Images courtesy of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts “Woman on a Sofa,” about 1930, by Kees Van DongenWith his riotous use of color and singular portraits of women draped in Paul Poiret furs, the Dutch painter Kees Van Dongen has always been in style. So why has the smart set, who breezily name-drop more obscure artists than an art history major, seldom paid him his due?
The short answer is because his paintings are rarely seen in these parts, though “Van Dongen: A Fauve in the City,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until April 19, will change all that. A dizzying showcase of his richly colored works, many unseen here before, it’s the first major Van Dongen retrospective in North America.
Why it’s taken this long is a bit trickier. Van Dongen’s many moods and influences were as fierce as the Fauvist themes he’s famous for, leading him though a life of professional ups and downs that left him unpopular both with his contemporaries and with art historians. Thankfully, this exhibit helps settle the score. It elegantly displays his many transformations through drawings, ceramics, prints, documents and paintings — complete with a musical component that corresponds to the time and place of each work. Van Dongen reputedly had the largest phonograph in Paris and would blast out tunes for all of Montmartre to hear.
“The Manila Shawl,” about 1907-1909.The life and work of his contemporary Henri Matisse looms over the show. Although the two shared a mutual dislike, their relationship was a brotherhood of sorts, with Van Dongen often provoking and reacting to the older, more established painter. Indeed, Van Dongen enjoyed off-color pleasures that would make Matisse blush, from sketching prostitutes on the piers in Holland to portraiture work of society women in his later years. The joke is that, as a painter for hire, Van Dongen himself became the prostitute. But by refusing to do prim and proper landscapes, he changed the face of Expressionist Fauvism — inadvertently setting the tone for the lascivious dance between art and commerce yet to come.
The next and only stop for this exhibit is Barcelona, where Picasso and Van Dongen are reunited again at the Picasso Museum from June through September 2009.