LIVE 24-SEVEN IT’S ALL A LITTLE BIT KITSCH…
Predicting trends in the world of art and antiques can be a tricky business to say the least, if not impossible. What do we buy now? What do we hold on to? What do we sell?
Some areas of collecting have enjoyed increasing popularity, such as mid-century design, whilst others seem to come and go. One of the current trends rising at an astonishing rate is the wonderful, colourful, crazy – and some would even say horrific – world of kitsch art!
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Will Farmer is our antiques & collectors expert, he is well known for his resident work on the Antiques Roadshow, he has also written for the popular ‘Miller’s Antique Guide’. Those in the know will have also come across him at ‘Fieldings Auctioneers’. We are delighted that Will writes for Live 24-Seven, he brings with him a wealth of knowledge and expertise.
The word ‘kitsch’ is German and has been used since the 1920s, but one person's kitsch is another’s interior decor, so how can we talk about it without revealing layers of snobbery? It is such a Marmite look, some love it, others hate it, but whichever camp you fall into, it has become something of a must-have amongst a new breed of collector!
Kitsch art is intently recognisable, often being mass-produced reproductions of original art, steeped in sentimentality and melodrama and frequently with an over exaggerated appearance, bold colour palette or unusual subject matter. Many see the genre as ‘low brow’, however there is something instantly familiar to the many works which now fall in to this category, works that can instantly take you back to earlier times, distant memories of family interiors from generations before. These works, now rocketing in both popularity and price, appear to be tugging at the memories of many who have this interior style firmly embedded in their childhood psyche.
The stand-out stars of the kitsch craze in its current incarnation are the instantly-recognisable retro prints of artists like Vladimir Tretchikoff and Joseph Henry Lynch with two of the most iconic works being The Chinese Girl and Tina.
The artist Joseph Henry Lynch, better recognised by his signature, J.H. Lynch, was a British artist born in October 1911 who mainly painted glamorous female subjects with exotic names to match.
Reproductions of his sultry paintings graced many a 1960s and 1970s wall and were produced worldwide and sold in their hundreds of thousands. Known to have been painted in 1961, Tina went on sale in Boots; launched in 1964 it enjoyed instant success. You can still find versions of it in the original gilt frame and glass with the Boots Framing Department tag or, more commonly, in a cream frame.
While Tina would go on to decorate the living rooms of aspirational urbanites in the 1960s and 1970s, his body of work included many other now iconic images such as Woodland Goddess, Nymph and Rose, to name a few. His work, so typical of the
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