I was fortunate to grow up in a house full of artwork. My grandfather, an eager sketcher since his days as an Allied soldier captured by the Germans during World War 2, took up painting in his retirement, producing a series of landscapes and still life studies, in watercolours and oils, that adorned our walls.
They are well executed, but of course technical accomplishment is not what matters here. These are the scenes of my childhood, no less than my bedroom or the school sports field or the café down the road where I queued to play arcade games.
We also had a couple of the requisite prints: those copies of copies of celebrated images hung in millions of homes around the world, creating a lasting impression on us as children and calling to mind stronger associations than we can fully explain when we are older.
My dad kept a print of the Mona Lisa in his workshop. Leonardo da Vinci’s painting has apparently yellowed over time; our version at home turned all kinds of green and blue. The famous lady’s eyes are supposed to follow the viewer, but at chez Thurman it became increasingly difficult to meet her gaze as the picture grew darker.
When I was lucky enough to travel to Paris and see the original, I shared the sense of anticlimax that all pilgrims experience. For most people who have visited the Louvre over the years, this bathos has been attributable to the work’s location in a glass box, cordoned off and surrounded by thronging crowds. In my case, I later realised, the disappointment came because the room didn’t smell like sawdust and grease — the synaesthetic sense data that my brain connected to the image.
For many families, the Da Vinci reproduction of choice was The Last Supper rather than Mona Lisa. But South Africans who grew up in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were more likely to see another print at home every day: a “Mother and Child” photograph of unknown provenance that declared, in the top left corner, “A Mother is Very Special!”.
As the late Jabulani Tsambo (stage name HHP) put it when interviewed for Dewald Brand’s 2017 short film Searching for Mother and Child, black families under apartheid “had the same kind of template in all our houses — if it wasn’t the mother and daughter poster it would be the picture of the crying boy or the porcelain dogs”.
That Crying Boy is a whole other story. Part of a batch of portraits of weeping children made by Italian artist Bruno Amadio (who worked under the pseudonym of Giovanni Bragolin), the subject is said to represent a generation of Italian orphans whose parents were killed during World War 2. Bragolin churned out dozens of these paintings for tourists in post-war Venice. An urban legend developed that they were cursed and caused fires.
Statistically, the artist most likely to be represented in homes around the globe in the second half of the 20th century was Vladimir Tretchikoff. “Tretchi” washed up on SA shores after a series of outlandish adventures that took him from revolutionary Russia to a Japanese internment camp in Java. The fates — or the muses — introduced him to two young women, Valerie Howe and Monika Sing Lee, who sat for what would become truly iconic portraits.
Are they groundbreaking technicolour experiments or mere orientalist cliché? Did they fundamentally shape the idea of art-for-all or drag collective tastes into the irredeemable domain of kitsch? History has judged Tretchi kindly, despite what the snobbish might say. And prints of his work have been ubiquitous since the 1950s.
Probably the most famous of these is Chinese Girl (or The Green Lady). But that is set to change, as Lady from the Orient broke the Tretchikoff world record at a high-profile Strauss & Co auction held earlier this week. Sold for more than R31m, the Lady eclipsed the Girl, which itself had been acquired via Bonhams for just less than £1m in 2013.
Both paintings are admired for the blue-green hue of their subjects’ skin. Perhaps there was something special about that old print of the Mona Lisa in my dad’s workshop after all.
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