Kees van Dongen (1877-1968)

Cérès presents the most recurrent and celebrated theme in the work of Kees van Dongen: the female figure. After the First World War, Van Dongen achieved great fame with his series of sensuous, glamorous female portraits. At times inspired by lovers, at other times working on commissions, Van Dongen explored the calculated coquetry and the piercing autonomy of the modern woman. With Cérès, however, Van Dongen transposed the female figure into the atemporal and magical world of mythology, specifically depicting the classical goddess of earth, and hence fertility. Through an idealised figure, whose only attributes are a crown of flowers, moreover, Van Dongen seems also to invoke the figure of Flora, goddess of spring, reinforcing the mythological dimension of the work. The handling of the paint - dense and brilliant in its colours - reveals the legacy of Van Dongen's involvement with the Parisian avant-garde of the early 1900s: in 1905, he had exhibited with Henri Matisse at the Salon d'Automne, becoming one of the leading figures of Fauvism.

To be included in the forthcoming Kees van Dongen catalogue critique of paintings and drawings being prepared by Jacques Chalom Des Cordes under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.