​Contemporary South African Art

Mysterious Admirer 

Vladimir Tretchikoff's legendary 'Lady of the Orchids' has elusively resurfaced in Switzerland.

 

One of the most significant paintings of Vladimir Tretchikoff will be sold on 16 December by Swiss auction house Schuler in Zurich. Titled Lady of the Orchids, it is estimated at R870,000 - R1,160,000 (CHF 60'000 - 80'000).

 

The story goes that Tretchikoff, who grew up in China, spent the most romantic period of his life in Jakarta during World War II. After a spell as a Japanese prisoner-of-war, he was released by the occupation authorities and allowed to pursue his artistic carrer in Java. 

 

One Day, an anonymous admirer sent him a box of orchids. Those flowers, ten times as expensive as roses, were an exorbitant present in a city where everybody eked out the little money they had just to survive. For a few months, Tretchikoff received orchids twice every week. They were so many that they filled the house. The identity of the sender remained a mystery. The shop that delivered the flowers refused to reveal the buyer's name. Tretchikoff regarded these gifts as an encouragement to continue painting. "Somebody evidently had faith in me", he remembered. "And it grew to mean so very much, when all around was desolation, poverty and suffering". He imagined his mysterious benefactor as a woman. With each new picture he produced, he wondered if she would like it. The sitter for Lady of the Orchids was Leonora Moltema-Salomonson. Half-Indonesian and half-Dutch. Leonora - or Lenka as Tretchikfoff affectionatley called her - for him, embodied "that intricate blend of the East and West, the mixing of women". Although in Java's strong Muslim traditions nudity was seen as taboo, Leonara posed semi-naked for the painting. According to Boris Gorelik, it is one of Tretchikoff's best paintings from his Havanese period. Leonara's unflinching belief in his esuccess helped Tretchikoff to perservere. His model and lover, she urged him not to sell his paintings so that he would be able to hold an exhibition after the war. 

 

On his departure from Java in 1945, Tretchikoff took his Javanese canvases away with him. Again the Lady of Orchids was a rare exception, as the grandfather of the present owner, a Swiss who had moved to Java to work for a Dutch company bought it directly from the artistin order to support him. The legendary Lady of the Orchids has been in possession of the same family for three generations. Unlike other exceptional Tretchikoff canvases, it has never been exhibited or reproduced before. 

 

 

The Forest Fire

 

 

The only known landscapes by Tretchikoff are his depictions of Cape mountain wildfires. In 1948, shortly after settling in South Africa, Tretchikoff held the first of his many exceedingly popular exhibitions in Cape Town and Johannesburg. In commercial terms, he soon became the country’s most successful artist. Half the works that Tretchikoff presented that year were produced in Indonesia, where he had been working during World War II, but in 1949, the Russian-born artist decided that the theme for his shows would be South Africa, his newly-adopted country. Not only was the subject matter purely South African, he even made use of indigenous materials in The Forest Fire and other works.

With his interest in the mysteries of death and resurrection and his penchant for intense colours, Tretchikoff was awed by the drama of Cape wildfires. In his work, flames usually represent the ultimate destructive force. This is evident in his most dramatic paintings – Atomic Age and The Atom – where raging fire spells the end of humanity. But Tretchikoff saw death as a new beginning. As in his often-reproduced Lost Orchid and Weeping Rose, when something beautiful perishes, a new life is bound to emerge in its place. No wonder that, in another canvas from the same series, The Spring, we see daisies sprouting through cracks in the dry soil among the blackened trunks of fallen trees after a blaze.

The frame for The Forest Fire was designed and crafted by Tretchikoff personally. He bought heavy blocks of Cape pine, which he transported to his studio in his car. He stripped off the bark, which timber merchants usually discard, trying not to break the brown gnarled surface. He then cut a rectangular hole in the large pieces of bark and used them to frame his Cape wildfire landscapes.

The Forest Fire was purchased by a sheep farmer from the Karoo, who bought several other works by Tretchikoff as well as paintings by Frans Oerder, Tinus de Jongh, Vernon Ward and Sir Russell Flint. The buyer was prompted by his seven-year-old daughter who accompanied him to  Tretchikoff's studio. When he asked her which was her favourite painting, she pointed to The Forest Fire. The canvas has been in the family ever since.

Boris Gorelik