December 13, 1913 - August 26, 2006

VLADIMIR TRETCHIKOFF’S world-wide popularity made him a millionaire several times over, entirely on the strength of his work, but he found himself omitted from all the leading reference books on art. Such was the fate of an artist whose Chinese Girl print has adorned millions of walls, but it did not dent his self-confidence. “Art can reach the heart; but kitsch can make you rich” goes the couplet. Tretchikoff went one better: he declared himself a real and sincere artist, rejected the “kitsch” label and did even better out of this self-belief than any cynical self-exploitation could have achieved.

Untroubled by self-doubt, he was a survivor of two traumas — the Russian Revolution and the war in the Pacific. He worked hard at his art and had his own integrity, refusing portrait commissions and a request to add a photo-realist drop of water to a painting. Though he loved every minute of his success and adulation and the lifestyle it brought, he was modest enough to say: “if the critics are surprised at my success, so am I”. Asked whom he regarded as the greatest painter alive, he answered at the time “Winston Churchill” because they both painted for sheer love of painting. Though touchy, excitable, naive and prone to fantasy and superstition, he was a great salesman for his own work; and the Chinese Girl sold in millions.

Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff was born in 1913 in Petropavlovsk, the Siberian industrial city on the River Ischim, the youngest of six boys in a family of eight. His father owned many estates, and Tretchikoff was five when the Russian Revolution overtook Siberia and the family fled, abandoning their wealth, to Herbin, a Russian town in Northern China. There was a Russian opera house in this outpost, however, and Vladimir graduated from mixing paint to assisting with the broad artistic effects of scenic design, earning enough to keep himself at school at the Manchurian College until the age of 16.

In 1929, when Tretchikoff was 15, the management of the Chinese-Eastern railway asked him for portraits of its worthies for its council chamber; the payment for this went on a ticket for Shanghai — “the Paris of the East” — where he became a cartoonist for the American-owned Shanghai Evening Post. There he met, when he was 18, another refugee from the revolution, Natalie Telpregoff, who was 17; after a few years they moved on to Singapore, where Tretchikoff worked for the Straits Times and started a small art school.

International recognition first came in 1937, when the American head of IBM, Thomas Watson, with an eye to the coming New York World Fair, was commissioning a collection of art from 79 countries around the world; Tretchikoff represented Malaya with a painting, The Last Divers. On the outbreak of war in the Pacific, in 1940, Tretchikoff became, through his Straits Times work, a British Ministry of Information propaganda artist boosting local morale with caricatures of the Governor, generals, admirals, air-marshals, and the rather resented special envoy from Britain, Duff Cooper.

As the Japanese threat neared Singapore in 1941, plans were made to evacuate the local ministry staff to South Africa initially via India, on the armed coaster Giang Bee while wives and children were evacuated separately. On Friday, February 13, the ship, on which Tretchikoff was acting as volunteer stoker, was bombed by the Japanese. The 42 survivors rowed in lifeboats for two days and two nights to Sumatra only to find that the Japanese had just preceded them there. After discussion, 17 of them set off again on a journey of 500 miles to Java. This involved 19 days of rowing against many varying currents. Arriving eventually at landfall in Java, they were once again to find that the Japanese had preceded them. In prison camp, Tretchikoff’s loud complaints that as a Soviet citizen he was entitled to freedom landed him in solitary confinement for three months. However, he was later released on parole to Batavia, where he discovered a Javanese ballet troupe which he could work with and restore himself to favour.

When the war in the East ended, news of his wife and child came through and he was reunited with them in South Africa, settling in Cape Town. Within two years Tretchikoff, who had spent much of his time in Batavia painting portraits of Oriental women, was invited to compile an illustrated book of his figure studies and flower pieces (his other speciality). This brought considerable interest and fame, with crowds of 61,000 in Cape Town and 30,000 in Johannesburg coming to see his work. His renown spread to North America, where the Rosicrucians of San Jose in California invited him to launch an American tour. Some 19,000 people visited his show in Los Angeles and 51,000 in San Francisco. In Seattle, a rival show including Picasso and Rothko failed to draw visitors away to Tretchikoff’s satisfaction. A million Americans finally saw his paintings, which then went on to Canada with equal success; collectors began to compete for the original oils, while a massive sale of prints began to build up.

In 1961 Tretchikoff turned down the offer of a London exhibition in the Harrods art gallery because he thought the space too small for a fair representation of his work. He asked for the ground-floor exhibition space and 205,000 people visited the exhibition. One of his British collectors, Leslie Rigall, bought ten paintings and designed his new house in Windsor Great Park around them. A further accolade of a sort was Tretchikoff’s discovery in 1970 of a forgery of his Fighting Cocks about to be auctioned at Christie’s.

Tretchikoff’s best-known image must surely be his Chinese Girl, with bluish face and bright red lips, which was adapted from studies of the daughter of a San Francisco merchant. His oriental and mixed-race figures include Miss Wong and Balinese Girl.

Among the more symbolic or sentimental subjects are Lost Orchid, lying discarded on the ground, symbolising a wasted life weeping for itself; the spilt water or dewdrops beside the fallen rose and its vase in Weeping Rose; Blue Monday, with the singer Françoise Hardy behind a rain-spattered window symbolising, as the artist puts it, “the rainy day in every girl’s life”; and Journey’s End, spelt out with dustbin, empty bottle, worn-out boots, rich man’s orchid and poor man’s tram ticket. All these were best-sellers, as was Birth of Venus (copied in 1970 in Carnaby Street but suppressed by the artist), and the two studies of the dancer Alicia Markova in The Dying Swan — Tretchikoff called her his most stimulating sitter.

Aesthetic judgment on Tretchikoff should take into account that had he not fled the revolution, he would probably have become a run-of-the-mill Socialist Realist provider of heroic populist posters and a distinguished Russian Academician oblivious of Russian modernism before and after the revolution. The trajectory of his career, taking him through the most multi-racial and cosmopolitan areas of the world in the Orient to, paradoxically, freedom in a rigidly racist country, set Tretchikoff the aim of blending Western tonal painting with the stylised simplicities of Oriental line enclosing unmodulated bright colour — a blend that art critics did not take kindly to. Pressed to define his art, he settled for “symbolic realism”.

Tretchikoff took to making some sculpture in later life, using precious metals and semi-precious stones. In 1973 he published, with the aid of Anthony Hocking, an account, Pigeon’s Luck, of his wartime and subsequent adventures. In 1991 he refused permission for the reproduction of one of his paintings on the cover of a book on “kitsch”; asserting once again that he was a serious artist.

His multiracial background put this extrovert character beyond political interests in South Africa; his proud Xhosa, Ndebele and Zulu men and women in traditional finery, friendly children, and Cape Town herb-sellers, proved, at first, acceptable sanitised images for South African walls. But in 1959, an innocuous Black and White, a face divided in half vertically into white girl and black girl, was taken by some critics as a covert political gesture against apartheid. Tretchikoff became a figure of controversy.

His simple-minded art, all a mixture of Russian populism, symbolism, exotic colour, and slight influences from most art movements of the last 100 years went down well with people all over the world. Contemporary art critics, with their jibes of “art for those who hate art”, and “token art”, allow no space between “kitsch” (worthless pretentiousness), and “academic realism”, for an art that wins popular appeal. Tretchikoff’s public faded away to an extent in later years; but he may yet re-appear in the auction houses.

He stopped painting in 2002 after suffering a stroke. He married Natalie Telpregoff in 1935. They had a daughter.

Vladimir Tretchikoff, artist, was born on December 13, 1913. He died on August 26, 2006, aged 92.