Kees van Dongen
Fauve colour applied to the women of Parisian society, who queued for it.
Kees van Dongen was born near Rotterdam in 1877 and moved to Paris in 1897, where he lived for a time in the Bateau-Lavoir alongside Picasso. He exhibited with the Fauves in 1905 and pushed the colour further towards the figure than most of them, painting cabaret performers, circus riders and nudes in acid greens, pinks and blacks. After the First World War he became the portraitist Parisian society wanted, painting film stars, aristocrats and financiers in a manner that flattered without softening, and lived accordingly. He died at Monte Carlo in 1968, at ninety-one.
The Fauve years to about 1913 are far ahead of everything else, and the fashionable portraits of the 1920s and 1930s are a large and quite separate market. Van Dongen is heavily forged, particularly in the portrait manner, and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute holds the catalogue raisonne project that is the reference for attribution. Provenance during the occupation years requires the same scrutiny given to any Paris-based painter of the period. There is a body of watercolours, drawings and illustrated books, and a modest print output.
If you own a work by Kees van Dongen
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.