Lot 64
  • 64

Kees van Dongen

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Description

  • Kees van Dongen
  • NU ET FEMME EN CHEMISE
  • signed Van Dongen (lower left)
  • oil on canvas
  • 65 by 54cm.
  • 25 5/8 by 21 1/4 in.

Provenance

M. Léséleuc de Kerouara, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1951)
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1980

Exhibited

Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kees van Dongen. Le Peintre, 1990, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Aosta, Museo Archeologico Regionale, La Femme, les Femmes. Da Monet a Renoir, a Modigliani, da Picasso a Warhol, 1997-98, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Turin, Palazzo Bricherasio & Lodève, Musée de Lodève, Hôtel du Cardinal Fleury, Les Fauves et la critique, 1999, no. 50, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Kees van Dongen, 2002, no. 40, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from circa 1906-08)

Catalogue Note

Nu et Femme en chemise was painted about a year after the pivotal 1905 exhibition at the Salon d'Automne which launched the Fauve movement, and exhibits many of the distinctive traits that characterised the movement, as well as those that were to define Van Dongen’s later work. Unlike the more joyful and innocent visions of his Fauve colleagues such as Matisse, Van Dongen’s nudes are mediated through his impressions of Parisian night-life and the artificial lights of the bars and concert-halls, rather than nature and open spaces. The febrile eroticism and pallor of the nude in this work, as well as the atmospheric depiction of the interior, evoke the decadent milieu of Montmartre.

 

Louis Vauxcelles, the influential French art critic, proclaimed Van Dongen as 'the historian of girls of the streets, of the dregs, of all the rabble of corrupt females and their crapulous pimps' (quoted in Gaston Diehl, Van Dongen, Milan, n.d., p. 87) and behind the air of sensuous decadence that pervades this work is a streak of Dutch realism that remained ever present in his work. Whilst the sulphurous yellows and lurid greens which were to become hallmarks of his mature work are more muted at this early stage, his nudes already exude the troubling sensuality which became more overt in his later work. In his prologue to his December 1911 exhibition, Van Dongen asserted that 'a certain immodesty is truly a virtue, as is the absence of respect for many respectable things' (ibid., p. 87), and this work is underpinned by a strange combination of baudelairism and naïveté that captures both the exotic and the sordid nature of the bohemian world he inhabited.