Kees van Dongen

Paul Boncour, France (acquired from the artist circa 1920)

Mme C. Loraine, Paris (by descent from the above)

Galerie Urban, Paris (1965)

George Gregson, Tucson (acquired from the above in 1965 and until 1997)

Acquired in 1997

Tucson, The University of Arizona Art Museum, The George Gregson Collection, 1968

Arizona, The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Nelson Gallery -Atkins Museum, Van Dongen, 1971, no. 63

Original canvas. Apart from a few minor spots of inpainting in the composition, this work is in excellent original condition.
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Ines Napoli, clothed in black with white petticoat seductively exposed, stands with her hand placed coquettishly on her hip.  It may well be that she is a performer, one of the many van Dongen selected as his subject from the Montmartre cabarets at this time. Indeed, the panels of fabric hanging from above and hunched seated figure in the background, suggests that we may be encountering her backstage in a theater dressing room, a space that the artist is known to have frequented.

"Van Dongen's paintings of friends and colleagues of the night-life of Montmartre and of similar venues draw directly upon the example of Toulouse-Lautrec," John Elderfield explains. "Such a mixture of Lautrec and expressionist colorism was by no means unprecedented. Picasso's paintings of prostitutes and entertainers of late 1900 and early 1901 form an important precedent for the art of Van Dongen, who lived in the Bateau-Lavoir in 1906-07" (John Elderfield, The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 66). His gestural brushwork, flattened space and notational technique alludes both to Fauvism with which he was closely affiliated at this time and the expressionist work of Die Brücke, that included artists Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, with whom he had contact in 1908. Her schematically indicated eyes, a trademark of van Dongen, are evocative of African tribal masks, a favored source among avant-garde artists in the first years of the twentieth century.