The blue-green tinged portrait is a lurid splash of colour outside the South African National Gallery, in a nod to painter Vladimir Tretchikoff who was blackballed by the art world in his lifetime.
The poster of his most famous work – the mass-printed Chinese Girl – is for the first major retrospective of the eye-popping works that earned him the labels “king of kitsch” and a “painterly Barbara Cartland”.
“He was definitely somebody who was above everybody’s mantlepiece,” said curator Andrew Lamprecht who spent three years putting the show together,” said curator Andrew Lamprecht who spent three years putting the show together. Adored by the public but scorned by critics, 92 original paintings by the Russian-born artist who arrived in Cape Town after World War II were tracked down across four continents for loan until the end of September.
They range from a moody glimpse of the French singer Francoise Hardy to a pair of rearing zebras, and evocative women from the perky breasted and beautifully exotic to a humble, mixed-race street seller. Chinese Girl, often called Tretchikoff’s Mona Lisa, is on public show for the first time in over 50 years with her bright red painted lips, glossy hair and downward gaze.
But nearby are a bizarre later series of the biblical commandments with photo-real body parts and symbolism that baffle as much as others invoke retro nostalgia with their brashly sentimental flair and garish colours.
The controversy is fitting: The self-taught painter was forced to hold his first solo exhibition in Cape Town in a book publisher’s gallery in 1948 after a pending show was shut down following a visit by the painter Irma Stern.
“To his surprise and everyone’s surprise, by word of mouth, literally thousands of people started queuing outside,” said Mr Lamprecht.
“And that was the beginning of a long and acrimonious relationship between the critics and Tretchikoff. The critics did not like Tretchikoff. But Tretchikoff just basically carried on.” Instead, he turned his workinto an unprecedented savvy business brand and himself into a millionaire with overseas tours and affordable mass-produced prints of his paintings from flowers to portraits.