Kees Van Dongen

Kees van Dongen – Relocation to Paris, first solo exhibition with Ambroise Vollard

Kees van Dongen was born Cornelis Theodorus Marie van Dongen on 26 January 1877 in Delfshaven, Rotterdam. The son of a brewer, he studied at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam from 1892 to 1894 where he also met his later wife Augusta “Guus” Preitinger and whom he followed to Paris for a number of months in 1897. The stimulating atmosphere of the French cultural metropolis fascinated him greatly, and so he decided in December 1899 to settle there permanently. During this time, Kees van Dongen eared his living as a cartoonist for various satirical magazines. In 1901 he married Augusta, moving with her in a gypsy caravan to Montmartre, and in 1904 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard enabled him to have his first solo exhibition. Just one year later, van Dongen was one of the participants at the famous Salon d’Automne, even though he could not exhibit in Room VII, which later gave its name to Fauvism as cage aux fauves (“cage of wild beasts”). Kees van Dongen’s early years, like many other artists, were marked by a great love of experimentation that drove him from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. His daughter Dolly was born in 1905, whom he often used as a model for his paintings. 

Encounter with Picasso and his circle, connection with the Fauvists

The encounter with Pablo Picasso drove Kees van Dongen to move to the neighbouring studio barrack of Bateau-Lavoir which was inhabited by the Spanish master and his partner Fernande Olivier. There he had intensive interaction with the circle around Picasso, to which Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, Max Jacob, Georges Braque and Juan Gris belonged. Despite these fruitful contacts, Kees van Dongen eventually turned with deep conviction to the Fauvists and gathered his own group of kindred spirits around him including Charles Camoin, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain and Henri Matisse. The German painter Max Pechstein invited van Dongen to Dresden to take part in an exhibition of the artist group Die Brücke, even though it was soon clear that the artistic understandings lay far apart. Thus, the planned collaboration did not take place to the desired extent, although van Dongen did become a member of the association. 

Breakthrough as portrait painter, a dissolute life

The 1920s were a time of great success for Kees van Dongen who fulfilled numerous commissions for female portraits in the Fauvist style. From then on, he moved in the fashionable circles of Montparnasse and finally took French citizenship in 1929. He had already divorced his first wife Guus in 1921, and in the frenzy of his rise, van Dongen indulged in a decadent life, held masked balls, and was introduced to the elite of society by his mistress Jasmy Jacon. At the invitation of Arno Breker, he visited National Socialist Germany, leading to accusations by occupied France of collaboration with the enemy. In 1938, he met his second wife Marie-Claire Huguen, whom he did not marry, however, until 1953. Van Dongen moved to Monaco in 1957, but kept his studio in Paris.

Kees van Dongen died in Monte Carlo on 28 May 1968.