Hungry Eyes: The Fashions of Kees Van Dongen
Born in Rotterdam, Holland in 1877, Kees Van Dongen’s paintings portray the vibrancy of the Fauvist style, whilst oozing with the glamour and wealth of French society in the early 20th century. He also had a name that is great to say, rife with innuendo… say it out loud if you don’t believe me. He settled in Paris in 1899, and once he began exhibiting in the contemporary salons his earlier training in draughtsmanship played second fiddle to his new approach to art: tonnes of bold colour, lashes of paint and a hunt for innovation.
Kees van Dongen could easily get lost in the art history books on this period, working alongside some of the big arts lads of late 19th century and early 20th century art. He exhibited with leading figures of the Fauve movement including Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Henri Manguin, and named Pablo Picasso amongst his friends. They’re the entourage we could only dream of.
The Wild Beasts
The Fauves (French for ‘wild beasts’) were avant-garde, and EVERYTHING about them was bold — their brushstrokes, their interpretations, their colours. If you want to find out more about them, don a pair of sunglasses and read this great essay by The Met (the shades are because they’re so bright, not for fashion). These artists looked beyond Western art history and took inspiration from Oceanic and African sculpture. Van Dongen’s works from his residency in Montmartre, France drew further inspiration from Javanese masks, and Japanese woodblocks depicting kabuki scenes. His art practice also extended beyond paintings and drawings, as Lynn Garafola notes in ‘Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance’ (Wesleyan University Press, 28 Jan 2005), Van Dongen was friends with Martinique dancer Djemil-Anik and he arranged for her to perform a dance completely nude, but painted (by Van Dongen) from head to toe.
The portraits of Kees Van Dongen are instantly recognisable, with overly expressive features produced in heavy strokes of paint, leaving an almost caricature-like depiction of the sitter. His studies at Rotterdam School of Decorative Arts encouraged his draughtsman talents, and his later work on illustrations and caricatures were featured in satirical magazines. Not one of those typical £10 street caricatures where you always end up looking like a horse — but considered exaggerations that seem to be both at harmony and discord with the composition. Like his approach to the human form, Van Dongen also provided an original portrayal of the changing fashions of his sitters and contemporaries.
Let’s start gently: hats
Have you ever worn a hat so large that a bird landed in it and started building a nest on the rim? No, because that would be ridiculous.
Unless you are one of Kees Van Dongen’s sitters that is! (Disclaimer: this never happened … THAT WE KNOW OF).
It’s physically impossible to count the amount of hats that feature in Kees Van Dongen’s paintings. Every hat in each painting differs in colour, size, or style, ranging from the demure (yet still startlingly red) beret of The Corn Poppy, 1919 to the extravagant, borderline neck-breaking Woman with Blue Hat, 1912. Or even the cutesy: Woman with Cherries On Her Hat — maybe if she fancies a snack later?
Yet across these diverse portraits a pattern emerges: Van Dongen uses these hats to centre the composition in a real space. These hats are vivid depictions of the lines and textures of millinery fashions of the day.
From 1900–10, large brimmed hats were highly fashionable and were adorned with flowers, ribbons, lace and all the trimmings. Van Dongen brings this exuberance to life in his paintings. He uses bold colours including lapis lazuli blues, the starkest of whites and sweeping paint strokes to convey the movement of the hats and their feathers and adornments. Some portrait sitters disappear under these giant hat brims and feathers, like in ‘La Parisienne’, 1910. In a comical style, the viewer is left wondering — who is this mystery lady with a tiny wee dog? Is the woman beautiful? Does the woman have green eyes or blue eyes? Is it even a woman, or could it be a ham sandwich?
You can then use Van Dongen’s paintings to track how these hats then go out of style and the fashion changes for smaller, demure cloche hats and berets. It also marks a change in how he depicts his sitters’ facial features; as the hats shrink, their eyes grow! These exaggerated, quasi-goldfish eyes become one of his trademarks, a classic VD to a T.
His complicated relationship with women and their bodies.
Around 1895, Van Dongen submitted drawings of prostitutes and the red light district of Rotterdam to local publications. His fascination with women performing — in a myriad of ways — was a theme that continued across his work throughout his career. He painted and sketched countless representations of cabaret dancers and circus performers, and nearly 10 years later he returned to this theme with scenes from the Medrano Circus. Van Dongen wasn’t the first artist to find inspiration from this famous Parisian troupe, with the following names painting/sketching their shows and performers: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso and Toulouse Lautrec.
Kees Van Dongen was also a strong advocate for sexual liberation, however some critics have questioned his treatment of his subjects, and his approach to transgender performance as seen in Modjesko, Soprano Singer 1908. Patricia Leighton in The Liberation of Painting sees Van Dongen’s over-use of colour and simplistic approach to the rendering of the subject’s body as creating a cartoonish treatment, but later noting that his depictions of prostitution show an awareness of the ‘origins of poverty’. An extract of this book can be seen here. However, it is in his illustrations for the journal L’Assiette au Beurre, October 1901, which show the realities of a life of prostitution, and also provide a rare glimpse into the clothing and conditions of the lower classes. These women are not painted in his usual palette, but instead wear simply coloured blouses and long, floor-length black skirts. It is a sombre contrast to his usual vigorous kaleidoscope of excess. You can see the full edition of this journal here.
The alternative to his depictions of female performers and prostitution are his portraits of Parisian society after World War I. These are opulent displays of the wealth and glamour found in the wardrobes of his sitters; from swathes of silk and chiffon, to jewelled details and rich colour palettes. His success moving amongst the Parisian elite came from a variety of factors: his relationship with fashion designer Jasmy Alvin, the patronage of the Parisian ‘King of Fashion’ Paul Poiret, and his ability to depict the most fashionable styles of the androgynous cuts and stances of the Parisian female in a desirable way. In his paintings, these women are all legs and all glamour. That’s often what they say about me, too: Amelia ‘All Legs All Glamour’ Rowland.
Jasmy Alvin was the commercial director for the couture label ‘Jenny’. Whilst the label name is so unbelievably boring (no offence to all the Jenny’s out there), it was one of the most influential fashion brands of 1920’s Paris, and was sought after across Europe and America. In Van Dongen’s portrait of Alvin (now in the Pompidou, Paris) he captures the detailed beading and textures of a grey silk dress, and draped in a fur shawl. In this full length painting he has produced a detailed rendering of the height of fashion at this time, and most importantly, how these couture outfits should be worn. This work is giant and imposing coming in at a mere 195 cm tall — you can only imagine her towering over you, commanding awe and respect. She is a powerful, but also distant figure.
These portraits perhaps show the complexity of his approach to the female form — admiration, experimentation, exaggeration and now, controversy. They are also incredible markers of time and fashion changes over this remarkable period of history. His works have depicted poverty, but then they also depict excess, and are about painting in excess. What is now left of his work is scattered among private collections and in some of the most respected art institutions.
