Collecting guide: Kees van Dongen

In the words of the art critic, W.F.A. Röell, writing in 1920, Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) was, ‘along with Picasso, Matisse and Derain… among the greatest artists living in France’. Even allowing for some patriotic bias — Röell, like Van Dongen, was a Dutchman based in Paris — this was an impressive claim.

Six years later, the artist would be named a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the French state, in acknowledgement of his role as one of the spearheads of Fauvism. Not bad for somebody who had been born on the outskirts of Rotterdam in 1877, to parents who ran a small malthouse next door to the family home.

Young Kees — or Cornelis Theodorus Maria, to give him his full name — helped out often in the malthouse. However, he was also a precocious artist. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he sold his first picture aged 12: it depicted a cow and was bought by the local butcher.

He studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Art and Technical Science, and at the start of his career regularly took for subject matter the prostitutes, sailors and tavern drinkers in his hometown’s red light district.

For an aspiring artist at around the turn of the 20th century, though, there was only one place to be. ‘Paris attracted me like a beacon,’ Van Dongen said in later life. He moved to the French capital in 1899 and was soon experimenting with a number of different styles, Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism among them.

To make ends meet, he worked as an illustrator for satirical Parisian publications such as L’Assiette au Beurre. He also decorated houses, served as a guide for Dutch tourists, hauled heavy sacks and even, he claimed, got paid for taking on established wrestlers in bouts at the circus.

Running with the ‘wild beasts’ of the infamous 1905 Salon d’Automne

Success as a painter, however, helped Van Dongen give up these jobs after a few years. His palette, which had started out quite neutral, now became ‘violent’, in the view of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. His work showed alongside that of Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck in the infamous Salon d’Automne exhibition of 1905. It was there that the art critic, Louis Vauxcelles — stunned by the intense, non-naturalistically coloured paintings with simplified forms — compared their creators to ‘wild beasts’ (fauves, in French). The term Fauvism was duly coined.

Van Dongen was never at what you might call the heart of the movement. He wasn’t a friend of Matisse’s. He was also foreign, only becoming a French citizen in the 1920s. More than that, though, where the Fauves tend to be associated with landscapes, the Dutchman concentrated on the human figure — the female figure, above all.

He generated erotic tension seemingly at will, with subjects that confront, provoke, titillate and lure the viewer into their space. Disproportionately large eyes are a recurring feature.

A taste for the demi-monde

Like Toulouse-Lautrec before him, Van Dongen had a taste for the demi-monde of Montmartre at night-time, and one of the most frequent subjects of his artistic attention was a sultry belly dancer called Anita la Bohémienne. She worked in a dive on the Place Pigalle, and in Anita en almée (1908) reveals a lot more than her belly.

The artist depicted his subjects fully clothed, too. Van Dongen was, in fact, always interested in fashion, and in many of his canvases — such as La Femme au collier (1908) — his female sitters are seen wearing an elaborate hat.

Another favourite model from this time was a performer known as Nini, who danced at the Folies Bergère. In one of the artist’s most striking Fauvist works — the acidly coloured La femme au collier vert (1906-10) — she stares at us uncompromisingly. Though the title refers to the green of Nini’s necklace, it is red, a colour beloved of Van Dongen, that dominates: used to capture her lipstick, part of the patterning of her blouse and, most ardently, the entire background.

‘I know every one of those women's histories,’ Van Dongen said of the demi-mondaines he portrayed. ‘They have experienced life in all its facets. I cannot help painting them in garish colours; perhaps I do so in order to express the intensity of their lives.’

Despite Van Dongen’s empathy for the women he painted, many Parisians were shocked by his provocative mix of erotic subject matter, urgent brushwork and arresting hues. In 1913 a nude painting of his wife, Guus, called Tableau, was removed by police from the Salon d’Automne after just one day, on grounds of indecency — and locked away in a cupboard till the end of the show.

Friendship with Picasso — and a studio that doubled as a party venue

Not that any of this damaged his career. Far from it. Scandal meant free publicity for the artist and his work. After successful solo exhibitions in 1908 at the Galerie Kahnweiler and the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, he signed an advantageous seven-year contract with the latter, obliging the gallery to purchase a fixed number of his works per annum. (Around this time he also exhibited with the German Expressionist group, Die Brücke, in Dresden — however, he never really identified with them.)

For a while, Van Dongen occupied a studio in Le Bateau-Lavoir, the building in Montmartre where Picasso also worked. The pair became friends and would often go on sketching trips to the circus together. When Van Dongen returned to the Netherlands with Guus and their infant daughter Dolly for a few months in 1907, he even put his furniture into storage with Picasso — to the appreciation of Fernande Olivier (the Spaniard’s girlfriend and the Dutchman’s occasional model), who said she found it very comfortable.

Van Dongen’s increasing success meant that he could soon afford a new studio, in Montparnasse — one ‘so large that you could drive a car into it’, he said. The studio doubled as a party venue, with Van Dongen’s guests passing innumerable nights dancing the tango, quadrille and foxtrot to music played on his phonograph.

Spain, Africa, and a thrilling shift in style

Financial security also meant that the artist had the wherewithal to travel to southern Spain and northern Africa in 1910. Thanks in part to the bright light and exoticism he encountered, his art would undergo a thrilling shift immediately thereafter. The other artists once associated with Fauvism had by this point largely moved on from the movement. Van Dongen, however, breathed new life into it.

Female subjects still dominate his output, but they now tend to be characterised by a richer sensuality, more eye-catching attire, and a more captivating gaze. The artist’s colour contrasts might be said to have grown more sophisticated too. Witness La gitane (1910-11), depicting a gypsy woman from Spain; and L’Ouled Naïl (1910), a dancer from Algeria, whose luminous white head-dress and glittering gold jacket are offset by the cool, blue background.

Portraits of the rich and famous, from the Aga Khan to Brigitte Bardot

Following the end of the First World War, Van Dongen went on to become one of the most sought-after portraitists in France. Various celebrities sat for him, from the Aga Khan and King Leopold III of Belgium to the singer Maurice Chevalier; the carmaker André-Gustave Citroën; and, shortly before his death, the actress Brigitte Bardot.

He also produced numerous flattering portraits of elegant Parisian ladies, sometimes dressed in the creations of Paul Poiret or Jeanne Adèle Bernard. Van Dongen counted both those famous couturiers as a friend and patron.

Poiret was the first owner of one of the artist’s most remarkable pictures, La Quiétude (1918), a phantasmagoria dominated by two human figures lying entwined — one painted midnight blue, the other siren red. Perched above them are a pair of songbirds, also painted blue and red, with a dog and a monkey completing the scene. Everyone and everything seems to be asleep, the brash colours belying the somnolent atmosphere.

Among the Van Dongen paintings formerly owned by Bernard was La Porte Dauphine (1923), a jaunty vision of well-dressed Parisians strolling along the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (today’s Avenue Foch), with the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. This was part of a set of similar cityscapes from the same year titled ‘Paris’, in which Van Dongen celebrated his adopted city.

As the artist aged, he increasingly became an establishment figure who appeared in the society pages of the newspapers. In his radical trailblazing pomp, however, Picasso had nicknamed him ‘the inspired Kropotkin of the Bateau-Lavoir’ — in comparison to the Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. Coming from Picasso, this was high praise indeed.

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