Tretchikoff - Self Portrait

About the artist:

Vladimir Grigoryevich Tretchikoff (Владимир Григорьевич Третчиков, 26 December [O.S. 13 December] 1913, Petropavlovsk, Russian Empire, now Petropavl in Kazakhstan– 26 August 2006, Cape Town, South Africa) 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 (indeed, he was nicknamed the "King of Kitsch"). He worked in oil, watercolour, ink, charcoal and pencil but is best known for those works turned into reproduction prints.

About this painting:

Laboured over for almost thirty years, Tretchikoff's Self-Portrait was the artist's most treasured work.

He produced several self-portraits over the course of his career – the earliest, a sanguine drawing, was the star lot of his first solo exhibition in Shanghai in 1934.

However, his obsession with this particular portrait was fuelled by a séance he attended in Jakarta. Prompted by Lenka, his Indonesian muse, Tretchikoff asked the spirit what his greatest artistic accomplishments would be. The upturned glass moved from letter to letter on a sheet of paper; the answer was that his most successful creations would be a self-portrait and an 'Oriental lady'.

The latter turned out to be Chinese Girl, which was sold in our saleroom for almost £1 million, the current world record for the artist.
Tretchikoff was inspired by the spirit's prediction and set to work on the self-portrait in 1944. He later described his vision for the painting in his memoir, Pigeon's Luck:

"The artist was concerned with colour, the whole spectrum of the palette, streaming and whirling through his mind before ever he puts brush to canvas. That was where it all began: not on the canvas, not on the palette, but in the mind. And it was with that idea I set to work on the self-portrait."

The painting is characterised by the thick application of pigment. Tretchikoff squirted the paints directly onto the canvas, creating a fantastical rainbow effect.

When the 'dean of Chinese-Indonesian painters', Lee Man Fong, visited Tretchikoff's studio, he saw the half-finished portrait and refused to believe that the artist's likeness could compete with the multi-hued backdrop. Tretchikoff bet Lee that when the painting was finished, he would notice the face before the whirlpool of colours. Needless to say, Lee Man Fong, lost the bet; he was enthralled by the intensity of the artist's gaze.
When Tretchikoff moved to Cape Town in 1946, the self-portrait travelled with him. It was one of three works the artist submitted to the South African Association of Arts.

Tretchikoff continued to work on the painting for the rest of his career, making subtle adjustments to the face until the late 1970s. The sum of his life's work, this self-portrait has been included in almost every exhibition on Tretchikoff since 1948.