Dongen, Kees van

Dongen, Kees van (1877–1968). Dutch-born painter and printmaker who became a French citizen in 1929. He was born in Delfshaven, the son of a brewer, and studied at the Academy in nearby Rotterdam, 1894–5. In 1897 he first visited Paris, and he settled there in 1899, living in poverty for a while in the Bateau-Lavoir (where he was a friend of Picasso) and eking out a living with various jobs, including bill-sticker and circus wrestler. He had his first one-man show at Vollard's gallery in 1904. His early work was Impressionist in style, but in 1906 he became a member of the Fauves. From this time he rapidly made a name for himself in France and elsewhere; he was given contracts by Kahnweiler in 1907 and Bernheim-Jeune in 1908, and had numerous one-man shows in Paris and elsewhere in the period leading up to the First World War. The foreign exhibitions at which his work appeared included a Die Brücke show in Dresden in 1908 and the second Golden Fleece exhibition in Moscow in 1909. He had a reputation as a ladies' man, and his work (mainly nudes and female portraits) was often erotic in spirit; in 1913 one of his pictures was removed from the Salon d'Automne by the police on the grounds of alleged indecency.

After the First World War van Dongen became internationally famous for his paintings of fashionable life, particularly portraits of insolently glamorous women, in which he created a feminine type that has been memorably described by the art historian Frank Elgar as ‘half drawing-room prostitute, half sidewalk princess'. His great facility led to repetition and banality, and it is generally agreed that most of his best work was done before 1920. From 1959 he lived in Monaco, and his work is represented in several galleries on the French Riviera, notably the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice. Among his works here are not only portraits but also several large imaginative compositions, including ‘a triptych entitled Tango of the Archangel, which features a girl, naked save for black fishnet stockings, dancing with a dinner-jacketed man with wings; all the decadence of high society between the wars seems captured in this work’ ( Michael Jacobs and Paul Stirton, The Mitchell Beazley Traveller's Guides to Art: France, 1984). In 1967–8 a large retrospective exhibition in honour of his 90th birthday was held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, and the Boymans Museum, Rotterdam.