Kees Van Dongen
dal 10/6/2009 al 26/9/2009
Segnalato da
10/6/2009
Kees Van Dongen
Museu Picasso, Barcelona
Retrospective
This exhibition dedicated to Kees Van Dongen shows
the artist‘s evolution from his student years to the
peak of his career and evokes many of his aesthetic
ties and exchanges with Picasso, with whom he
temporarily shared the Bateau-Lavoir. Born in a
suburb of Rotterdam, Van Dongen‘s career was
spent mainly in Paris where he came to live in 1897.
A hedonist and frequent traveller, he was a regular
visitor to the seaside resorts of Deauville, Cannes
and Monte Carlo, where he died in 1968. Van
Dongen experienced poverty, during the years of
revelry with Picasso, and then fame before finally
falling out of fashion, a status he endured with a
certain melancholy.
The exhibition confirms Kees Van Dongen‘s decisive
role in the great artistic upheavals of the early 20th
century as a member of the Fauvist movement, in
which he occupied the unique position of an often
irreverent and acerbic portraitist. The virulence and
extravagance of his canvases provoked immediate
repercussions abroad, particularly within the Die
Brücke German expressionist movement. Together
with his orientalism, contemporary with that of
Matisse, this places Van Dongen at the very forefront
of the avant-garde. His bold and vibrant works – often
compared to ―prodigious orgies of light, heat and
colour‖ – testify to the affirmation of his own style
within the history of modern art, alongside Matisse
and Picasso.
Assembled in the light of new research and including
previously little-known works, the exhibition also
provides a new perspective on the artist.
It has been designed chronologically in order to
demonstrate Van Dongen‘s evolution from one piece
of work to the next, in addition to his recurrent
concerns and his enduring traits and characteristics.
It includes examples of the artist‘s work in different
fields: painting, of course – in which, wrote Elie
Faure, Van Dongen ―wrote the sensual poem of the
world‖ – but also illustration and graphic work.
Press and Communication Department
Phone: +34 93 2563021 /26 museupicasso_premsa@bcn.cat
Opening 11th June 2009, at 19.30 p.m.
Museu Picasso
C/ Montcada, 15-19 Barcelona 08003 Spain
Opening Times
Tuesday to Sundays (including holidays): 10 am to 8 pm. Access to rooms until 30 minutes before closing