Kees van Dongen

Biography

In 1895 Van Dongen, then eighteen, illustrated the Dutch edition of Peter Kropotkin’s “Anarchy”. He worked on the book together with Jan Krulder. More than thirty years later, in 1926, he was entrusted with the illustrations for another book, a scandalous one: the French edition of Victor Margueritte’s “La Garçonne”.

He was born on 26 January 1877 in Delfshaven, then on the outskirts of Rotterdam, the second of four children. His father worked in a malt house, and the family came from North Brabant. His talent for drawing was noticed early, but there was no money to educate the boy, and from the age of fourteen he earned his own living. From 1892 to 1897 he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam. In his free time he haunted the red-light quarter of the port and drew sailors and prostitutes there. At the Academy he met Augusta Preitinger, known as Guus.

In 1897 Van Dongen spent several months in Paris. In December 1899 he returned there for good, to join Guus, who had moved earlier. They married on 11 July 1901. Money had to be found however he could: he painted houses, carried loads, and sold satirical drawings to magazines, among them La Revue blanche. In 1901 Félix Fénéon commissioned him to do a whole issue of the satirical magazine L’Assiette au beurre.

The Salon d’Automne of 1905.

Van Dongen exhibited there with Matisse, Derain, Marquet, Vlaminck, Camoin and Puy. The critic Louis Vauxcelles called the group “wild beasts” (les fauves) because of their bright colour. In 1906 the family moved to the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, into the circle of Picasso and Fernande Olivier. His portrait of her, as Gertrude Stein recalled, made his name, although he himself denied that he had painted Fernande in particular. For a short time he was also a member of the German group Die Brücke. Early nudes and night scenes, dancers and cabaret singers, alternated with scandals. In 1911, in Amsterdam, three of his nudes were removed from an exhibition on the orders of the city authorities. In 1913 the canvas “Tableau” (“The Spanish Shawl”), showing Guus wearing only a yellow shawl and stockings, was taken down from the Salon d’Automne the day after it opened. In 1912 he taught at the Académie Vitti, and in these years he moved in Paris from Montmartre to Montparnasse.

In 1914 Guus went with their daughter Dolly to visit family in Rotterdam and stayed there until 1918 because of the war. Van Dongen lived in Paris; in 1921 the couple divorced. From 1917 he was involved with Léa Jacob, known as Jasmy. After the war wealthy clients began to come to him, and he settled near the Bois de Boulogne, at the Villa Saïd. He painted Anatole France, Louis Barthou, Sacha Guitry, Arletty, Anna de Noailles, Madame Grès and Maurice Chevalier. He described his trade with cynicism: “The essential thing is to elongate the women and especially to make them slim.” After that, he said, it only remained to enlarge their jewels. Another of his sayings: “Painting is the most beautiful of lies.” The portrait of France caused an uproar: the painter was reproached for making the writer look like a senile old man. The row subsided when France himself declared that he was pleased with the portrait.

In 1926 he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, in 1927 he received the Belgian Order of the Crown, and in 1929 French citizenship; he became an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1954.

In November 1941, or October according to other accounts, Van Dongen travelled to Germany with a group of French artists at the invitation of the sculptor Arno Breker. A planned meeting with Hitler did not take place, and he always spoke evasively about his motives. In France the trip was held against him: in 1946 the national purge committee for artists banned him for one year from exhibiting, selling and publishing his work, counting from 1 September 1944. In the postwar years he again illustrated a great deal: Proust, Baudelaire, Colette, Anatole France, Kipling, and he made posters and menus. By the end of the 1940s commissions for portraits returned; he painted Brigitte Bardot twice.

What interests me in this biography is the gap between the early and the late years: many specialists consider his Fauve years, 1906 to 1913, his best, and find the later portraits smoother.

From 1959 he lived in Monaco, and in 1965 he gave up his studio in Paris. He could not attend the celebrations of his ninetieth birthday. He died on 28 May 1968 in Monte Carlo. A large collection of his work is held by the New National Museum of Monaco, and six of his paintings are in the Hermitage.