Life and Work
Kees van Dongen was born in Delfshaven, then on the outskirts, and today a borough, of Rotterdam. In 1892, at age 16, Kees van Dongen started his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam. During this period from 1892 to 1897, van Dongen frequented the Red Quarter seaport area, where he drew scenes of sailors and prostitutes.
In 1897, he lived in Paris for several months. In December 1899 he returned to Paris to join Augusta Preitinger ("Guus"), whom he had met at the Academy. They married on 11 July 1901 (they divorced in 1921). He began to exhibit in Paris, and participated in 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'). He was also briefly a member of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke.
In these years he was part of an avant-garde wave of painters—Maurice de Vlaminck, Othon Friesz, Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, Albert Marquet, Édouard Vuillard—who aspired to a renewal of painting that was stuck in neo-impressionism.
In 1906, the couple moved to the Bateau Lavoir at 13 rue Ravignan, where they were friends with the circle surrounding Pablo Picasso and his girlfriend Fernande Olivier.
In addition to selling his paintings, van Dongen also gained an income by selling satirical sketches to the newspaper 'Revue Blanche' and organising very successful costume balls in Montparnasse to gain extra income.
Under the influence of Jasmy Jacob, among others, Kees van Dongen developed the lush colours of his Fauvist style. This earned him a solid reputation with the French bourgeoisie and a profitable lifestyle. As a fashionable portraitist, his subjects included Arletty, Louis Barthou, Sacha Guitry, Leopold III of Belgium, Anna de Noailles and Maurice Chevalier. With a playful cynicism he remarked of his popularity as a portraitist with 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." This remark is reminiscent of another of his sayings: "Painting is the most beautiful of lies".
In 1926, he was awarded the Legion of Honour and in 1927 the Order of the Crown of Belgium. In 1929, he received French nationality and two of his works were admitted to the Musée du Luxembourg.
The social and commercial appeal of his later work (such as a 1959 portrait of Brigitte Bardot with her hair tousled, in a little black dress) did not match the artistic promise or the bohemian eroticism of his earlier years.
Kees van Dongen died in his home in Monte Carlo in 1968.
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