The king of kitsch?

A portrait of a Chinese woman, her features a glowing, lustrous turquoise, Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl (The Green Lady) might be taken, certainly on paper, for a piece of Surrealism. The painting became one of the best known, most controversial and widely reproduced of the 20th century. If this sounds like a case of Salvador Dalí-style visionary hyper-realism meeting Andy Warhol-flavoured mass market manipulation, there is slightly more to it. Tretchikoff’s ‘masterpiece’ achieved its infamy not because of its challenge to mainstream taste, but because the smoothly realistic rendering of the model’s features made it all too easily enjoyed by people who ‘don’t know much about art, but know what they like’.

Seen in reproduction in millions of suburban living rooms, Chinese Girl was seen as the epitome of petit-bourgeois, even proletarian, lack of taste. Its Russian-South African creator was the “king of kitsch”.

Nowadays, of course, such snobbish distinctions don’t mean a thing. Anything that challenges the aesthetic orthodoxies of ‘educated people’ is hailed as subversive, even radical. Tretchikoff’s near-hallucinatory images of African and Asian types might be seen as examples of exoticism and cultural appropriation, but at least he was painting ‘non-white people’ at a time when racism was endemic throughout Europe, North America and, particularly, the artist’s adopted South Africa. Bonhams sold Chinese Girl for nearly £1 million at auction in 2013. It would doubtless fetch far more today.

Now Bonhams is offering a haunting painting from Tretchikoff’s classic late 1940s/early 1950s period that was even closer to its creator’s heart. Another huge seller in reproduction, it was long believed lost.

It shows a fragile flower, discarded on a staircase, in eerily vivid detail. Two pearl-like droplets, which might be tears, are on the step below. All is bathed in an unearthly light. One of Tretchikoff’s most popular works from the moment it was first exhibited in 1949, Lost Orchid has been out of public view since its last sale in 1955.

An apparently similar painting emerged in 2009, raising hopes that Lost Orchid had been rediscovered, but crucial details revealed it was different work. Now, however, the original Lost Orchid is offered at auction for the first time in Bonhams’ Modern & Contemporary African Art sale in London. It highlights many contradictions in the life and art of its creator.

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Born in 1913 into a Russian landowning family in Petropavlovsk (in modern Kazakhstan), Tretchikoff grew up with a sense of disconnection from the Western mainstream that he was to turn to lucrative creative account. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, his family fled to an even more remote outpost: the Manchurian city of Harbin in the north-east of China, at that time an essentially Russian city, with an Orthodox Cathedral and a Russian opera house, where the young Tretchikoff worked as a scenery painter.

With no formal training, but evidently gifted and patently entrepreneurial, Tretchikoff spent his young adult years moving in a westerly direction around the South-east Asian periphery, picking up work as a designer, illustrator and painter – first in Shanghai.

Tretchikoff was in Singapore, working as a propaganda artist for the British Ministry of Information, when the Second World War broke out – there, in 1940, he married fellow Russian émigré Natalie Telpougoff. His wife and infant daughter were evacuated to South Africa, but the ship following, which carried Tretchikoff and other British government personnel, was hit by a Japanese torpedo.

He and other survivors spent 21 days on the open sea, before arriving, near starved, in Java, which was already under Japanese occupation. Tretchikoff was imprisoned and spent three months in solitary confinement after protesting his neutrality as a ‘Soviet citizen’. Eventually released, he was put on parole in Batavia (now Jakarta).

A few days into his new freedom, he spotted an orchid in the street. “Fresh dew drops shone on its leaves, and for me it was as if the flower wept,” he recalled many years later. Having lived in China he was alert to the symbolism of flowers. “The orchid represents life. People use it and throw it away, without thinking. That is why it is now abandoned, lost, crying.” In the ensuing painting, the flower is captured with a visionary verisimilitude, its petals opened out like some botanical specimen, but sitting right on the edge of a step, as though about to slip on to the one below, where the two teardrops shine like huge pearls.

A safety pin in its stem suggests the flower was a buttonhole, while further up the steps are discarded streamers, the detritus of some party or celebration. The narrative focus has shifted from the feelings of the flower, as described by Tretchikoff, to those of the wearer, who was clearly distressed by the occasion: was it the wedding of a former lover? Did he see the love of his life in the arms of another? And something about the discarded cigarette butt lying nearby suggests that our protagonist, like the painter himself, is a man. In the process of painting, the two tears have been transformed from the flower’s tears, as Tretchikoff first imagined them, into the man’s tears.

Shortly after completing the painting, Tretchikoff took delivery of a box of orchids, then exorbitantly expensive – ten times the cost of roses – but with no indication of the who sent them. For a few months, he received orchids twice a week – so many that they filled his house. Yet the florist who delivered them refused to give the name of the sender. Tretchikoff was at once mystified and profoundly touched. “Somebody evidently had faith in me,” he remembered. “And it grew to mean so much, when all around was desolation, poverty and suffering.”

He painted a fantasy portrait of his mysterious benefactor, whom he imagined – unsurprisingly – as a woman. Painted in a theatrical expressionistic style, Lady of the Orchids shows a beautiful, bare-breasted figure staring at a single orchid, surrounded by large red-tinged leaves that, under Tretchikoff’s fervent brush, feel erotically charged.

The model was Tretchikoff’s lover Leonora Schmidt-Salomonson, known as Lenka, a half-Indonesian, half-Dutch woman. In 1946, he was reunited with his wife and daughter in South Africa, where he painted the final and definitive version of Lost Orchid, bought by John Schlesinger, owner of the advertising agency where he worked.

Tretchikoff soon had little need of a day job, as his profile as a painter rocketed with successful exhibitions in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and an invitation – in 1952 – to create a touring exhibition in America.

He asked Schlesinger to lend the painting for the tour. Vast crowds – 57,000 in LA, 52,000 in San Francisco – turned out to see his paintings, with Lost Orchid one of the most discussed. Tretchikoff persuaded Schlesinger to sell the painting back to him, at three times the price Schlesinger had paid. Eventually, it was sold on to the Hollywood actor Mark Dawson. He was initially unable to afford the hefty asking price, but by the time Lost Orchid had spent another three years on a protracted world tour, Dawson had managed to save the required sum. The painting has remained with his family ever since.

A 1961 exhibition at Harrods in London saw more than 200,000 people turn out to see Chinese Girl (actually the daughter of a Cape Town laundry owner), Miss Wong (another ‘mysterious’ oriental beauty), Balinese Girl and Zulu Girl in all their blue and green-tinged glory. Tretchikoff was now, after Picasso, the second-richest artist in the world, but retained a chippy attitude towards critics. Most, he reckoned, were “failed artists”, while his “symbolic realism” was truly loved by real people.

By the late 1990s, taste was shifting. New generations of artists and viewers saw delicious irony in Tretchikoff’s ‘transgressive’ exoticism, which did not entirely please the artist himself. He died in 2006, bemused at the idea that there was anything ironic in his passionate people’s art.

Mark Hudson is the Art Critic of The Independent.