S.Africa’s ‘king of kitsch’ Tretchikoff sells for new world record

JOHANNESBURG (AFP): Vladimir Tretchikoff’s iconic painting “Lady from the Orient” has sold for more than $1.7m in a new world record for the Russia-born South African painter, a Johannesburg auction house said Wednesday.

The 1955 portrait of a glamorous woman in a green and gold silk gown is among Tretchikoff’s most recognisable pieces, reproduced the world over on items such as tablecloths to handbags.

It sold to an anonymous telephone bidder late Tuesday for R31,892,000 (US$1,776,017), the Strauss & Co auction house said.

The final price, inclusive of commission and taxes, “comfortably eclipses” the previous world record for a Tretchikoff work of £982,050 for “Chinese Girl” (1952) sold in London in 2013, it said in a statement.

The painting of the daughter of a Cape Town grocer was a particular sensation in 1960s Britain and is among the most famous images produced by Tretchikoff, who moved to Cape Town in 1946 and died there in 2006.

“It was sold as a reproduction in London from 1962 and it was the second-highest selling print in Britain in 1962 and a massive seller in 1963, ’64, ’65,” senior art specialist at Strauss & Co, Alastair Meredith, told AFP ahead of the auction.

Tretchikoff, whose stylised work — including the famous “The Dying Swan” (1949) — led some to call him “the king of kitsch”, became wealthy through the reproductions and prints of his pieces.

“Tretchikoff essentially authorised huge numbers of prints of his own paintings to be sold at very cheap prices in department stores and stationery shops all around the world,” Meredith said.

“Lady from the Orient” is “part of South Africa’s cultural and visual makeup, part of our country’s aesthetic history. But it’s also a global icon,” he said.

Tretchikoff was born in what is now Kazakhstan, and was then Russia, in 1913. He fled with his family to China at the 1917 Russian revolution and grew up in Shanghai, before moving to Singapore and then South Africa.