TRETCHIKOFF (Signed by Artist)

Estimate

R2,500 - R3,000

Hammer

R2,500

TRETCHIKOFF (Signed by Artist)

More Information

Cape Town: George G. Harrap & Company Limited, C. 1969

Large hardcover fo, bound in grey cloth-boards with Tretchikoff’s printed signature in black on the front board with decorative golden dust-jacket. Unnumbered pages, 12pp of illustrated prelims, an introduction and 96pp of beautiful colour reproductions of the painter's work on gloss art paper. The black endpapers, double at the front with a deep-etched frontispiece photograph of the artist's head, and single-sided at the back.

Signed by the artist.

Vladimir Grigoryevich Tretchikoff (1913-2006) was an artist whose painting Chinese Girl, popularly known as The Green Lady, is one of the best-selling art prints of the twentieth century. Tretchikoff was a self-taught artist who painted realistic figures, portraits, still life, and animals, with subjects often inspired by his early life in China, Singapore and Indonesia, and later life in South Africa. While his work was immensely popular with the general public, it is often seen by art critics as the epitome of kitsch. He worked in oil, watercolour, ink, charcoal and pencil but is best known for those works turned into reproduction prints. According to his biographer Boris Gorelik, writing in Incredible Tretchikoff, the reproductions were so popular that it was rumoured that Tretchikoff was the world's richest artist after Picasso.