Kees van Dongen, Tango. 1922-1935. Canvas. Nouveau Muséé National de Monaco. © Estate of Kees Van Dongen / SODRAC[2008]Organised by the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, the first major retrospective of the art of
Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) in North America is being presented from January 22 to April 19, 2009.
This exhibition brings together some 200 works, including over a hundred paintings, as well as forty rare drawings, prints and other archival documents and photographs, and, for the first time, a dozen Fauvist ceramics. From turn-of-the-century anarchist to the ‘interwar painter of elegant neurosis’, it is the work of a moralist that will be shown here, an observer of society, from the bohemian world to the demi-mondaines of the cocktail era.
The exhibition Kees van Dongen will illustrate the influential role Van Dongen played in early twentieth-century art and his unique position as the only portraitist among the Fauves.
In the light of new research and previously little-known works, the artist’s career will be traced from his early days in Holland to his move to Paris. Arresting paintings of nudes and flirtatious women that retain the sumptuous colours and rich impasto of his Fauvist works will be examined through the themes of exoticism, spectacle and Orientalism. The show will also include an impressive selection of large society portraits of the most celebrated personalities of the Roaring Twenties, which will illustrate his mature period. After Monaco and Montreal, the exhibition will travel to Barcelona’s Picasso Museum.
Thus, the themes of the exhibition will introduce visitors to Van Dongen’s rich and varied oeuvre as they follow his career from Rotterdam to Paris, where he was an active player in the avant-garde scene of the early twentieth century. Van Dongen himself always presented himself as an untrained artist who followed his natural intuition and worked spontaneously, without analysing what he was doing. The development of Van Dongen’s artistic ability has been a contentious subject, partly due to his own indifferent attitude. He was never willing to cooperate on any documentation, and considered only his most recent work to be important. Van Dongen hardly ever dated his work. And he would sometimes antedate certain works, as other artists have done with a view to enhancing their position in the artistic vanguard. For years his place among the Parisian avant-garde was a subject of debate, and above all there were doubts about his role as a Fauvist. As a painter he went from from Avant-Garde to Beau Monde, an anarchist who became a man of the world who very aptly died in suitably fashionable Monaco in 1968.
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