This autumn Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is staging a major exhibition of paintings by the internationally renowned artist Kees van Dongen (1877-1968).
He was born in Rotterdam-Delfshaven and died in Monte-Carlo as a has been bohemian who had become a society painter.
From 1897 he lived in Paris. He was part of the controversial 1905 exhibition Salon d'Automne, in a room featuring Henri Matisse amongst others. The bright colours of this group of artists led to them being called Fauves ('Wild Beasts').
‘Enlarge their jewels’
Van Dongen’s lifestyle was flamboyant; his lavish nightly studio parties were attended by film stars, famous politicians and artists.
‘Woman’ was his muse, her body his landscape, and the young Brigitte Bardot (1959) his most famous model.
What Andy Warhol was to New York in the 1960s, Kees van Dongen was to Paris — an artist who added colour and excitement to the city from the Roaring Twenties onwards.
With a playful cynicism he explained his popularity as a portraitist of high society women: “The essential thing is to elongate the women and especially to make them slim. After that it just remains to enlarge their jewels. They are ravished.”
A remark that allies itself to another of his sayings: “Painting is the most beautiful of lies.”
Van Dongen received various French awards, shared a studio with Picasso and took French nationality in 1929. In the Netherlands of his time, Van Dongen was essentially seen as the Dutch artist who was a success abroad.
Alluring portraits
The exhibition (18 September 2010 – 23 January 2011) will show representative examples of Van Dongen’s portraiture and extravagant works created in his Paris studios. The works with which Van Dongen impressed the Salons and avant-garde exhibitions in Paris will also be seen in Rotterdam.
The paintings he made on his trips to Egypt, Spain and Morocco (1910 -13) are another important feature of the exhibition. These alluring portraits of women, with their oriental influences, intense colours and sumptuous decorative accents, are among his best works.
The exhibition ends with acrobats, provocative women, nightlife scenes and paintings dating from his first years in Paris and Rotterdam. Alongside the sixty paintings there is a small selection of drawings, ceramics, posters and a great many photographs.
TLC article on Van Dongen
Two years ago, The Low Countries Yearbook published an article on Kees van Dongen's work. You can read it here.
[Illustration: Kees van Dongen, Le doigt sur la joue (The finger on the Cheek), circa 1910. oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam]
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