Background
Kees van Dongen was born on January 26, 1877 in Rotterdam, South Holland, Netherlands. He was the second of four children in a middle-class family.
Kees van Dongen
Kees van Dongen
Kees van Dongen was born on January 26, 1877 in Rotterdam, South Holland, Netherlands. He was the second of four children in a middle-class family.
Showing early artistic promise, he enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Rotterdam in 1892. During his four-year course of study there he became acquainted with the Dutch old-master tradition as well as with the then-current Impressionist painting. He also contributed sketches to the newspaper Rotterdam Nieuwsblad, the first of many illustrations in his long career.
Encouraged by his friend and compatriot Siebe Ten Cate, van Dongen visited Paris in 1897 and found it so to his liking that late in 1899 he settled permanently in France.
Van Dongen's primary source of financial support was the illustrations he did for a variety of publications, including Le Rire, Gil Blas, and La Revue Blanche. One issue of the left-wing review Assiette au Beurre (the Butter Dish) concerning the moralizing tale of a prostitute's demise was illustrated entirely by van Dongen and contrasted with his frequent exaltation of the demimonde. At this point van Dongen was assimilating many artistic influences and was on the threshold of a full-bodied style that would align him with the Fauve painters.
In 1904 van Dongen exhibited some 100 works at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, a champion of avant-garde art. The catalogue of the show was introduced by the progressive art theorist and critic Félix Fénéon. Van Dongen's neo-Impressionist style of bold color patches and a flattened depth linked him with such artists as Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck and their anti-naturalist palette. In 1905, the same year in which his daughter "Dolly" was born, van Dongen showed pictures at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne alongside a loose collection of like-minded painters of which Matisse was the ringleader. The riot of color in their work caused a somewhat hostile critic, Louis Vauxcelles, to dub these artists "les fauves" ("the wild beasts").
The Fauvists were never an alliance with a strict manifesto. Instead, they found themselves united by their interest in intense, unmodulated chromatics, a shallow pictorial space, and a joie de vivre. While often referred to as the first significant movement of 20th-century art, the style represented the culmination of aesthetic ideas begun in the 1890s. The untempered color zones of Femme Fatale (1905), a typical Fauve painting by van Dongen, bear a striking resemblance to Matisse's The Green Line of the same year.
By 1907 the Fauvists began dispersing to explore new directions. However, van Dongen, who had arrived at the style independently of the others, retained much of his Fauvist intensity for the duration of his career. In 1908 he exhibited with the German Expressionist group Die Brücke and affected some of its members' styles. Two years before he had found lodging in the famed "Bateau-Lavoir" ("the laundry barge"), the name coined by the poet Max Jacob for the seedy Montmartre tenement whose most celebrated resident was Pablo Picasso. Picasso and van Dongen became fast friends, and van Dongen painted Picasso's mistress, Fernande Olivier. Thrust into this fertile artistic and literary milieu, van Dongen cultivated a carefree bohemian image typified by his comment: "I've always played. Painting is nothing but a game. "
In response to Picasso's example, van Dongen's subjects during this time were often circus people. His unflattering images of burlesque performers and prostitutes also recall Toulouse-Lautrec's candid perspective. One well-known painting by van Dongen, Modjesko, Soprano Singer (1908), uses a hot Fauve palette to depict the mocking, exaggerated image of a female impersonator. In 1913 van Dongen visited Egypt, and the ancient monuments he saw contributed to an increasing decorativeness in his own art. Also, around this time van Dongen acquired a reputation as a socialite, hosting a masquerade party at this home, now in Montparnasse, that was the talk of fashionable Paris in 1914. His licentious nudes and erotic subjects caused a stir among critics and admirers alike.
Van Dongen's connections with the rich and famous led him to chronical the Age des Folles ("Crazy Age") and its excessive habits. His portraits of the time range from the world-weary garçonne to well-known figures such as Anatole France. His painting of the latter in 1921, representing the literary giant as a feeble old man, scandalized the public. He painted outdoor scenes as well, capturing the spirit of Deauville, the Côte d'Azur, Paris, and Venice.
From 1917 to 1927 van Dongen formed a liaison with Jasmy Jacob, who managed a haute couture house. He seemed as much a participant in as an observer of the fastpaced Roaring Twenties, yet claimed to maintain aesthetic distance: "I very much like being as they say, the painter of elegance and fashion! But I am not, as many wish to believe, a victim of snobbism, of luxury, of the world. " But in 1927 van Dongen wrote a biography of Rembrandt that proved to be a largely autobiographical account of a painter encumbered by his own fame. Two years later van Dongen, who had so successfully captured French society in his art, became a French citizen.
With the economic crash of 1929 van Dongen's artistic fortunes, so dependent on a prosperous society, suffered a temporary setback. Yet he continued to garner significant portrait commissions in the 1930s, including that of the Aga Khan and King Leopold III of Belgium. He complemented his work as a portraitist with a steady stream of book illustrations, including writings by Mardrus, Kipling, Montherlant, Proust, Voltaire, Gide, and Baudelaire.
Kees van Dongen died on May 28, 1968, at the age of 91. In the waning years of his life, spent in Monaco, he was honored by frequent museum retrospectives. Until almost the end he sustained what Apollinaire called his blend of "opium, ambergris, and eroticism, " the fluid touch and exuberance that were his trademark whether he painted landscapes, nudes, or portraits.
La baie d'Antibes
l'Ecuyère
1920Portrait de Ms Jean McKelvie Sclater-Booth
1920Parisian lady
1910Odalisque couchée
1909Self-Portrait
1895Woman With Blue Hat
1912Dimanche à la Plage
1900Woman with a dog walking on the beach
1937Tangier, Morocco
1911The Comode
1910A Woman's Portrait
1909Trouville, la mer
1904Le Moulin de la Galette
1906La Gitane (La Curieuse)
1911The dancers Revel and Coco
1910Spring
1908La Nuit ou La Lune Découpée
Woman in a black hat
1908Woman before a mirror
1908Sheaf binders
1905Woman on Sofa
1930Quiétude
Modjesko, opera singer
1908The Corn Poppy
1919The Quai, Venice
1921Josephine Baker
1925Dans les Folies Bergères
1914The Red Clown
1905Le Sphinx
1925Woman with Cat
1908Femme avec cigarette
1908Lucie and her partner
1911Portrait de Fernande Olivier
1905Woman with Blue Eyes
1908Torso the Idol
1905Woman with Cherries on Her Hat
1905Paris La Nuit
Woman with Green Stockings
1905Van Dongen was briefly a member of the German Expressionist group the Bridge (Die Brücke).
Quotes from others about the person
His sarcastic images made no attempt to disguise moral and physical defects. Van Dongen created a feminine type that was half drawing-room prostitute, half sidewalk princess; her murky eyes, livid face with blood- red mouth, spindly arms, and exaggeratedly thin body adorned with sparkling jewels and veiled in silk or tulle, or stripped cynically nude.
Kees van Dongen married Augusta Preitinger, whom he had met at the Rotterdam Academy. They had two children together: a son, who died a couple of days after birth in December 1901, and their daughter Augusta, called "Dolly", was born on April 18, 1905. Preitinger and van Dongen divorced in 1921. In 1917, van Dongen had become involved with a married socialite, the fashion director Léa Alvin, also known as Jasmy Jacob. Their relationship lasted until 1927. In 1938 he met Marie-Claire Huguen, who bore him a son, Jean Marie, in 1940. They married in 1953.