Literature

Andrew Lamprecht (ed) (2011) Tretchikoff: The People's Painter, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, illustrated in colour on page 80.

Boris Gorelik (2013) Incredible Tretchikoff, Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, illustrated in colour.

Wayne Hemingway (2000) Just Above the Mantelpiece: Mass-Market Masterpieces, London: Booth-Clibborn, illustrated on page 25.

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist by Mr Jim Keele, Nassau, and thence by descent.

Notes

A prolific artist during his lifetime, Vladimir Tretchikoff's global fame rests on a small group of instantly recognisable images produced in the decade after he settled in South Africa in 1946. His most iconic output includes a quartet of sultry, exoticised portraits that fuse his Eastern influences - from formative years in Shanghai, Singapore and Java - with a flair for theatrical colour, stylised feminine beauty and an unmistakable pop sensibility. Kicked off by his portrait of British prima ballerina Alicia Markova (The Dying Swan, 1949), the series includes Chinese Girl (1952), featuring Cape Town resident Monika Pon-su-san (née Sing-Lee), and two works starring Valerie Howe, posed introspectively, eyes askance, wearing the same emerald-green gown with gold detailing: Miss Wong (1953) and the present lot, Lady of the Orient (1955).

Details of how Tretchikoff met Howe, the daughter of a Cape Town grocer, remain sketchy. Whatever the circumstances, her decision at 21 to pose for the artist - gratis - proved a coup for Tretchikoff's long-term popularity.¹ Following a buzzy 1949 exhibition in Durban, he recognised the commercial goldmine in reproducing his works as prints. It was a shrewd move that launched his imagery beyond the polished walls of early collectors' homes, among them magnate John S. Schlesinger, and into the living rooms of the post-war public. In Britain, Miss Wong was the sixth best-selling print of 1960. Lady of the Orient did even better, coming in second in a 1962 poll.² Copies of his 1969 book, co-published with local impresario Howard Timmins, included an eleven-colour lithograph of Lady of the Orient.

Tretchikoff's prints of eastern women were huge successes, unlike his contemporaneous works depicting Zulu women. Why? In part, they lacked the mystique that 'oriental' women held in the Western popular imagination. Both portraits of Howe channelled the glamour of Hollywood's Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American movie star to achieve international acclaim.³ The title Lady of the Orient itself nods to two interwar films of the same name. But in showing Howe in a quiet, self-contained pose, eyes downcast, Tretchikoff was also riffing on older painterly traditions.

In a 1974 BBC documentary about the artist, Success Story, British art critic William Feaver linked Tretchikoff to the romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelites. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who also revered youthful beauty, Tretchikoff sought to portray 'the ideal woman' stripped of flaw or fault, a perfected vision offered as an icon of worship: 'a spiritual pin-up.'⁴ Decades later, his technicolor muse still holds the gaze, proof that mass appeal and artistic ambition are not mutually exclusive, but often powerfully entwined.

¹ Boris Gorelik (2013) Incredible Tretchikoff: Life of an Artist and Adventurer, London, Art/Books, page 157.
² Ibid, page 160.
³ Ibid, page 161.
⁴ Ibid, page 161.