Pigeon`s Luck - Vladimir Tretchikoff And Anthony Hocking - Collins - 1973 - Hard cover with dust cover in good condition.
PIGEON'S LUCK, which reads with the pace and suspense of a thriller, is the extraordinary life story of one of the most successful artists of our time.
The adventures of Vladimir Tretchikoff, whose lithographs are said to even out-sell even those of the Mona Lisa and hang in literally millions of homes throughout the world, began at an early age. Born in Russia, he grew up in Manchuria and, at the outbreak of the 1939 war, was working for the Ministry of Information in Singapore. When the Japanese attacked, he was suddenly seperated from his wife and young daughter, and a few weeks later found himself drifting in an open boat through the Java Sea : his courage, ingenuity and luck contributed decisively to the survival of his companions. His subsequent capture by the Japanese, solitary confinement, interrogation by the Secret Police, release on patrol and the strange seances in which his spectular career was foretold in detail, make enthralling reading.
After the war, reunited with his family in Cape Town, he struggled against misfortune and ill-will until his fame began to spread through South Africa, Canada, the United States and Britain (where nearly 205,000 people visited his first exhibition at Harrods). In all, over two and a half million people have flocked to forty-three international exhibitions to see, discuss and buy his pictures and to fulfill the predictions made so many years before on the remote island of Java.
The Russians are a superstitious people, and that aone of their beliefs is that a bird can bring good luck. On a number of occasions in Tretchikoff's career, especially when things have been going badly, a pigeon has arrived as if by magic. Suddenly all his problems have seemed to solve themselves.
This fascinating story is illustrated with some of Tretchikoff's most famous and controversial pictures and not least of the book's many attractions are his accounts of the strange stories which lie behind so many of them.
Anthony Hocking is an Englishman, born in 1944 and educated at Monkton Combe and Christ Church, Oxford, where he spent most of his time rowing. After several years' globe-trotting in the British Merchant Navy he settled in South Africa in 1968, and for two years wrote features for The Argus in Cape Town.
It was as a journalist that he encountered Tretchikoff. He was so entertained that later he gladly seized the chance of collaborating with him on this book. It has involved him in a a fascinating detective hunt for information, tracking down sources on five continents and in twenty countries.
Anthony Hocking has now quit journalism to devote his time to serious writing. He has a small clutch of books behind him and plans for many more. His work involves him in a good deal of travel, but his home base is Johannesburg."
