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Kees van Dongen Fauvism Dutch (near Rotterdam, 1877 - 1968, Monaco) View objects by this artist.

(Acquavella.com)
Born in the Netherlands, Kees van Dongen attended the Royal Academy of Arts in Rotterdam, and moved to Paris in 1897. He lived in the Montmartre district and worked as a house painter and illustrator for satirical magazines.
He met Henri Matisse in the first years in Paris, and adopted the Fauve style of painting in bright colors and broad strokes. He exhibited with the Fauves in their famous 1905 exhibition. Van Dongen’s paintings of women, dancers and nudes are composed of rich vivid colors and bold outlines. The simplified forms and emotional distortions were used to express his passionate involvement with contemporary life in Paris.

In 1908, Van Dongen was invited to join the German Expressionist group Die Brucke, and his expressionist portraits were extremely popular throughout continental Europe through the war years.

After 1918 van Dongen became a popular society painter. His style became simpler and more realistic, although he continued to use vivid colors in his portraits.


(http://wwar.com/masters/d/dongen-kees_van.html)
Kees van Dongen moved to Paris in 1897 and eventually became a French citizen in 1929. His initial style was Impressionist but he eventually joined the Fauves in 1906. Two years later, he was exhibiting with the Die Brucke group, mostly painting his somewhat erotic female nudes in their Expressionist fashion. Sometimes controversial, one of Dongen’s works was seized by the police from the 1913 Salon d’Automne on the grounds that is was indecent. He then began painting fashionable women subjects from high society, earning him international recognition after World War I. The height of his career occurred before 1920, and Dongen spent his late life in Monaco.


(Guggenheim Hermitage Museum)
b. 1877, near Rotterdam; d. 1968, Monaco
Born January 26, 1877 in a town outside Rotterdam, Kees van Dongen is best known for his nudes, portraits, and landscapes painted in a Fauvist manner. In his teens, van Dongen created projection drawings for an engineering office, and later enrolled at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Art and Technical Science, where he studied drawing. Van Dongen worked as an illustrator for Rotterdam magazines and newspapers, and continued to publish drawings in popular periodicals for several years. His early paintings used a dark palette inspired by Rembrandt, who remained an important model for his work. In the mid-1890s, van Dongen began employing much brighter colors and a sketchy style that anticipated Fauvism. In 1899, the artist settled permanently in Paris, where he lived in the building in which Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris also worked. In Paris, van Dongen continued to produce illustrations for numerous publications.

It was in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century that van Dongen developed his characteristic style. His vivid color contrasts, heavy brushwork, and simplified forms identified his work as Fauvist. His professional associations also allied him with the artistic avant-garde; dealer Félix Fénéon promoted his work, and van Dongen also exhibited with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. The Parisian demi-monde and its cafés, dance halls, and prostitutes were regular subjects for the artist. These scenes often depicted women in overtly sexual poses.

After about 1917, van Dongen concentrated on portraits of notable figures in politics and entertainment, as well as members of the aristocracy, and in the 1950s, he used lithography for these portraits. Van Dongen died in Monaco on May 28, 1968.






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