Word: dongens
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Cornelius van Dongen was one of the original fauves (wild beasts) of modern art. Today he is one of the tamest pets of Paris. At 75, he is a dapper and well-to-do gentleman who sports a Shavian beard and has a well-appointed studio on the fashionable Rue de Courcelles. Over the past 30 years he has become the most successful portrait painter in France. His models: just about everyone from Maurice Chevalier to Queen Marie of Rumania...
...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...
Four of the painters in the show, Derain (66), Van Dongen (67), Segonzac (63), and Vlaminck (70), had been suspended from public showing for the past year (because they exhibited in Berlin during the war). Now their year of quiet humiliation was up, and the weary old foursome could creep into the daylight once again...
...years old, he decided to be a musician. For six years he worked hard at piano, musical theory and composition, but an ear infection made him too deaf to go on with it. At 17, he went to Paris to study art and slavishly imitated his teachers, Van Dongen and Modigliani. Back home he discovered and concentrated on Guatemalan folk themes, spearheading the racial art movement which revolutionized Latin American painting. Later he went abstract, tried to paint a kind of visual music which would be empty of pictorial meaning, but beautifully composed and rich in color harmonies...
...Unpersecuted, painting and sculpting and making the rounds of the Paris cafés just as usual were such familiar masters as Picasso, Derain, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Braque, Van Dongen...