Lot Essay
The Wildenstein Institute will include this painting in their forthcoming van Dongen catalogue raisonn
Harem was painted shortly after a visit to Egypt which had had a particularly striking effect on van Dongen's style. The painterly years of fauvism were behind him as van Dongen developed a much flatter painting technique where surface was substituted with bold flat planes of color. Between 1916 and 1918, he lived in the Villa Sad on the Bois de Boulogne, which he decorated with paintings very similar to the present work. These colorist paintings of the teens are arguably amongst the most striking in his oeuvre.
Discussing this period, Denys Sutton writes: "In 1910-11 [van Dongen] made a series of rapid visits to Italy, Spain and Morocco and the results of these were shown at Bernheim's in 1911 ... Two years later he went to Egypt, a visit that was of considerable significance for his art. The chance of seeing the elegant silhouettes of the two-dimensional compositions of Egyptian sculpture aroused his interest in decorative painting and the way in which his work underwent a decided change may be seen in Homme bleu et femme rouge (1918). A phase now occurred in his art analagous to that undergone by Matisse when he painted such famous paintings as L'Atelier Rose" (D. Sutton, Cornelis Theodorus Marie van Dongen, Arizona, 1971, p. 38).
Harem was painted shortly after a visit to Egypt which had had a particularly striking effect on van Dongen's style. The painterly years of fauvism were behind him as van Dongen developed a much flatter painting technique where surface was substituted with bold flat planes of color. Between 1916 and 1918, he lived in the Villa Sad on the Bois de Boulogne, which he decorated with paintings very similar to the present work. These colorist paintings of the teens are arguably amongst the most striking in his oeuvre.
Discussing this period, Denys Sutton writes: "In 1910-11 [van Dongen] made a series of rapid visits to Italy, Spain and Morocco and the results of these were shown at Bernheim's in 1911 ... Two years later he went to Egypt, a visit that was of considerable significance for his art. The chance of seeing the elegant silhouettes of the two-dimensional compositions of Egyptian sculpture aroused his interest in decorative painting and the way in which his work underwent a decided change may be seen in Homme bleu et femme rouge (1918). A phase now occurred in his art analagous to that undergone by Matisse when he painted such famous paintings as L'Atelier Rose" (D. Sutton, Cornelis Theodorus Marie van Dongen, Arizona, 1971, p. 38).