Truth about the Green Lady
For many of the post-war generation the exotic painting known as The Green Lady was as much a must-have as the ducks that flew across the wall of Hilda Ogden?s Coronation Street house. The retro image ? a Woolworth?s framed print favourite ? was a hastriking splash of colour in tens of thousands of British homes in the Fifties and the next two decades.
Its popularity among the working classes turned it from an obscure work into one of the world?s best-selling fine art prints.
Many in the art world derided the painting (titled The Chinese Girl) as populist kitsch. ?I wish it had never happened,? says Brian Sewell. But it made Vladimir Tretchikoff, a Russian-born South African artist, interhanationally famous ? and rich.
His work is among the most reproduced in the world and at one point he was as popular as Picasso and Dali. He exhibited in department stores and was one of the first artists to target ?ordinary? people.
Now the original, which has been held in a private collection for half a century, will be auctioned at Bonhams in London next month and is expected to fetch up to £500,000.
Yet the painting continues to ask more questions than it answers.
Why is the Chinese girl?s skin such a strange blue-green? Why are only her face and hair fully painted? Why does she wear a 19th- century Chinese gown and sport bright red Max Factor lipstick?
Even Monika Pon, who at the age of 17 sat for the portrait in 1951, got no satisfactory answers from Tretchikoff when she saw the finished work.
?I?m not green!? she told him. ?I didn?t understand what it meant. I told him and he said, ?What don?t you like?? I said, ?I don?t like the green, it makes me look ill?. He laughed.?
She was introduced to the artist (who died in 2006 aged 93) by his friend Masha Arsenyeva, a Russia ballet teacher, who often found models for him and had noticed the striking girl in her uncle?s launderette in the upmarket Cape Town suburb of Sea Point. Twice a week for more than six weeks the 37-year-old artist would collect the teenager in his yellow convertible and drive her to his studio.
?He treated me so nice, I nearly fell in love with him,? Monika later told his biographer Boris Gorelik.
Her daughter Margo solved the mystery of the bright red lipstick. ?As a child looking over photographs of my mother?s youth I could never get over how exquisitely stunning she was,? she said. ?She always wore red lipstick on her full lips and black eyeliner??
The painting brought Monika neither fame nor fortune. ?I sat for six weeks. For that I got £6.50,? she says. ?But all in all he was a very nice man. I have not got a grudge against him.?
The iconic image appeared in Alfred Hitchcock?s 1972 film Frenzy (it hangs on the living room wall of the killer Bob Rusk). It was in the apartment of Ruby, Shelley Winters? character in Michael Caine?s 1966 hit film Alfie, and it was part of two Monty Python TV episodes (in one a moustache was painted on it). Tretchikoff fans include TV celebrity Uri Geller, who says the painting ?radiates an aura of peace. To me it is very powerful and spiritual?.
It?s the world?s most reproduced painting that ended up on the walls of countless British living rooms. What is the story behind the portrait now about to be sold for a fortune?
Designer Wayne Hemingway, who collects Tretchikoffs, says: ?It is more than just what the art looks like. It is what it stands for. A Tretchikoff ? it means it?s exotic, it means something about my background and where I?m from and my nan.?
He so admires Tretchikoff?s graphic visual style that his company HemingwayDesign has worked with SurfaceView.co.uk to offer a scaled-up version to fit an entire wall (prices start from £440 for an 8ft x 12ft adhesive mural).
To Hemingway, Tretchikoff was a pioneer, a precursor of Andy Warhol. ?If you were to go out and stand with a picture of his in a cool part of any city and spoke to hapeople who understand modern cool, the majority will say good things about it,? he says.
But for some the picture provided an often unsettling backdrop to their younger lives. ?I remember this image because my gran used to have it hanging above the three-bar electric fire in the living room,? says one contributor to an internet forum discussing the artist?s legacy. ?I found it dark, foreboding and depressing.?
Claire Horvath from Birmingham says: ?My mum had it hanging in her bedroom, it frightened me for years.?
Even Tretchikoff, who referred to his home in an exclusive Cape Town suburb as ?the house the Chinese Girl built? was puzzled by its popularity. ?I still cannot explain the mystery of my painting,? he wrote in his autobiography Pigeon?s Luck. ?I would have never believed anyone who told me that one day I would paint a picture that would appeal? not only to the European races but to Orientals and Africans as well.?
His biographer Gorelik says: ?When you look at the Chinese Girl she reflects your thoughts back at you, like the tiger in Life Of Pi. This picture can keep you busy for years and you still won?t find the answer.?
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