Nu à la mantille dit aussi Le divan au modèle

The Dutch artist Kees van Dongen painted Nu à la mantille dit aussi Le divan au modèle around the same time that he moved from the Montmartre neighborhood in Paris. He had spent more than a decade articulating his artistic identity and struggling to make ends meet in the bohemian, avant-garde enclave, alongside fellow painters Maurice de Vlaminck and Henri Matisse. This group became collectively known as fauves, or wild beasts, after they exhibited their work together at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. The Fauvist cohort was both criticized and praised for their experimental color choices. In that creative, collaborative environment, Van Dongen developed a palette that was unique from his contemporaries, characterized by the jarring juxtaposition of rich and acidic hues, which he later described as "raw bright colors...sometimes brutal in their intensity" (quoted in “Bums, Madmen, Masters” in LIFE, vol. 48, no. 5, 8 February 1960, p. 92).
This painting represents one of the most frequent themes in Van Dongen's oeuvre: a stylized, semi-nude parisienne. As was typical of the artist's work, particularly during his Fauvist period, the woman's skin is tinted with strokes of mint and pale sea-glass green. Her petite yet voluptuous figure is not fully revealed, yet her semi-nudity is no less provocative. The upper half of her body is partially concealed with a sheer black shawl, draped casually over her shoulder. Her legs, meanwhile, are clad only in thigh-high red stockings. Beyond her curvaceous silhouette and seductive pose, Van Dongen's idealized woman also possesses wide, almond-shaped eyes and an intense, piercing gaze. Those bold, seductive eyes, cosmetically enhanced with a thick ring of kohl eyeliner and blackened lashes, were among the most distinctive features of Van Dongen's vision of modern femininity.
The subject of the present painting lies on a marigold and maroon striped sofa. She uses one bent arm to prop up her head, as if she were an odalisque: a concubine of a harem from the Ottoman Empire, in the tradition of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Van Dongen's model for this painting, however, was not an exotic figment of his imagination but more likely a modern French dancer, actress or escort. Like his Montmartre predecessors Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Dongen drew inspiration from the electric energy and colorful denizens of Parisian nightlife. The artist fully admitted that painting was a way to satiate his yearning for sensual pleasure of all textures; he later declared, "I exteriorize my desires by expressing them in pictures. I love anything that glitters, precious stones that sparkle, fabrics that shimmer, beautiful women who arouse carnal desire...Painting lets me possess all this most fully" (quoted in M. Giry, Fauvism, Fribourg, 1981, pp. 224-226).