The Exhibition’s Themes*

 

Van Dongen (1877–1968): The Urban Fauve

Matisse, Dufy, Derain, Vlaminck, Braque, and the other artists of the short-lived “Fauve” revolution with whom Van Dongen was associated were in search of new forms. As the aftermath of Post-Impressionism, this art movement historically made its first appearance at the scandalous Salon d’Automne of 1905. The Fauves, valuing an instinctive colour sense over theory, were first and foremost painters of nature, whereas Van Dongen preferred the study of human nature. With the exception of Matisse, for most of the Fauves portraits remained on the sidelines; incidental and often pastoral, they provided a pretext for the unleashing of unmixed, intense colours bathed in natural light. Figure painting rarely denounced social ills.

If Van Dongen is on the margins of the Fauves’ official history, it is largely because his work expresses something else entirely. He was not alone in claiming to be an anarchist given that it was in vogue at the time, as he himself admitted. Nevertheless, he genuinely had a social conscience poised somewhere between denunciation and sarcasm. A critic of double-edged mores, “a moralist of his time” for Vaudoyer, a “former Fauve, and the most ferocious” for Henriot, Van Dongen was perhaps an idealist, a nihilist who became a misanthrope.

This is the ambiguity of a “savage foreigner,” a Dutch artist who depicts an artificially illuminated world of night – the Van Gogh of the Arles taverns – quite different from the sunny Fauve landscapes. Closer to the German Expressionists, his paths to virtue resemble Kirchner’s Berlin sidewalks; his Paris of the Moulin Rouge and the bals musettes are reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec; his acrobats and old clowns echo Picasso.

A draughtsman well worth rediscovering, he was for many years the inspired illustrator of those adrift: unwed mothers, prostitutes, nocturnal revellers. Speaking about the Roaring Twenties, Vlaminck described Van Dongen as “the historian of postwar cynical debauchery.” He became “the painter of elegant neuroses” for some, a Van Dyck of the high-society salons for others. In his studio, he received “Tout Paris, Tout New York, and Tout Everybody,” drawing both money and models from this wealth of contacts … a “Factory” of the cocktail era. This is the Van Dongen we wanted to show in Montreal.

Van Dongen, an urban Fauve, captured the psychological portrait of a fierce, frivolous, artificial society whose playgrounds – Paris, Venice, Deauville, or Monte Carlo – serve as the backdrop for this theatre of manners. The portraits of lovers, coquettes, Parisiennes, “Orientals,” and other creatures of excess became almost an obsession: “I love beautiful women who arouse carnal desire … and painting allows me to possess all of that completely.” Between tragedy and comedy, wretchedness and social vanity, the ephemeral parade of humanity across Van Dongen’s work reveals the subtle humanism of an artist whose ostentation, masquerades, and paradoxes coyly disguise a complex, lucid, and pessimistic sensibility.

 

1895–1904

“My father wanted a child with a bowler hat, one with a reputable profession, but he always let me do what I wanted.”

Kees van Dongen was only eighteen and studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam when he left home in 1895. His works during this period show the apprentice artist’s world oscillating between two approaches: the ambience of Rembrandt-inspired interiors translated for contemporary tastes by work of his fellow countryman, the painter Jozef Israels, and the free, Impressionist treatment of Dutch landscapes influenced by Breitner. In these small, luminously coloured oils, mainly on cardboard, the foreground animates the composition in snapshot fashion. Félix Fénéon described the genre with extraordinary acuity as “a slow life.”

“The area was inhabited by smugglers. You would meet the most diverse people, Jews, Huguenots, descendents of French immigrants, huge numbers of fellows named Jacques, François, and Clément. You were free there, really, no laws at all. I still have vivid memories of it. It was luminous, very colourful.”

“Paris beckoned me like a lighthouse.”

Van Dongen became increasingly taken with the idea of building a life in Paris as a draughtsman-illustrator and continuing to develop as a “free” artist, and in July 1897 he left Rotterdam: “Paris beckoned me like a lighthouse.”

His drawings are clear indications that Van Dongen had abandoned his earlier Symbolist style. Later, in a cartoon of 1902, he openly criticized Art Nouveau as being too elitist. But Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s left-wing prints were the determining influence. During this same period he met Félix Fénéon, senior editor of La Revue blanche (to which Van Dongen contributed some drawings in the summer of 1901), and Maximilien Luce. “We were all anarchists.”

The “little instant things” are series of sketches of the Parisian underclass, labourers, street porters, figures hurrying home in the dark, vagrants, and prostitutes on the boulevards extérieurs. With swift, powerful lines, watercolour washes, an occasional touch of colour, and light hatching, he captured the careworn characters – almost all of them, like the artist himself, living outside respectable society. A deliberate incompleteness, a certain angularity in the drawing, heightens the effect.

Artists were encouraged to learn about using pure colour by going back to “primitive frescoes” and to “naïve periods, when human art simply reproduced the main features of nature … recording them crudely.” This conception of art embodies anarchist ideals, now merged with the striving for innovation in which “primitive” art becomes the model – creating by instinct, without rules. In the form of a contemporary primitivism, this endeavour would become part of Fauvism and other modernist movements in the early twentieth century.

Zandstraat, Rotterdam’s red-light district

Zandstraat was the main thoroughfare of Rotterdam’s red-light district, a seventeenth-century warren of narrow streets, alleyways, and passages in the inner city, not far from the Academy of Fine Arts and a popular haunt for sailors on shore leave. Nicknamed “the Polder,” the district was demolished in 1912.

Van Dongen drew on the spot in this colourful area, which teemed with brothels, bars, cafés-chantants, and stalls selling food. His strikingly austere drawings of prostitutes accosting men in the street, leaning in doorways, or sitting in windows on the lookout for customers were put down with a few coarse strokes and lines in black chalk on large sheets of cheap wrapping paper. The artist’s technique suggested a certain directness, and at the same time, helped by the choice of rough paper and the spare accents in watercolour or chalk, emphasized the seedy oppressiveness of this tough existence. Van Dongen got to know the district and its inhabitants well, going back several times when he was living in Paris. On more than one occasion he used the Rotterdam sketches for illustrations in the French press. His fascination with prostitutes sitting “in almost priest-like poses, as if in shop windows,” was reflected in the way he posed his models against a black-painted wall in his Rotterdam studio.

 

1905–1910

The Montmartre period is one of major stylistic innovations, when Van Dongen broadens his range of subjects from portraits, women, and landscapes to acrobats, clowns, and bareback riders. Now well integrated into the circle of Montmartre artists, he often goes to the Cirque Médrano with Picasso and frequents the Bateau-Lavoir, where he meets the painters Derain and Vlaminck as well as the writer and critic Apollinaire. This is also the period of the major Seurat and Van Gogh retrospectives. Van Gogh’s influence on his fellow Dutch artist is particularly striking.

In 1905 Van Dongen shows two canvases at the Salon d’Automne: two female portraits, one nude, the other clothed (present whereabouts unknown). Room VII, where the work of Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck is exhibited, causes a scandal. The strident colours spark a furore in the press, including the resounding critique in which Louis Vauxcelles famously describes the “cage aux Fauves.” In November Galerie Druet organizes the solo exhibition Kees van Dongen: Une saison, where the artist shows nineteen paintings, including one Carousel, watercolours, and drawings, and, in particular, landscapes painted at Fleury-en-Bière. An orgy of colour at the Salon d’Automne, a torrent of colour at Galerie Druet: Van Dongen is incontestably a Fauve from the outset.
From 1905 Van Dongen distances himself from Tachism, gravitating towards a brutal, completely Fauve realism. Yet he will always be an exception among the Fauves. Although his palette becomes more harsh and expressive, he maintains a certain naivety in his drawing. While some of the Fauves forsake pure colour for Cézannian preoccupations, Van Dongen pursues his experimentation with virulent colour, heralding the beginning of his international recognition. The Die Brücke painters, in particular, Max Pechstein, ask him to exhibit with them, thereby tightening the links between German Expressionism and French Fauvism. Although Montmartre still inspires many of his themes – the Moulin de la Galette, the Cirque Médrano, and the Moulin Rouge – the source begins to run dry and other subjects take precedence.

Drawing on clay: Van Dongen’s collaboration with the ceramist André Metthey

The stunning group of ceramics decorated by Van Dongen, and included in his major 1908 exhibition in Paris at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, was created in a context receptive to the decorative arts, and earns its place in the larger vogue for ceramics among French artists at the time. The artist collaborated with André Metthey (1871–1920), the ceramist who produced the clay forms Van Dongen decorated. Metthey also invited Derain, Matisse, Vlaminck, Puy, Valtat, and others to work with him in creating “Fauve ceramics.”

In 1903, when Metthey set up his studio in Asnières, in the outskirts of Paris, his aim of using locally found materials led him to discover faïence stannifère, or tin-glazed earthenware, a surface remarkable for its distinct white opacity, which provides a luminous ground for the application of bright colours. Metthey’s modern approach was very attractive to the Fauves.

Despite numerous initiatives to unify the arts and to abolish the hierarchy between major and minor arts, the distinction between artist and craftsman persisted. Metthey felt it essential to work with artists to give a new impetus to the ceramic medium. He wrote in 1907: “Instead of relegating the decorator to the role of the unskilled worker, who is condemned to continually repeat the same motif, I wanted to give the artist the role that is truly his: that of a collaborator.” He made available not only wheel-thrown or hand-built forms, but also the enamels and glazes that would yield brilliant colours. To vitrify their ceramics, Metthey fired the works in a kiln that reached up to 1200 degrees Celsius, a temperature high enough to yield the brilliant colours the artists coveted. This, combined with the symbolism and history of the ceramic medium itself, contributed to a mystique – even a “primitivism” – that Van Dongen and the Fauves would have greatly appreciated. Van Dongen exploited the decorative aspect of drawing in his ceramics most fully when their subjects were derived from his paintings. The artist turned to his skills as a draughtsman, creating daring works in a medium he adopted only temporarily.

 

1910–1914

Van Dongen made important contributions to the formal innovations of Fauvism, with portraiture at the heart of his enterprise. He also came to deliberately manipulate Fauve style and subject matter in a sweeping embrace of the vulgar, the sexually transgressive, and the exotic. In his work, style becomes stylization; transgression is transformed into mannerism, and ultimately, through portraiture, into commercial and social success. The avant-garde is always co-opted, but rarely so thoroughly by one of its own as Fauvism was by this knowing parodist of the movement. Portraiture, along with the nude female figure, is always at work in Van Dongen’s identity.

As early as 1908, and from as far away as New York, Van Dongen’s reputation was well established, as a New York Times review of his solo exhibition at Kahnweiler’s Parisian gallery attests: “Van Dongen is unquestionably one of nature’s great caricaturists … Unfortunately, his favorite models are the worst type of the underworld to be found in Montmartre. The tragedy of their lives, the baseness to which they have fallen, and the conditions that have reduced them to what they are, all find expression in cruel lines and savage color. The women he paints are for the most part horrible things, and yet inspired with such melancholy beauty that the initiated gaze in rapture for hours at a time.”

This characterization of Van Dongen’s work repeats a number of common themes, familiar criticisms of his first exhibitions in Paris: the idea of Van Dongen as a “caricaturist,” that is, someone who abstracts from, simplifies, and deforms nature; the idea of Van Dongen as a painter of women, specifically those from the underbelly of Paris, twenty-franc whores seducing sailors on leave, circus performers and actresses, artists’ models and acrobats, women on the wrong side of a moral divide; and the idea that the crudity of Van Dongen’s painting style was related to the sorry, even tragic, state of his female subjects. But if these qualities were identified by critics in order to argue for the particularity of Van Dongen’s work, they were also seen to be part of a larger, Fauve-inspired modernist expressionism, one in which an arbitrary manipulation of form intersected with a brutal, immodest, and bold eroticism.

The Thousand and One Nights

The passion for colour prompted all of the former Fauves to travel. After Collioure and Céret, Matisse was fascinated by Morocco. Van Dongen followed him there, travelling through Spain in 1910. He returned with a broader palette, a new approach to light, and a generous, profoundly sensual treatment that lent itself to modern portraits and landscapes, far removed from the style of the nineteenth-century Orientalists. Three years later, success and a new contract with Bernheim-Jeune gave him the means to discover Egypt, where he did numerous studies of women that recalled some of Delacroix’s dazzling colour effects. Other scenes, including Saïda and Fellahs, along the Nile, were executed with a brilliant, picturesque economy: brisk strokes evoke the sun-drenched colours of the Maghreb region in northwest Africa.

 

1914–1929

Van Dongen managed to seduce not only the avant-garde: everyone wanted to know this outrageous painter whose exhibitions led to “crowd scenes, shock, riots, and a general outcry.” Polite society and the demimonde, the worlds of business, politics, and journalism showered him with commissions. He became the painter of the diverse societies that made up a universe united around money, pleasure, and world-weariness. In keeping with his new specialty as a portraitist, Van Dongen modified his style, adopting a more lifelike palette and stifling the passions of his Fauvist past.
Yet Van Dongen the portraitist did not adopt a conventional naturalism. His colours are abrasive and artificial, the skin of these excessively made-up faces is shot with green, and contrasts exacerbate the acidity of the colours. In Portraits avant décès, Vlaminck wrote: “Van Dongen painted all the charm of the postwar high-class tart. Women with false nails coloured or armed with metal, bellicose, perverse greasepaint, beauties painted with a crayon and sharpened by artificial colours, spotlights, the strange attraction of the Hollywood vamps.”

Van Dongen’s photograph album

Some of the impressive number of photographic portraits of the portraitist entirely at ease in front of the camera were made by the great photographers like Jacques Henri Lartigue, his friend for almost thirty years. Others are the work of studio photographers who were in vogue between the wars, including G.-L. Manuel Frères, Lipnitzki, and Albert Harlingue. Many were taken in the artist’s studio, or rather his studios, since Van Dongen moved often, then less so. Considered alongside the body of his paintings, this iconography forms part of the documentary evidence on those years when the painter was most in the public eye, mainly because of the parties he hosted.

Van Dongen, Max Stern, and the Dominion Gallery

During his lifetime, only a handful of North American art dealers like Dr. Max Stern of Montreal’s Dominion Gallery championed Van Dongen’s art. In 1941, while Van Dongen and other French artists were in Germany at the invitation of Arno Breker and the Nazi authorities, Max Stern (1904-1987), a young Jewish art dealer of German origin, decided to set up shop in Montreal. A victim of anti-Semitism, he had been forced to give up art dealing in 1937; the majority of the collection at his father’s gallery in Düsseldorf was sold shortly afterwards – a fate that did not prevent him from appreciating and promoting the art of the Weimar traveller. Stern’s father, an art dealer with academic tastes specializing in the Old Masters, had forbidden his son to organize an exhibition of the French modern art he had discovered in Paris as a young university graduate.

“I bought all our Van Dongens except for Woman on a Sofa directly from the artist.” Between 1956 and the early 1960s, Max Stern visited Van Dongen on a number of occasions to buy works directly from him, acquiring several dozen paintings. His collection included some fine paintings. Stern was particularly proud of The Concierge at Villa Saïd, a caustic portrait then wrongly dated, and Actress Playing Hamlet.Both pictures were chosen by the artist for his famous exhibition at Galerie Charpentier in 1949. A true patron of the arts and a gifted teacher, Stern generously lent his pictures. Since Stern and his wife had no heirs, they left most of their Van Dongens and other artworks to Canadian museums, principally in Montreal, during their lifetime or bequeathed them through the Stern Foundation.

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal received five pictures, among them The Drizzle, Normandy, and The First Communicant. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has four Van Dongens, including Woman on a Sofa, Hamlet, and Parakeet, a captivating Orientalist painting with an uncommon subject, which Marie-Claire van Dongen remembers with emotion because it hung over her bed.

 

* Texts from the catalogue of the exhibition

 

Voir aussi : First Major Retrospective in North America at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Van Dongen in Montreal: The Urban Fauve Van Dongen in North America: A Montreal Tribute Chronology Some Quotations…

Van Dongen in Montreal: The Urban Fauve

 

Nathalie Bondil
Director
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Curator of the exhibition

 

Van Dongen a Fauve painter? Matisse, Dufy, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, and the others, the artists of the ephemeral Fauve “revolution” with which Van Dongen was associated, were in search of new forms. As the aftermath of the Post-Impressionist movement, the Fauves, valuing instinct over theory, were first and foremost painters of nature, whereas Van Dongen preferred the study of human nature. Van Dongen was a landscapist early on, when he was finding his way, and again at the very end, when he was no longer searching. “Can he who passes his time patiently recording the tones and shades of an apple really love life? Can he who looks at nature through the shutters of his room really understand life? Can he who limits himself to depicting the magic of the Orient really feel alive?” In this admission to Des Courières, Van Dongen barely concealed his distaste for Matisse, the ruling Fauve and rival, who happened to feel the same way about him. Although not portraitists, the Fauves did on occasion paint figures. These rare examples appear reified, subjected to an exercise in formal analysis. They remembered the shirt collar in the portrait of Ambroise Vollard upon which Cézanne lavished such attention, much to the surprise of his model. The subject of the painting is the painting itself, “a flat surface covered in colours arranged in a certain order,” as Maurice Denis once wrote. With the exception of Matisse, portraits remained on the sidelines for most of the Fauves; frequently accessories, often bucolic, they provided a pretext for the unleashing of colour, bathed in natural light. Figures rarely denounced social ills. The Fauves’ inventory includes Vlaminck’s Portrait of a Woman from Le Rat Mort, occasionally some gypsies, Spaniards, and heavily made-up prostitutes – society’s rabble. Van Dongen, always provocative, once stated, “I’m like a cow. I look: I paint the way I see.” He reclaimed his animal nature, the artistic instinct, colour as vehicle of emotion, with pagan joy. He is “the bestial and resplendent Van Dongen” that Élie Faure boasts of, a role that pleased him and that he wore like a mask. If Van Dongen is on the margins of the Fauves’ official history, as issued by Duthuit and therefore by definition Matissian, it is largely because his work expresses something else entirely. Van Dongen was not alone in claiming to be an anarchist given that it was in vogue at the time, as he himself admitted. Nevertheless, he genuinely had a social conscience somewhere between denunciation and sarcasm. He was a critic of double-edged mores, “a moralist of his time” for Vaudoyer, a “former Fauve, and the most ferocious” for Henriot, an idealist perhaps, a nihilist who became a misanthrope. For Van Dongen, the subject defined the man. In the artist’s enormous oeuvre, coherence and consistency may be found in his themes while his stylistic changes, occasionally punctuated by an affected oddness or a formulaic facility, could disconcert critics. It is the ambiguity of a “savage and lowly foreign” artist who depicts an artificially illuminated world of night – the Van Gogh of the Arles taverns – quite different from the sunny landscapes of the Fauves. Closer to the German Expressionists, his paths to virtue (cat. 189) resemble Kirchner’s Berlin sidewalks; his Paris of the Moulin Rouge and the bals musettes are reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec; his acrobats and old clowns echo Picasso; his father’s paradise (cat. 217) is the heavenly brothel of Casegemas; like Degas, he loved irony, dance, cabaret, horses, women and their hats, but he enjoyed them all without complication. A draughtsman worth rediscovering, he was for many years the inspired illustrator of those adrift: unwed mothers, prostitutes, nocturnal revellers. Speaking about the Roaring Twenties, Vlaminck described Van Dongen as “the historian of postwar cynical debauchery.” He became “the painter of elegant neuroses” for some, a Van Dyck of the high-society salons for others. In his studio, he received “Tout Paris, Tout New York, and Tout Everybody,” drawing both money and models from this wealth of contacts… a “Factory” of the cocktail age.

This is the Van Dongen we wanted to show to Montreal within an exhibition of paintings enhanced by drawings, ceramics, prints, documents, and even music. In his studio, the reputedly largest phonograph in Paris belted out the music of the day: Montmartre’s Moulin Rouge and the bals musettes, where dances included the licentious La Mattchiche (cat. 78), the bal nègre, and Tango of the Archangel (cat. 215). Van Dongen, an urban Fauve, captured the psychological portrait of a fierce, frivolous, artificial society. The places of pleasure – Paris, Venice, Deauville, or Monte Carlo – are the backdrop for this theatre of manners. Almost like an obsession are the portraits of lovers, a whisper of misogyny, coquettes, Parisiennes, “Orientals,” and other creatures of excess: “I love beautiful women who arouse carnal desire… and painting allows me to possess all of that completely.” Between tragedy and comedy, social vanity and misery, the ephemeral humanity parading across Van Dongen’s work reveals the subtle humanism of an artist whose ostentation, masquerades, and paradoxes demurely disguise a complex, clear, and pessimistic sensibility.

 

Foreword of the exhibition’s catalogue

 

See also: First Major Retrospective in North America at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts The Exhibition’s Themes Van Dongen in North America: A Montreal Tribute Chronology Some Quotations…

Van Dongen in North America: A Montreal Tribute

 

Nathalie Bondil
Director
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Curator of the exhibition

 

“What’s wrong? Mrs. Stern bought most of the Van Dongens and, quite rightly, doesn’t want to sell them – as she has often told both of you!” The famous Montreal art dealer Dr. Max Stern has lost his temper with his assistants, who in his absence granted a client a one-month purchase option on three of the painter’s pictures. “Even if she paid five thousand dollars for that option, you had no right to accept that!” Raising the stakes, the owner of the famous Dominion Gallery added: “Not even Mr. Mellon and Mr. Rockefeller were allowed to buy a single painting.” The mere mention of these names is an eloquent reminder of the clientele of the highly respected Dr. Stern. “We could very easily sell Van Dongens in Europe if we so decided! As you said so yourselves, the going rate is now between twenty and fifty thousand dollars and prices will rise a lot further.” Was it merely for mercantile reasons that the dealer was loathe to sell? Or was it to vindicate the painter, who believed he would earn a lot of money after he died? After a long tirade, heaping sales advice on his employees, Dr. Stern concluded, “Mrs. Stern is extremely annoyed about the Van Dongens. All the dealers have asked us for them but she loves them as if they were her children.”1

Although during the Roaring Twenties, “Tout Paris, Tout New York, and Tout Everybody”2 flocked to Van Dongen’s studio every Monday night (“What a mixture! Americans, Russian grand dukes with extraordinary women… Free admission!”3), his splendid notoriety in Europe had few repercussions across the Atlantic. Several large society portraits hung in American collections (for example, Portrait of W. S. Davenport, undated, The Brooklyn Museum, (cat. 197); Portrait of E. Berry Wall, 1938, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh), even though the “King of Dudes,” as he was called in New York, had left his country to live in the Hôtel Meurice in Paris. During his lifetime, a handful of North American art dealers like Dr. Max Stern championed his art. The 1965 exhibition at the Leonard Hutton Galleries4 in New York included a few commercial lithographs and thirty, often remarkable, paintings, all dating from 1900 to 1925 except for Brigitte Bardot, his portrait of the French sex symbol of the moment. Most of the works were for sale, apart from The Singer Modjesko (cat. 95), loaned by the Museum of Modern Art (donated by Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Rubel in 1955). His portrait of the celebrated transvestite soprano became the best known of the few Van Dongens in North American public collections and was shown at his major retrospectives. The second most famous work, Souvenir of the Russian Opera Season (cat. 140), was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada in 1966. It is all the more distressing to note that museums in the United States have recently parted with several Van Dongens (for reasons both good and bad), now that our aim is to place them in the public eye once again. In fact, there have been no exhibitions devoted to Van Dongen in North America since 1971! Organized by the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson, this “First Retrospective Exhibition held in America”5 then travelled to the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. The exhibition, whose pioneering nature should be emphasized, comprised 110 works, including sixty-nine paintings of greatly varying quality, a number of them loaned by Dolly van Dongen. The main advantage of this selection was to trace the location of Van Dongens on American soil, 13, including eleven pictures from the “Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern, Dominion Gallery, Montreal,” who, with the painter’s daughter, were by far the most important lenders.

In 1941, while Van Dongen and other French artists were in Germany at the invitation of Arno Breker and the Nazi authorities, Max Stern (1904-1987),6 a young Jewish art dealer of German origin, decided to set up shop in Montreal. A victim of anti-Semitism, he had been forced to give up art dealing in 1937; the majority of the collection at his father’s gallery in Düsseldorf was sold shortly afterwards. He left for London, and soon afterwards Great Britain declared war on Germany. A German citizen, and therefore classified as “a civilian alien,” he was interned for two years in Canada, a fate which did not prevent him from appreciating and championing the art of the Weimar traveller. Max Stern’s father, an art dealer with academic tastes specializing in the Old Masters, had forbidden his son to organize an exhibition of the French modern art he had discovered in Paris as a young university graduate. Max Stern never forgot his stay in Paris in 1928, and the art market had by then confirmed the value of the artists he met there. He chose to settle in “French Canada,” in Montréal, a francophile city and cultural capital since the nineteenth century. Although he sold Canadian “living art,” his gallery also introduced the Canadian public to Picasso, Léger, and Kandinsky at the height of Duplessist obscurantism in Quebec. He knew Moore and Arp, whose sculptures he sold, and was also the exclusive Canadian agent for Rodin casts. These pioneering exhibitions established the Dominion Gallery as one of Canada’s major venues.

In August 1956, on one of his many trips to Europe, where he met artists such as Pascin, Foujita, and Valadon, Van Dongen invited him to his rue de Courcelles “studio-cathedral” in Paris for the first time. During this period, the last of the Fauves (Vlaminck died two years later) was benefiting both from his status as survivor and the movement’s critical reappraisal. “The Fauve bomb,” as Van Dongen called it, “was fabricated by literary hacks and only became a bomb after fifty years of memories. By which time it was barely more than a firecracker.”7 Although Max Stern was hardly daring in taking an interest in Van Dongen, he was nonetheless one of the only North American dealers to do so (he read Élie Faure in French), at a time when the other Fauves were in great demand and being reviewed according to the official, largely Matissian, line. His taste for figurative art, sensual female subjects, and vividly coloured landscapes also ran counter to the prevailing artistic climate dominated by abstraction and Greenberg’s dogma. “I bought all our Van Dongens except for Woman on a Sofa (cat. 208) directly from the artist.”8 Between 1956 and the early 1960s, Max Stern visited Van Dongen several times to buy works directly from him. Their relations must have been cordial because he confided to Dufy’s heirs: “Kees van Dongen intends to send his son to Canada soon.”9 Several dozen paintings were bought by the dealer: still lifes with flowers (Arômes [Aromas], Roses et muguet [Roses and Lily of the Valley] ) and more or less late landscapes (Sassy-Orne, Sur la plage [On the Beach], Avenue Foch Paris, “Blue Grass Races”). They were resold to a new Canadian and American clientele, while Dr. and Mrs. Stern kept seventeen works for their personal collection: “We haven’t yet sold one of our Van Dongen pictures. We continue to buy a lot, but we try to buy high quality works.”10 Although in hindsight, these works are clearly of uneven quality, the collection included some fine paintings. Stern was particularly proud of The Concierge at Villa Saïd (cat. 193), a caustic portrait then wrongly dated about 1902–03, and Actress Playing Hamlet (cat. 200), who, with her flamboyant orange hair could well be a homage to Sarah Bernhardt.11 Both pictures were chosen by the artist for his famous exhibition at Galerie Charpentier in 1949.
A true patron of the arts and a gifted teacher, Stern generously lent his pictures. Since the couple had no heirs, they left most of their Van Dongens and other artworks to Canadian museums, principally in Montreal, during their lifetime or bequeathed them through the Stern Foundation. Dahlias went to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, and two paintings, including Spring (fig. 29), to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston. Van Dongen painted Spring twice: “The scene takes place in Normandy. A timid man is plucking up the courage to propose to a young woman.” In the first version, a priest is waiting in front of the church in the distance. Max Stern pointed out to him that in the second version, the priest had disappeared. The painter replied that the priest, tired of waiting for the man to make up his mind, had simply gone back into the church.12 The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art received five pictures, among them The Drizzle, Normandy (cat. 229) and The First Communicant (cat. 230). The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has four Van Dongens, including Woman on Sofa, Hamlet, and Parakeet (cat. 156), a captivating Orientalist painting with an uncommon subject, which Marie-Claire van Dongen remembers with emotion because it hung over her bed. Not counting the works in private collections, a dozen paintings were donated to Canadian museums, ensuring both an unquestionable taste and an increasing reputation for his work. And today, Monsieur van Dongen would not be displeased to discover that museums are no longer “coat hangers, in which there are clothes with no one in them.”

 

Excerpt from the exhibition’s catalogue

My heartfelt thanks to Charlie Hill, Cyndie Campbell, and Philip Dombowskyof the National Gallery of Canada, who made it possible for me to consult archival material on Max Stern.

1. Dr. Stern to Gauvreau and Jacobs, July 27, 1961, Max Stern fonds,
   National Gallery of Canada Archives.

2. Van Dongen, quoted in Louis Chaumeil, Van Dongen: l’homme
   et l’artiste, la vie et l’oeuvre (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1967), p. 176.

3. Paul Guth, “Van Dongen,” La Revue de Paris, June 1949.

4. A Comprehensive Exhibition of Paintings 1900–1925 by Van Dongen,
   November 16 – December 18, 1965, Leonard Hutton Galleries,
   New York. Of course, there was the exhibition in 1953 at
   the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, which is still working on
   the painter’s catalogue raisonné. Also noteworthy to a lesser extent
   are the Perls Galleries in New York and the Maxwell Galleries
   in San Francisco.

5. Cornelis Theodorus Marie Van Dongen 1977–1968, The University
   of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, and Nelson Gallery-Atkins
   Museum, Kansas City, 1971. The catalogue republished the only
   article by Denys Sutton, “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Apollo 93,
   no. 107 (January 1971): pp. 36-43. American art history having
   passed Van Dongen over, we have invited several specialists in
   Fauve painting to give their opinion here.

6. See Max Stern: Montreal Dealer and Patron (Montreal: Montreal
   Museum of Fine Arts / Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2004).

7. Van Dongen, quoted in Chaumeil, Van Dongen, p. 90.

8. Dr. Stern to McCurdy, December 4, 1970, Max Stern fonds,
   National Gallery of Canada Archives.

9. Dr. Stern to Mr. and Mrs. Jean Dufy, April 28, 1961, Max Stern fonds,
   National Gallery of Canada Archives.

10. Dr. Stern to Jacobs, October 21, 1964, Max Stern fonds, National
    Gallery of Canada Archives.

11. This suggestion comes from Janet M. Brooke.

12. Dr. Stern to McCurdy, December 4, 1970, Max Stern fonds,
    National Gallery of Canada Archives.

13. Paul Guth, “Van Dongen,” La Revue de Paris, June 1949.

 

Voir aussi : First Major Retrospective in North America at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts The Exhibition’s Themes Van Dongen in Montreal: The Urban Fauve Chronology Some Quotations…

Chronology

 

1877–1891
January 26: Cornelis Theodorus Marie “Kees” van Dongen is born into a strict, upper middle-class family in Delfshaven, on the outskirts of Rotterdam. His father runs a malt-house where Kees works as an apprentice while continuing secondary school.

1892
He attends evening classes in drawing at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Rotterdam, directed by Jan Striening.

1894–1895
Studies Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and contemporary painters such as Breitner and the Hague School painter Jozef Israels.

1896
Even before leaving for Paris, Van Dongen is a member of left-wing anarchist and Symbolist circles.

1897
On July 12, Van Dongen goes to Paris.  He is soon is obliged to do odd jobs to make ends meet: wrestler, fairground roustabout, and penny portraitist.

1898
He meets Augusta “Guus” Preitinger, whom he will marry three years later.

1899
In October, he returns to Paris to join Guus and settles in Montmartre.

1900–1903
Most of his income is derived from drawings for Parisian illustrated satirical newspapers (Le Rire, L’Indiscret, Gil Blas, Frou-Frou), and in the Netherlands for De Ware Jacob.

1904
In February Van Dongen sends six canvases to the twentieth Salon des Indépendants.
In November, urged by Picasso, Vlaminck, and Derain, Van Dongen shows two canvases at the second Salon d’Automne, which prompt several commentaries in the press.

He presents his first solo exhibition, at Galerie Vollard, marking his entry on the Parisian artistic scene.

1905
Van Dongen often goes to the Cirque Médrano with Pablo Picasso, and is now well integrated into the circle of Montmartre artists.

Van Dongen’s daughter, Dolly, is born on April 18, 1905.

He shows two canvases at the third Salon d’Automne. Room VII, where the work of Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck, characterized by pure, vivid colour, causes a scandal and sparks a furore in the press, including the resounding critique in which Louis Vauxcelles famously derides them as the “cage aux Fauves.”

1906
In early 1906 he moves to the Bateau-Lavoir, where Picasso, Fernande Olivier, Max Jacob, Pierre Mac Orlan, and André Salmon also live.

1907
Van Dongen travels to Rotterdam and is charged with gathering a hundred works by Van Gogh for Galerie Bernheim-Jeune for an exhibition in 1908.

Kahnweiler opens a gallery on rue Vignon and buys several works by Van Dongen.

He participates in group exhibitions at Galerie Berthe Weill and Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.

1908
The year is marked by Van Dongen’s first exhibitions abroad, heralding the beginning of his international recognition. He shows at Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf. The Die Brücke painters contact him to exhibit with them. In the spring, he shows at the fifteenth Berlin Secession, at the first Golden Fleece exhibition in Moscow, and at the Salon des Indépendants.

1909
He moves into a new apartment at 6 rue Saulnier, opposite the Folies-Bergère.

He attends the first performance by Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet.

1910
He continues to participate in group exhibitions abroad: Berlin, Kiev, Prague, Budapest, Saint Petersburg, Riga, Düsseldorf and Munich.
Bernheim-Jeune buys forty paintings, enabling him to travel. He goes to Spain, then Morocco during the winter of 1910-11.

1912
He moves into a large studio near Montparnasse, where he hosts lavish receptions and costume parties.

He takes part in numerous exhibitions abroad, now famous from Cologne to Moscow, participating in the second exhibition organized by the Jack of Diamonds group, and from Brussels (Galerie Georges Giroux) to London, where he shows with the Allied Artists Association at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries.

1913
Van Dongen meets Marchesa Luisa Casati, muse of the Parisian elite who introduces him into the high society of which he will quickly become the chronicler.

In March, he leaves for Egypt, and then spends the summer with his family at Deauville.

He shows the famous Tableau at the eleventh Salon d’Automne, which the police take  down immediately. The ensuing scandal definitively seals Van Dongen’s fame.

In 1913, Van Dongen moves into a vast two storey house at 33 rue Denfert-Rochereau, where Paris high society flocks to attend his parties or have portraits painted.

1914
In June, Guus and Dolly leave Paris for Rotterdam. The outbreak of war prevents Van Dongen from joining them. A Dutch national and therefore ineligible for mobilization in France, he stays in Paris.

1916
The war triggers the collapse of the art market, and in March, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune terminates its contract with Van Dongen.

At a reception, he meets Léa “Jasmy” Jacob, sales director of the couture house Jenny.

1917
Van Dongen leaves the studio in rue Denfert- Rochereau to move with Jasmy into a large townhouse at 29 Villa Saïd, near the Bois de Boulogne.

1918
The war now over, Guus and Dolly return to Paris, but Kees ends his relationship with Guus.
He illustrates Dr. Mardrus’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights.

1919
From 1919 to 1928, Van Dongen shows only portraits at the Salons.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler writes the preface for the catalogue of his solo exhibition at Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf.

1920
He shows at the first postwar Salon des Indépendants, and at the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts.

He paints the portrait of Charles Rappoport, who introduces him to Anatole France.

He organizes the first exhibition in the Villa Saïd and decides to exhibit there from now on.

1921
His portrait of Anatole France shown at Salon de la Nationale causes a huge scandal, and his painting Maria Ricotti in “L’Enjôleuse” is taken down from the Salon d’Automne.

Leading figures in the arts, finance, and Paris society pose for Van Dongen.

1922
He buys an apartment at 5 rue Juliette-Lamber in Jasmy’s name. The parties hosted in the townhouse help seal Van Dongen’s reputation as an elegant socialite.

1923
He regularly shows portraits at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon de la Nationale and later at the Tuileries. In his studio he shows a series of pictures painted on the Côte d’Azur, and later, some Parisian pictures.

1925
He illustrates Victor Margueritte’s novel La Garçonne.

1926
He is made a knight of the Légion d’Honneur.

1927
He writes an autobiography titled Van Dongen Recounts the Life of Rembrandt and Writes, on this Subject, about Holland, Women and Art.

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is the first museum to organize a Van Dongen retrospective.

His relationship with Jasmy Jacob ends, but he continues to live with her at rue Juliette-Lamber. It is now his daughter Dolly who organizes most of the receptions.

He receives the Order of the Crown (Belgium).

1928
During a second trip to Egypt he paints several canvases. His outlook has changed: he sells less, exhibits little, and withdraws into himself, painting only bouquets of flowers and landscapes for himself.

1929
The Wall Street crash marks the end of the Roaring Twenties. Portrait commissions are now few and far between.

He obtains French citizenship.

1934
Van Dongen moves into an apartment at 75 rue de Courcelles, and continues to refuse to sell his paintings to prevent his prices falling.

1935
As the art market is still sluggish, he goes to the United States to make new contacts.

1936
He receives two prestigious portrait commissions, from King Leopold III of Belgium and the Aga Khan. He is again showered with honours and commissions from the entertainment world.

1937
First exhibitions in North America: at the René Gimpel Gallery in New York, and at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

1938
In Cannes, he meets Marie-Claire Huguen, a young woman from Brittany.

1940
Germany invades France in June. In Brittany with Marie-Claire, now pregnant, Van Dongen hurries to Paris, which is soon occupied.

Birth of Jean-Marie, his second child. The couple moves to Garches.

1941
In November, he and other artists, including Dunoyer de Segonzac, Derain, Vlaminck, Despiau, and Belmondo, go on a one-week trip to Germany organized by the Third Reich’s official sculptor, Arno Breker.

1942
Galerie Charpentier organizes a retrospective, the most comprehensive so far.

1943
A retrospective is held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux.

1945
After Paris is liberated, Van Dongen and those who accompanied him on the 1941 trip to Germany are temporarily banned from showing at the Salon d’Automne. He returns to Deauville, where he resumes contacts with his wealthy and famous prewar clientele and again becomes the “king of the boardwalk.”

1946
Illustrates Henry de Montherlant’s La Lépreuse, and will produce numerous book illustrations during the next years.

1949
Retrospective at Galerie Charpentier, which travels to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, where the police take down several nudes.
At the end of the year, Marie-Claire buys a villa in Monaco, which Van Dongen renames “Le Bateau-Lavoir” and where he will live for the rest of his life with his wife and son. From now on he spends the winter in Monaco, the summer in Deauville, and spring and fall in Paris.

1953
Marries Marie-Claire.

Exhibits at Wildenstein in New Yorkand at Galerie de Berri in Paris.

1958
Paints the portrait of Brigitte Bardot.

1967
To celebrate his ninetieth birthday, the Musée national d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris organizes a sixty-four work retrospective, shown at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam the same year.

Publication of the monograph by Louis Chaumeil.

1968
Kees van Dongen dies in Monaco on May 28 at the age of ninety-one. Because of the May uprising in France, his death goes largely unnoticed in the Paris press.

 

See also: First Major Retrospective in North America at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts The Exhibition’s Themes Van Dongen in Montreal: The Urban Fauve Van Dongen in North America: A Montreal Tribute Some Quotations…

Some Quotations…

 

“I went into the fields and made drawings of the horses who looked bit sad like I was, but who had very beautiful eyes.”
Van Dongen

 “The area was inhabited by smugglers. You would meet the most diverse people, Jews, Huguenots, descendents of French immigrants, huge numbers of fellows named Jacques, François, and Clément. You were free there, really, no laws at all (…) We lived in the middle of a polder. The boats passed right by our windows. Sometimes, it looked as if the boats were crossing the meadows under full sail. We were always living in the water.”
Van Dongen

“To Rotterdam, mainly to the red-light district. At that time, it was where all the sailors in the world came ashore. Ah, it was so colourful! Sailors, women, barrel organs. It was a really extraordinary spectacle. They were the only places where I could live on almost nothing. And, of course, they were picturesque, everything was full of life there. The women sat behind their large windows exactly like in shops, waiting, motionless.”
Van Dongen

“I thought it would be better to work as much as possible for the common good, for the people as a whole and not for a few deliberate or unwitting rogues. This is why I draw in magazines and have abandoned painting; I just do a bit now and then for myself.”
Van Dongen

“To make a living, I drew portraits of people strolling in the squares, and Picasso and I spread out our canvases on the ground near the [Cirque] Médrano, everything at a hundred sous. After a few years of Indépendants and tarmac, the Salon d’Automne finally opened its doors. We crept in to set off a bomb: the Fauves. A bomb that actually became a bomb only after fifty years of memories. Then it was hardly more than a firecracker.”
Van Dongen

“Confronted with my nude women in gaudy shawls, the critics spat ink. But it wasn’t really out of love of strident colour that I clashed reds and greens. I didn’t have enough money to pay for professional models, so I went into cafés, where girls agreed to pose for a few hours for a cup of coffee. And these nice kids wore their garish makeup like the sign of their trade. That’s how a reputation is born and how one becomes a Fauve.”
Van Dongen

“The inspired Kropotkin of the Bateau-Lavoir.”
Pablo Picasso

 

1905-1910

“How can I introduce myself to you? As a white negro perhaps?”
Van Dongen

“His noblest and most beautiful colors are made prostitutes to the disgraces of the city, which he perceives with the eye of a stranger.”
Guillaume Apollinaire

“That big devil with the blond beard and sardonic smile was not just anybody, but a real character. He seemed to be everywhere, always wearing sandals, his toes sticking out of the holes in his socks, in every neighbourhood, seedy or posh, chatting up pretty young things of all types. And even from that gangling pose sometimes affected, there emerged a certain distinction. Van Dongen, a very nice fellow, is in essence a painter.”
Berthe Weill

“‘The phosphorous yellows… the electric blues’ of his paintings were perfectly suited to contemporary painting’s representation of the beings and acts under the acetylene lights of the circus.”
Marius-Ary Leblond

“This painter was the first to use the sharp brightness of electric illumination, adding it to the shades.”
Guillaume Apollinaire

“The Moulin de la Galette ball in full swing at midnight. […] “The canvas shows a gaggle of bareheaded girlsand their tough-looking companions: this amiable crowd wanders around, waltzes, mills about, lives; it is the ruffians’ ball. The chandeliers, the electric light bulbs – rings of Naples, ochre and cadmium yellow – saffron and plum-coloured Chinese lanterns, everything is flooded with a haze of light and heat.”
Louis Vauxelles

 “But in 1913 the scandal was genuine. I had sent a ‘Nude with Shawl’ to the Salon. The day before the opening, the district police superintendent came and took it down. My young woman was put in a cellar and cops were posted in front of the door to stop nosy people who had the gall to go down. All because I had painted a woman with pubic hair. If the vagina were located in the middle of the face, where would we put modesty? And for once it wasn’t a ‘girl,’ it was my wife.”
Van Dongen

“European or exotic – according to his whim – Van Dongen has a feeling of his own, and a violent one too, about Orientalism. Such painting exhales something like opium and amber.”
Guillaume Apollinaire

“I love anything that shines, sparkling precious stones, shimmering fabrics, beautiful women who arouse carnal desire… and painting allows me to possess all of that completely because what I paint is often the haunting realization of a dream or an obsession.”
Van Dongen

“Van Dongen deliberately gave an essential role to electric light. He placed a woman beneath the cone of a projector, creating the impression of her under a bell, capable of living only in this artificial milieu.”
Paul Gsell

 

1910-1914

“I know the story of each of these women. Deeply tragic stories. They have experienced life in all its facets… I can’t help them by portraying them with garish colours, but perhaps I can express the intensity of their lives.”
Van Dongen

 “He had been the historian of postwar cynical debauchery… portraits of chorus girls and beauty queens, high-strung socialites, foreign malcontents, and crazed exotic types.”
Maurice de Vlaminck

“The bourgeois women are stupid and insignificant, and the nouveaux riche are boring, but the paintings I do of them are masterpieces.”
Van Dongen

“Van Dongen appears like the cocky Saint-Simon of these convulsionaries of jazz.”
Paul Guth

“Society men and women wanted me to paint their portraits. I slightly exaggerated my models’ features to bring out their character. I think they were a bit fearful.”
Van Dongen

“The essential rule is to make women tall and above all slender. After that, all you have to do is exaggerate the size of their jewels. They willbe delighted.”
Van Dongen

 

1914-1929

“The world is a big garden full of flowers, full of weeds… The charm of our times is that one can blend everything, mix everything together: it really is the Cocktail Era.”
Van Dongen

“Van Dongen is certainly a history painter in the best sense of the term… In his own way he is a moralist, who smilingly reveals without insisting – there is no need – on all the absurdities of his contemporaries.”
Édouard Des Courières

“The elegant woman – at least one wishing to be in the vanguard of fashion – has neither breasts, nor hips, nor hindquarters… her flapper-style shift dress ends at the calf; her neck is shaved, she is dripping with baroque pearls and handcrafted wooden necklaces… a cigarette holder thirty centimetres long protrudes from lips painted a bloody purple; her cheeks are
coated with powder, a blue-tinged halo encircles her eyes. With his cruel brush, Van Dongen captures this androgynous figure for posterity.”
Jacques Chastenet

“Although not a great beauty, she was a dynamic woman of impeccable breeding. She had the bearing of a top model, dressed extravagantly, and in everything she wore, she looked stunning. She had numerous affairs and had even been nicknamed ‘Jasmy the Divine.’ Because of her fiery temper, she had also been christened ‘Jasmy the Terrifying.’ Van Dongen and Jasmy knew immediately that they were made for each another and set out together to conquer Paris.”
Jean-Mélas Kyriazi

“Van Dongen has moved into his new townhouse in rue Juliette-Lamber. That is, he has transported three pieces of furniture and a hundred pictures: the Cannes canvases, the Egypt canvases, a lot of big ones, huge portraits hung everywhere, on the staircase and in all the rooms of the large house. No longer any need for Van Dongen to have exhibitions, to have a ‘dealer.’ His canvases will remain there and all the snobbish clients at his future soirées will come to see them there. Apart from his completely red bedroom and a small room in pure ultramarine, the entire, furnitureless house is white, filled only with space.”
Jacques Lartigue

“People came wearing tails, in décolleté dresses. I just wore a sweater. There was a one-man band. When the crowd became too much, I took off. What a mixture! Americans, Russian grand dukes with extraordinary women. A famous French cocotte who, legend has it, had the entire Russian fleet in pearls. Rappoport and the king of Romania. One half brought the other – ‘Free admission!’”
Van Dongen

“I have been reproached for loving the world, for being mad about luxury, elegance, for being a snob disguised as a bohemian – or a bohemian disguised as a snob. Well, it’s true! I passionately love the life of my time; it’s so animated, so feverish…”
Van Dongen

“Van Dongen living. He hardly paints at all anymore. Is he a little bit dead too? I am at his place. Despite his laughing eyes, despite his smiling philosophy, he speaks to me sadly. He is disgusted, having seen that in only a few months his old pictures from the ‘Fauve’ period, those that throughout his life were either little known or scorned, are now selling, not like hot cakes, but like fancy gateaux! Whereas his later paintings, including all his great and famous portraits, are still unsold, unwanted, stacked in a corner of his studio.”
Jacques Lartigue

 

See also: First Major Retrospective in North America at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts The Exhibition’s Themes Van Dongen in Montreal: The Urban Fauve Van Dongen in North America: A Montreal Tribute Chronology