RIP: Vladimir Tretchikoff

Шиловы и Глазуновы есть не только у нас - и некоторые из них русские.

At his death he was reputed to have sold more reproductions than any other artist in history and to have made more money in his lifetime than any other artist bar Picasso.

During this period Tretchikoff met an exotic half-Dutch, half-Malay woman called Lenka, whom he persuaded to model for him and who became his lover. Their relationship soured when Lenka became involved in spiritualism, attending regular seances during which she claimed to see images of Tretchikoff's wife and daughter.

As the British fashion designer Wayne Hemmingway put it, Tretchikoff had "achieved everything that Andy Warhol stated he wanted to do but could never achieve because of his coolness".


Chinese Girl, Vladimir Tretchikoff


Vladimir Tretchikoff
(Filed: 29/08/2006)

Vladimir Tretchikoff, the painter who has died aged 92, defied the canons of good taste to become one of the best-selling artists of the 20th century.

Although his exotic, hyper-realistic paintings were rarely seen on museum walls, they were found in suburban living rooms, student digs and lingerie departments all over the world.

His most famous work, The Green Girl (also known as The Blue Lady and The Chinese Girl), is said to have been more widely reproduced than the Mona Lisa. Ordinary people loved it for its naturalism and beguiling mystery; art critics scorned it as the epitome of postwar bad taste; Tretchikoff regarded it as a work of genius.

Tretchikoff specialised in portraits; he worked in oil, watercolour, ink, charcoal and pencil. The first series of high-quality reproductions, by Frost and Read in London, were sold to department stores, where they adorned the walls of the lingerie sections.

After The Green Girl, his best known pictures include Weeping Rose, Blue Monday and The Dying Swan, which features the dancer Alicia Markova. Self-taught and a brilliant businessman, Tretchikoff measured artistic success above all in financial terms.

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RIP: Sir Alfred Sherman

It was said that at party conferences he could be relied upon to provide a draft of 50 pages, 48.5 of which were so outrageous as to be unusable, while the other one and a half contained phrases of pure gold.

"If it wasn't for me, Mr Heath would still be the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition", he declared.

He was expelled from the Party for Titoist deviationism.

In 1992, when secret Soviet archives were opened, it emerged that in 1984 Sherman had given an interview to Pravda in which he was quoted as saying: "As for the lumpen, coloured people and the Irish, let's face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well armed and properly trained police." During the furore that followed, Sherman merely complained that the quotation missed the word "proletariat" after "lumpen", and denied using the phrase "well armed".

In 1993 Sherman became an adviser to the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a position which gave him a new opportunity to pour scorn on former allies in the Tory Party who regarded Karadzic as a war criminal.

Of the woman he once claimed he would die for, Sherman later said: "Lady Thatcher is great theatre as long as someone else is writing her lines; she hasn't got a clue." Nonetheless, when, last year, he published a book of memoirs, Paradoxes of Power: Reflections on the Thatcher Interlude, Lady Thatcher attended the launch party.

Sir Alfred Sherman
(Filed: 28/08/2006)

Sir Alfred Sherman, who died on Saturday aged 86, was the former Communist who became one of Margaret Thatcher's earliest intellectual soulmates when she succeeded Edward Heath as Opposition leader.

In 1974 he co-founded, with Sir Keith Joseph and Mrs Thatcher, the conservative think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), and became its first director. He was ousted from the CPS in 1984 after he fell out of favour with the Tory leadership.

Sherman was arguably the most eccentric, and certainly the most contradictory, figure ever to have been a leading adviser to a senior politician. His early imbibed skill in Marxist dialectic made him a formidable logician; at his best he could be witty, educated and shrewd on economic matters. But he could also be breathtakingly naive, never losing the instinctive fanaticism which put him in the Communist party in the first place.

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