Kees Van Dongen
25 March - 17 July 2011
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| Kees Van Dongen
Le Doigt su la joue, 1910 |
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KEES VAN DONGEN
Fauve, Anarchist and Socialite
The Musée d’Art Moderne is offering a fresh appreciation of Kees Van
Dongen (1877–1968), the dazzling, disconcerting painter who made his
reputation in Paris in the 1920s. This is a comprehensive look at a
multifaceted personality: the socially-conscious Dutchman ever ready to
caricature and denounce, the avant-garde artist and iconic Fauve, and
one of the Roaring Twenties' leading figures on the trendy Paris scene.
The exhibition includes and adds to "All eyes on Kees Van Dongen", shown
at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (18 September 2010 –
23 January 2011).
Twenty years after "Van Dongen: the Painter", the retrospective
organised in conjunction with the Boijmans Museum in 1990, this
exhibition centres on the success that came with his Paris period. The
latest research and exhibitions have given us a clearer idea of the
inventiveness and artistic strategy of a painter who dazzles with his
discoveries while disconcerting with the diversity of his
subject-matter.
The exhibition title suggests not so much a succession of periods as an
overlay of artistic poses: the Dutch rebel mixing in anarchist circles
around 1895 and ever ready to caricature and denounce; and the
avant-garde artist playing a very personal role in the Fauvist movement
and a decisive one in its dissemination abroad, in Holland, Germany and
Russia. The "urbane" Fauve Kees Van Dongen focused on the female body,
and in particular on the face made-up to the point of deformation under
the electric lighting he borrowed from Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec and
which became, in a way, his trademark.
Colour made Van Dongen the guiding spirit of Fauvism, the colour he
revivified with his trips to Morocco, Spain and Egypt and his
reinvention of the Orient in the early 1910s. Yet Paris remained his
dominant subject: the Montmartre of the early 20th century, where he
would meet Picasso and Derain and which would charm him with its
working-class vitality and vie de bohème; Montparnasse before and after
the First World War, where he was one of the main driving forces with
his depictions of a new, more eroticised woman; and then the Paris of
the Roaring Twenties – the "cocktail period", he called it – when he
would devote himself exclusively to the new elite, to now forgotten
literary men and women and stars of stage and screen, anticipating by
forty years the world of Andy Warhol's "beautiful people". The poses are
wildly overdone, with melodramatic costumes and props laying bare all
the artificiality of models who existed solely in terms of the roles
they played.
Van Dongen's success – akin to that of Foujita – and his involvement
with the avant-garde made him a special kind of artist, whose verve and
freedom still fascinate.
The exhibition comprises some 90 paintings and drawings, together with
ceramics, dating from 1895 to the early 1930s. Designed by the Boijmans
Van Beuningen Museum and organised in association with the Musée d’Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris, it includes loans from major national and
international institutions, and from outstanding private collections.
www.mam.paris.fr
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