Tretchikoff, Vladimir

▪ 2007

Vladimir Grigoryevich Trechikov 

      Russian-born South African artist (b. Dec. 13, 1913, Petropavlovsk, Siberia, Russia [now in Kazakhstan]—d. Aug. 26, 2006, Cape Town, S.Af.), was known as “the king of kitsch,” although his many fans compared his often garishly coloured art to Andy Warhol's. Tretchikoff, an enormously popular self-taught painter, claimed to have sold more reproductions than Pablo Picasso, particularly posters of “Chinese Girl” (1952), his best-known painting, which depicted an exotically dressed Asian woman with a pensive expression and bluish skin. Tretchikoff escaped with his family from Russia to Chinese Manchuria during the 1919 revolution and later worked as a cartoonist in Singapore. In 1941 the boat on which he was fleeing from Singapore sank, and Tretchikoff and the other survivors were forced to row for 21 days to Java, where they were interned by Japanese forces. He had his first art exhibition in South Africa in 1948.

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