Tretchikoff, Vladimir

Tretchikoff, Vladimir (1913– ). Russian-born painter who settled in South Africa in 1946 and became a citizen of the country, one of the most financially successful but also one of the most critically reviled artists of the 20th century. He was born in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, the son of a wealthy landowner. After the 1917 Revolution the family fled to Harbin in north China, a city that was predominantly Russian-built and which became a major haven for Russian refugees. Tretchikoff was self-taught as an artist. He began his career working on scenery at Harbin's opera house, then after earning money as a portraitist he set out for Paris at the age of 16. However, he initially got no further than Shanghai, where he worked as a cartoonist for the American Evening Post. He then moved on to Singapore, where he became a cartoonist for the Straits Times before joining the British Ministry of Information as a propaganda artist after the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1942 he was evacuated shortly before Singapore fell to the Japanese; his ship was torpedoed and he spent three weeks in an open lifeboat before landing in Java. There he was imprisoned by the Japanese, but he was soon paroled and allowed to paint. His wife and child had meanwhile been safely evacuated to South Africa, and after the war Tretchikoff joined them there, settling in Cape Town, where he held a one-man exhibition (the first of many in his new country) in 1948. A review of this show in the Cape Times praised Tretchikoff's work as marking ‘a return to sound craftsmanship and the end of crazy obscurantism', and his paintings are meant to appeal to the man or woman in the street rather than the art enthusiast. Typically they feature romantic or sugary themes, melodramatic lighting, and slick brushwork—adding up to what a less complimentary reviewer described as ‘cheap sensation and lachrymose sentimentality'. His most famous work is The Chinese Girl (1952), depicting an Oriental beauty whom he described as ‘refined and demure, and with all the charm and infinite promise of the East'. He did many other works in a similar vein, with titles such as Balinese Girl and Miss Wong, and his other favourite subjects include African tribesmen and tribeswomen portrayed as the noble savage (Zulu Maiden), and flower pieces, generally consisting of a single bloom, accompanied by tear-like drops of water and with titles such as The Bleeding Lily, The Lost Orchid, and The Weeping Rose.

Tretchikoff's enormous popular success depended not only on his choice and treatment of subject, but also on his skilful marketing. As well as showing extensively in South Africa, he organized several tours of his work in Britain, Canada, and the USA between 1953 and 1973 (the peak period of his fame), exhibiting in major department stores rather than galleries. The paintings themselves were generally not for sale, but reproductions of them (see POPULAR PRINTS) sold in vast quantities. Attendance figures at the exhibitions were phenomenal: according to Tretchikoff's autobiography, Pigeon's Luck (1973), 205,000 people visited his show at Harrods in London during its four-week run in 1962, and in Winnipeg in 1965 a third of the city's population saw his show ‘in spite of snow storms'. Tretchikoff has been the subject of several books and documentary films, including one for the BBC. To most critics, however, his work is excruciatingly vulgar, and he has been dubbed the ‘King of Kitsch'.