of dismissive thinking that if you’re self-taught, you’re not really an artist. The same rationale was used to exclude many great African artists, because they didn’t come through the Wits School of Fine Arts or something like that.” Following the sale of Chinese
Girl in March and the resultant publicity, comparisons were made between Tretchikoff and the US musician Rodriguez, who was well known in South Africa in the ’ 70s and ’ 80s and only recently found fame in his home country. But, in many respects, it is a whimsical evaluation at best.
Rodriguez was pretty poor most of his life and continued to work in construction until the
Searching for Sugarman documentary changed things. Tretchikoff, though, was by the ’60s making huge amounts of cash through the sale of his art locally and overseas. Because most galleries rejected him, he exhibited in department stores (most famously at Harrods in 1961, when 205 000 people came) and had door-to-door salesmen selling his prints.
He amassed a total of 252 exhibitions worldwide, attracting about 2.3 million visitors.
In the late ’70s, he retired to a mansion in Bishopscourt (which he designed) and could afford to indulge in painting and sculp- ture without selling or exhibiting again.
One relevant comparison between Rodriguez and Tretchikoff might be that the latter is also experiencing a surge of recognition, thanks to the pub-
He received a letter from the committee telling him his paintings were inappropriate for display
licity from the sale of Chinese
Girl . It could also be that in our digital age, in which, thanks to the universal influences of the internet and how it continually invents accepted wisdom about good and bad taste, kitsch has become an elite hipster convention, making Tretchikoff more fashionable than ever.
In 2011, a Tretchikoff retrospective was held at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. This was after the last two Iziko gallery directors rejected any notion of exhibiting the man.