Van Dongen’s Moments of Independence

Dutch painter, Cornelius “Kees” van Dongen astonished his family by his precocious gifts. When still an adolescent, he drew and painted realistic works, and was soon influenced by the French Impressionists. In 1897, seven years after the death of his countryman Vincent van Gogh, he settled in Paris. To make a living, he practised all professions; house-painter, porter at the Halles, and did sketches on café terraces. Like Steinlen, Jacques Villon and Vallotton, he contributed to satirical papers.

He mingled in Montmartre life and acquired a simpler, more nervous, more concise line. In 1906 he rallied enthusiastically to Fauvism, predisposed by a latent expressionism and gifts as a colourist. He was faithful to Fauvism for a long time, through temperament and taste. He attracted attention by his long and flexible arabesques, his clear and intense colour, his rich and oily matière. He juxtaposed tones in wide parallel strips, without much concern for depth. At this time he was already making brilliant use of a manner so cursory and elliptical that it would not have escaped unbearable dryness but for his vigorous sensualism. None of the other Fauves attained such richness, such fantasy, with means so direct, so concentrated, so simple.

Observing canvases like, In The Wood or The Fellahin, one marvels at the effects he obtained by placing pure white and an ultramarine blue side by side, a vermilion in the light and an acid green in the shadows, by opposing a golden yellow to a bright red background. He was too devoid of intellectualism, too eager to experience sensations to care about drawing and composition. The greatest dexterity, savour, and almost insolent ease are no doubt most visible in the works he executed from 1905 to 1913. Sureness of the eye, the life in every form, in every stroke, every passage painted for its own sake.

At the end of the First World War, he had already become the fashionable portraitist, the painter in demand, taken up by an aristocratic and dubious society. All the leading figures of this troubled period wanted their portrait signed by the former porter at the Halles whom they had consecrated as the painter of society. And each of them wanted his own portrait done exactly like Van Dongen's others.

Yet while he made some concessions to them, he did not humour them. He did not flatter them with his brush, did not even conceal the contempt he felt for them, did not hide their physical and moral flaws. However, to comply with their wish, he had to practise his art according to an invariable formula. It is thus that he created a sort of feminine type, the Theodora of the drawing room, the Messalina of the boudoir, the princess of the international set, with an exaggeratedly thin body, her pallor broken only by a gash of lipstick, half clad in transparent tulle and adorned with glittering jewels. His vision remained nevertheless that of a painter, of an incomparable colourist. If he attenuated the virulence of his tones in time, sought more to please by using greys, modulations, shading, and to reassure by accentuating naturalistic illusion, he was none the less capable, when working only for himself, through pride and conviction, of producing works of fascinating freedom and mastery. Even as a portraitist he sometimes gave up all constraint. It is nevertheless in landscape that van Dongen has best fulfilled himself, no doubt because before nature he was himself again and painted for pleasure, without calculation.

Then he quite naturally gave up artifice and the display of virtuosity. He showed tact, discretion, vigour, sacrificing the accessory, reducing form to the essential, employing a few tones, but the most direct and telling. However, those fortunate moments of independence and sincerity became more and more rare. In spite of a vigorous old age, Van Dongen no longer avoided facility, flabbiness, insipidity. Submitted too long to the vanities of the world, his will for expression gave way to a will to please. His sensuality, his pessimism, his dexterity, his impertinent boldness, his improviser's verve, had all but disappeared from his later work.