Kees van Dongen: Pointing the Way to the Future

Kees van Dongen - The Woman in the Green Hat - 1910 - Oil on canvas - 73.51 cm × 92.3 cm - Private Collection (click photo for larger image)Dutch-born French painter and printmaker Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) was one of the leading Fauvists, particularly renowned for his stylized, sensuously rendered portrayals of women. Moving from Impressionism into Fauvism, Van Dongen’s candid, colorful portrait style became immensely fashionable by the end of WWI, and thereafter it remained his main focus. The figure of a glamorous woman with large eyes and red lips became his archetype.

In addition to portrait paintings, Van Dongen also produced lithographs and painted richly colored seascapes, as well as scenes of Paris in an assured, economical style. He absorbed all the styles that converged ni Paris in the early 1900s and made out of them something new. 

His approach to the female body as a sensuous surface, devoid of psychic depth, gave later painters, including Willem de Kooning, Tom Wesselmann, and Yves Klein permission to treat the female body as a metaphor for the painted canvas. In addition, van Dongen's path as a portraitist prefigures the interaction between art and commerce that would become central to art after the 1950s. Painting all that glitters with a mixture of appreciation and disdain, his cultivated irony paved the way for Andy Warhol.

Van Dongen has never received the critical acclaim afforded other Fauves, and whether or not he deserves it is still an open question. What is certain is that modern art would not be the same without him. His oeuvre sits squarely at the intersection between Fauvism and Expressionism and, as an artist, he took risks that pointed the way to the future.

Dr. Jill will be holding a single-session ONLINE class on Van Dongen on Friday, April 1st from 11am - 12pm. Click HERE to Register.