Kees van Dongen

This portrait of an unidentified woman, gazing demurely in three-quarter profile, is a product of the many influences at play at this pivotal stage in Van Dongen’s career.  At the time he painted this work, he was still working with his Fauvist vocabulary of vibrant colours, but his art was now taking on a more sophisticated turn, mostly in response to the tastes of his clientele. Van Dongen had become an international celebrity, and his work was in demand internationally, most notably in the fashionable Parisian circles. In 1910, he participated in important exhibitions in Prague, Berlin, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Riga and Düsseldorf, as well as group shows with the German expressionist group, Die Brücke in Munich. The avant-garde of Europe was praising his talent as the best portraitist among the Fauves, and by 1910 Van Dongen began to receive several commissions from adoring patrons in France and abroad.  Portrait de femme, painted just as he was becoming the darling of the ‘beau monde’, is a wonderful example of the paintings that Van Dongen painted in response to these new opportunities. Bejeweled and dressed in the tasteful fashions of the upper class, this figure is at the same time an idealised portrait of a high society lady and a powerful example of the artist’s last months as a Fauvist painter. 

Portrait de femme is indeed a work that demonstrates the artist’s style on the cusp of two decisive periods in his career. Here he has painted a woman who is more reserved than the café performers, odalisques and courtesans of his earlier years, but nevertheless he does not temper his flare for the exotic. Though her pose and dress may appear more refined, the woman in this picture has the same sultry eyes, fiery red lips and radiant glow of many of the femmes fatales that Van Dongen depicted in 1907-08. As Donald Kuspit wrote: ‘Fauvism is eager for art to have the vital power of the female. It is this that the Fauvist images of females pursue, and that Van Dongen articulates with a special vehemence. For me, his most important pictures are those of women […] painted between circa 1905-1910. The female theme continues throughout his life, but never again as intense and fraught with psychological complexity as in the works of those years’ (D. Kuspit, ‘Kees van Dongen: Unequivocal Colour and Equivocal Sexuality’, in Kees van Dongen (exhibition catalogue), Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1989-90, pp. 37-39).

Fig. 1, Van Dongen in his studio, 1909