Vladimir Tretchikoff, 92, Popular Painter, Dies

From the NEW YORK TIMES
JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 5 — Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff, an exile from Siberia whose emotional depictions of wilting flowers, dancers and especially the daughter of a San Francisco Chinese merchant earned both global popularity and critics’ scorn, died in Cape Town on Aug. 26. He was 92.

One of Vladimir Tretchikoff's most popular works is “Chinese Girl,” (1952).
His daughter, Mimi Mercorio, announced his death. He had been in a Cape Town nursing home, in poor health, since a stroke in 2002.

A self-taught artist who roamed from China to Singapore to South Africa, who once rowed the Pacific for 21 days and who was interned in a wartime Japanese prison camp, Mr. Tretchikoff led a life as colorful as the vibrant blues and reds of his works. He possessed unwavering self-confidence, and it served him well. Arriving in Cape Town penniless at the end of World War II, he built a fortune painting and marketing art that was both technically superb and aimed with dead accuracy at the hearts of the middle class.

Art experts dismissed it, and both Mr. Tretchikoff and his family never forgave them.

“They called it kitsch,” his daughter said in a telephone interview from Cape Town. “It devastated him, and we feel the same way. A lot of people over the world have bought his paintings, and if the people love him, there must be something. Never mind what the art critics have to say.”

If sales are a yardstick, then Mr. Tretchikoff was a Leonardo, and his most popular painting was, as Ms. Mercorio often says, his Mona Lisa. The 1952 painting, variously called “Chinese Girl” and “Blue Lady,” depicts a heavy-lidded young woman clad in a yellow gown, with neon-red lips and a face washed in blue. Published but unverified reports estimate that at least a half-million prints of the portrait have been sold, and many reports rate Mr. Tretchikoff among the world’s best-selling artists.

In his adopted home, South Africa, as elsewhere, however, no museums of note display his works.

In a telephone interview, Christopher Till, the longtime director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, who is a major South African cultural figure and now heads the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, recalled visiting Mr. Tretchikoff in Cape Town at the behest of a collector who was urging the gallery to buy his works.

“He was delightful and charming, but I was surrounded by these sweet, sugary paintings,” he said. “His technique was very accomplished, but technique doesn’t necessarily describe the quality of an artist.” In the end, he said, he left empty-handed.

Lately, however, Mr. Tretchikoff’s work has enjoyed a small revival, among both fans of realism and aficionados of so-called retro art. He was sometimes out of favor in apartheid South Africa, where his popular portrait of a half-black, half-white girl was seen as a political statement against racial separation.

Mr. Tretchikoff painted hundreds of portraits of people of all races, as well as still lifes, mostly of flowers. All were in a not-quite-photorealistic style, saturated with vivid colors, that he called symbolic realism.

The first fine prints were sold in the lingerie sections of London department stores. Countless thousands of sales followed — he personally greeted long lines of dry-goods shoppers in South Africa, autographing his prints as he collected payment — and they are still sold in volume today on Internet art sites.

Mr. Tretchikoff was born in December 1913 in Petropavlovsk, a Siberian town now in northern Kazakhstan. His wealthy family fled to northern China after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He supplemented the family income by helping paint scenery for a Russian opera house in Harbin. Orphaned at 11, at 15 he went to Shanghai to paint portraits of the executives of a Chinese railway.

There he met and married Natalie Telpregoff, another Russian exile. She survives him, along with Ms. Mercorio, four granddaughters and five great-grandchildren.

The couple moved to Singapore, where he opened an art school, worked at The Straits Times newspaper, designed gowns and jewelry and, as World War II loomed, illustrated propaganda for the British Ministry of Information. He had art exhibitions in Singapore and won a 1939 medal from the New York Gallery of Science and Art.

As Japanese troops neared Singapore in 1941, Mr. Tretchikoff placed his family aboard a ship to South Africa and set off separately to meet them. But Japanese bombs sank his ship, and he rowed a lifeboat with other survivors for 21 days, first to Sumatra and then to Java, where he was captured and put in a Japanese prison camp.

Because of his propaganda work, the Japanese at first thought he was a spy, Ms. Mercorio said. But he was eventually paroled to Batavia (now Jakarta), where he painted portraits of Asian women. When the war ended, he went to Cape Town “with nothing but these canvases rolled up under his arm,” Ms. Mercorio said, adding, “And he never looked back.”

Mr. Tretchikoff’s prison paintings were his salvation. Published with still lifes of flowers in a book in the late 1940’s, they made him a sensation in South Africa and drew an invitation to the United States, where his Seattle exhibition rivaled another, which featured Picasso and Rothko. He also drew thousands to personal appearances in Los Angeles and San Francisco while on a tour sponsored by the Rosicrucians.

Earlier, in South Africa, he had painted a portrait of a Chinese woman seen through a blue filter, but the painting was slashed by vandals who broke into his studio. In San Francisco, Mr. Tretchikoff saw a daughter of a Chinese shop owner and reproduced his original, using the woman as a model.

His daughter said that a Chicago woman later fell in love with the painting at an exhibition and persuaded Mr. Tretchikoff to sell it to her. Neither she nor the work has been heard from since.

“I’d dearly love to have the painting today,” Ms. Mercorio said. “I wonder if she still has it.”

Yep, we've got that info here