Word: dongen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dongen's Restaurant de la Paix...
...Rotterdam brewery worker, Van Dongen hardly expected to become a pet of the upper classes: art was more serious than that. At twelve, he sold his first picture to a butcher ("It was the portrait of a cow"), and at 20 set out for Paris. There he shared a shed with young Pablo Picasso, who was peddling his own pictures for 5 francs apiece. "We shared our models and we shared our mistresses," says Van Dongen. "For almost ten years, we got along fine...
After World War I, Van Dongen said goodbye to the old life. Instead of the acrobats and gypsy girls and black-stockinged nudes that had preoccupied him, he turned more & more to painting celebrities. The Aga Khan sat for him ("best model I ever had . . . nice and patient"); so did the vivacious Comtesse Anne-Elisabeth de Noailles, who "gesticulated so much that one of her breasts slipped out of her blouse, so I painted her that way." In time the great and near-great began calling him Kiki, and whenever he gave a party, they flocked to it dressed...
...success, Painter van Dongen never really forgot his Fauvist days, and last week, in a new show in Paris, he proved it. There, instead of society's faces and figures, were dazzling beaches, race tracks and fields, painted in brilliant yellows, blues and reds that seemed as bright as sunlight itself...
...Some people," says Van Dongen, "write their memoirs. I am painting them." To Paris critics, Kiki's memoirs were as fresh and bold as anything he ever...