From 1908 onwards, Kees Van Dongen’s primary subject was women, often from the demi-monde of Paris, painted in sensual, sometimes sexual, always provocative, guises. These early paintings of female models are arguably the zenith of Van Dongen’s avant-garde œuvre, a scintillating synchronicity of scandalous sitters and shocking, revolutionary, stripped-back and uninhibited painting. Van Dongen moved in anarchist circles from the moment he arrived in Paris and the unrestrained passion of such sensibilities bleed into the artistic milieu of the time.

Kees van Dongen was, famously, the only non-French Fauvist, the group of artists that burst onto the avant-garde art world at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, scandalising critics and public alike with their daring and provocative subject matter, deliberately naive and raw style, and bold use of colour. Van Dongen wanted ‘to strip down painting to its essentials, to find inspiration in an art that depended on instinct, like children's art and folk art.’

The present work, La Femme au chapeau bleu, dating to the 1930s, demonstrates Van Dongen’s continued interest in the modern woman as his primary muse and subject. In La Femme au chapeau bleu, Van Dongen delights in the ambiguity of gender in his model - with lusious red lips, cat’s eye make-up and stylised curls, she is the epitome of sensual and alluring, and, yet, the avant-garde hat deliberately obscures half her face whilst the shirt and tie play with gender presentations. Much like Tamara de Lempicka, Van Dongen uses the fashion of the day to blur boundaries between male and female, calling into question binary certainties of the subject but also challenging the viewer’s perceptions of who or what attracts them.