Defending the king of kitsch
Marianne Fassler, who owns several Tretchikoff “original copies” and was appointed as one of the exhibition’s curators, said Iziko was astonished by the turnout (it attracted about 30 000 visitors). However, it still provoked huge criticism.
“It sparked all these old art critics to get this vitriol out of their system,” she said. “For Tretchikoff, that kind of thing was always like water off a duck’s back. His retort was always ‘I’m laughing all the way to the bank’, which was a phrase he coined himself.”
Fassler, who met Tretchikoff late in his life, said that technically his work was very intricate, that he started off with a black canvas and then built up the image. However, Fassler does not deny that Tretchikoff was not only gauche, but that he also produced a lot of bad art.
“There are really crap works, especially from later in his life when he got lazy, but, gee, he also produced some lovely, fabulous stuff. He became unfashionable, but because he was so-called kitsch, there was another whole new generation that rediscovered him, especially young artists.”
Fassler said that someone she knows almost made a bid for Chinese Girl but declined, haunted by the impending judgments of artistic refinement.
“He was really, really, really interested,” she said, “and I thought he was going to buy it, but I don’t think he had the guts in the end. He has the money to, but because of his art collections I just think he didn’t have the guts. He must have thought ‘What do I do?’ I told him to buy it because it’s the most famous painting in the world, and you can’t tell me it’s not a good painting; it’s a great painting.”
Someone who fervidly and very, very succinctly, crushes that suggestion is Marilyn Martin, senior scholar at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and former director of the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town (though clearly not in 2011 when Tretchikoff was exhibited).
A colleague of mine informed me that she refuses to discuss anything to do with Tretchikoff. I confirmed this by e-mailing Martin for comment on the man, to which she replied in blue text: “I am not prepared to comment on Tretchikoff. As we say in Afrikaans, ‘ benede kommentaar’ (beneath comment).”
Tretchikoff died in Cape Town in 2006, aged 92.