The cult of Tretchikoff

A unique and fascinating art auction is in the offing in Joburg this month.

The country’s premier fine art auction house, Strauss & Co, will not only bring some outstanding and little-seen works from one of our foremost black modernist artists, Gerard Sekoto, to auction, but will headline their flagship sale with Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Lady from the Orient, estimated at R5m to R7m.

Tretchikoff’s global fame rests on a small group of instantly recognisable images produced in the decade after he settled in SA 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.

Turned into a print, Lady from the Orient was one of the UK’s best-selling artwork in the 1960s. The other works, too, are instantly recognisable as best-selling prints, hanging on the walls of many working- and middle-class British households in particular.

They include his portrait of British prima ballerina Alicia Markova (The Dying Swan, 1949), 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 headlining work on the upcoming auction, Lady of the Orient (1955).

Tretchikoff’s commercial nous and pop sensibility in these works has for a long time been synonymous with kitsch and has been regarded as problematic in respect of the way the images exoticise their subjects.

The carefree Orientalism Tretchikoff embodies in these works is understood now as a kind of populist “othering” of its non-Western subjects — not only oriental, but exoticized and idealised women too. In more recent years his work has been rehabilitated somewhat by art history, with an incredibly popular exhibition staged in 2011 by UCT academic Andrew Lamprecht at the National Museum, with an accompanying book-length catalogue.  

Tretchikoof began releasing prints of his most famous works in the 1950s, after a hugely successful exhibition in Durban. Miss Wong was the sixth best-selling print of 1960. Lady of the Orient did even better, coming in second in a 1962 poll. The painting, done in 1955, plays on the Eastern exoticism and Hollywood glamour that Tretchikoff cannily exploited as his subject matter, to great acclaim and commercial success.

The current work on auction has an impeccable provenance, traceable directly to the artist, which will be of interest to his loyal and international collector base.

This shift from the perception of kitsch populism to serious art historical consideration has happened due to scholarly and museum reappraisal of his work over the past two decades, to the extent that his original painting of Balinese Girl, also from his classic period, sold at Strauss in 2024 for R5.6m. Another unique Tretchi curiosity will also feature on the sale, a depiction of a rugby match. Springboks v Wales will go on auction estimated at R300,000 to R400,000.

Lady from the Orient will be exhibited at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair (May 23-25), prior to the auction sale on May 27. While the unique and rehabilitated Tretchikoff work will lead the sale, there are a range of other works of interest on offer for collectors. Gerard Sekoto’s The Mother on the Road (estimate R2m to R3m, painted circa 1945–47, is an important early work by one of our most revered Black Modernist artists, painted before he went into voluntary exile in 1947.

The work was previously exhibited in Sekoto’s landmark 1989 retrospective at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The sale also has a significant Irma Stern still life on offer, Still Life with Lemons, estimated at R2 to R3 million, dated 1954. Stern has a solo exhibition in Berlin in July of this year, at the Brücke Museum.

The sale also includes three early works by George Pemba, a contemporary of Sekoto, who continues to attract significant collector interest and looks poised to exceed the R1-million milestone.

Both artists form part of the non-commercial exhibition currently showing at Strauss in Johannesburg, Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo (April 1-May 30), curated by Wilhelm van Rensburg, chief curator at Strauss & Co.

Update: The "Lady from the Orient" painting has sold for R31.9m setting a new record for Tretchikoff.