10 facts about the king of kitsch

Vladimir Tretchikoff is on everyone’s lips again since the sitter for The Chinese Girl has come to the fore. Coming up, the infamous Dying Swan will be going under the hammer at Strauss & Co on Monday 20 May. Here are 10 things you probably didn’t know about the king of kitsch.

• Tretchikoff rowed a lifeboat of survivors for 21 days after the ship he was on was bombed by Japanese troops neared Singapore in 1941. He had placed his family aboard another ship to South Africa and was en route to meet them.
• His first Johannesburg show was held at the Carlton Hotel in 1948.
• “At heart I am a bohemian but I prefer to live like a capitalist,” he famously said, as weel as: “I’d rather drive a Cadillac than ride a bicycle”.
• He said that the British prima ballerina, Alicia Markova, who sat for The Dying Swan in 1949, was his “most stimulating sitter”.
• Invited to the US for a tour in 1953, over 3-million Americans attended his exhibitions. In Seattle in 1960, a rival show that included Picasso and Rothko sold fewer tickets.
• Preferring to sell work in smart department stores rather than in galleries, in 1961 his exhibition at Harrods attracted 205 000 visitors. Leslie Rigall, a British collector, bought 10 paintings and reportedly designed his new house in Windsor Great Park around them.
• The South African National Gallery never acquired an original Tretchikoff because they did not “really regard Tretchikoff as a South African artist”.
• Prints of The Chinese Girl allegedly outsold those of the Mona Lisa.
• The Chinese Girl painting has been featured in various plays and television programmes: Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), the original set of Alfie, an episode of Doctor Who and, with a drawn moustache, in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
• The girl in the painting was 17-year-old Monika Sing-Lee, who was a single girl working in her uncle’s laundry in Cape Town. Their encounter happened in Sea Point, Cape Town, in the early 1950s. The success of the painting had no impact on her life.

Yes, love him or hate him, Tretchikoff was a legend and VISI proudly claims him as a South African! As Wayne Hemingway wrote in his book Just Above the Mantelpiece: “He achieved everything that Andy Warhol stated he wanted to do but could never achieve because of his coolness.”

The auction takes place on Monday 20 May at 3pm and at 8pm. There is a preview from Friday 17 to Sunday 19 May from 10am to 5pm.

The Wanderers Club, Ballroom, 21 North Street, Illovo, Johannesburg, 011 728 8246, www.straussart.co.za