"Painting is the most beautiful lie. Painting is a vice, I can't do anything else."
Dutch-born painter Kees Van Dongen is known for his portraits of women with large almond-shaped eyes. His brightly coloured works are, along with those of Vlaminck and Matisse, at the heart of Fauvism. The artist's colour is not imitative; its intensities are violent and animalistic, its harmonies subtle and refined. An "urban fawn", Kees Van Dongen focuses on the female body, especially the face, painted to the point of distortion with an electric light borrowed from Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec which, in a sense, is his signature. The enigmatic painter of Paris in the Roaring Twenties, which he describes as the "cocktail period", Van Dongen devotes himself exclusively to the new Parisian elite: writers, film and stage stars, now forgotten, heralding the universe of Andy Warhol's “beautiful people” forty years in advance.