Kees van Dongen

KEES VAN DONGEN

Delfshaven 1877 - 1968 Monaco

A painter and potter, Cornelis ‘Kees’ van Dongen was born in Delfshaven, a suburb of Rotterdam, in 1877. He commenced his artistic studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam aged sixteen and visited Paris for the first time in 1897. By 1899 van Dongen had settled permanently in Paris and became assimilated in the artistic circles of Montmartre, where his heavy Dutch Expressionist style was soon tempered by the late Impressionists.   In 1901 he married Augusta ‘Guus’ Preitinger who featured in many of his early works; he supported himself by house painting and illustrating periodicals.

In 1904 van Dongen exhibited one hundred works at the gallery of Ambrose Vollard and the following year he exhibited alongside Henri Matisse in the controversial Salon d’Automne which saw the emergence of the group of artists known as the Fauves. In 1906 he moved into the Bâteau Lavoir, a collection of run-down artists’ studios that attracted some of the most avant-garde artists of the period and which is reputed to have been the birthplace of Cubism. During this time he forged a strong and lasting friendship with Pablo Picasso whose girlfriend, Fernande Olivier, modelled for him on a number of occasions.

Van Dongen was also a prolific graphic artist and illustrator, contributing satirical drawings to La Revue Blanche and L’Assiette au Beurre and he also produced illustrations for numerous books including works by Rudyard Kipling and Anatole France.  

After the First World War van Dongen became a popular painter of the beau-monde and the demi-monde, chronicling the années folles of the 1920s. Throughout his career his work retained the Fauvist intensity of the early 1900s and he continued to draw his subject matter from the hedonistic world of Paris, Venice and the Côte d’Azur. He also executed portrait commissions for prominent members of European society, including the Aga Khan, King Leopold III of Belgium and Brigitte Bardot.