Lot 300 D

Kees van Dongen was from the Netherlands and settled in Paris in the late 19th century. He was one of the Fauves; Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck were regular visitors to his studio, and his work too is characterised by a strongly colourful, primitivistic style of painting.
In 1907/1908 Kahnweiler and Bernheim-Jeune exhibited van Dongen's work, and in an ensuing discussion with Harry Graf Kessler the idea developed of realising particularly succinct motifs in the form of ceramics. Ceramic plates were created in the workshop of André Metthey; among other subjects, these featured the portrait of the soprano “Modjesco” and the female half-length nude “L'Idole”. Kessler alone probably ordered 16 plates. A total of around 40 ceramic pieces were created (Hopmans, op. cit., p. 172, pp. 176 f., cat. nos. 88, 91). Kahnweiler presented van Dongen's ceramic works in his gallery in 1911. During those same years, presumably at the behest of the art dealer Vollard, the artists Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck also worked with ceramics - not least in order to provide this technique with a better reputation. Such works nonetheless remained isolated cases and are scarcely documentable today. Accordingly, the present ceramic painting “Femme nue au lierre” is a rarity.
An additional ceramic image is known from photographs of the interior of van Dongen's Villa Saïd in Paris, and that work seems like a pendant to our own: both are placed in a simple wooden frame and depict a central female nude on a dark ground surrounded by a simplified grapevine decoration (see comparative illustration). The grapevine situates the undressed female figure lasciviously grasping her long, flowing hair within the context of bucolic themes. In the same period, Henri Matisse created a ceramic triptych for the winter garden of Hohenhof - the house of the Folkwang's founder, Karl Ernst Osthaus. In that work, the bucolic-bacchanalian theme is formulated even more explicitly with “Fawn Discovering a Nymph” and “Dancing Nymphs” (see comparative illustration). The mutual influence between van Dongen and Matisse seems distinctive. Similarly, Kessler - who commissioned the ceramic plates - and Osthaus - who commissioned the ceramic images - presumably also knew one another well through Henry van de Velde, who worked as an architect for both of them. Van Dongen's as well as Matisse's ceramic paintings are characterised by their central female figures surrounded by a grapevine; in their dancing and erotic pose, they symbolise the proverbial “joie de vivre” of both artists' work.