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拍品專文
Femme arabe belongs to the series of unique portraits of Arab women painted by van Dongen shortly after his visit to Morocco in 1910. The discovery of the Maghreb, to which he travelled via Spain, immensely influenced the artist's aesthetic vision. His fauvist colours were lit up by the transparent, yet mesmerising light of the desert - acquiring a translucent, almost phosphorescent quality, magnificently expressed by the shining chromatic contrasts of the present portrait. As L. Chaumeil pointed out in Van Dongen, L'homme et l'artiste - La vie et l'oeuvre, '...Comme tous les hommes du Nord, Van Dongen va vers le soleil, mais vers le soleil qui brille sur la violence et les constrastes. L'exemple de Delacroix, l'atavisme batave et l'esprit du fauvisme le poussrent vers des pays colors et frustes: l'Espagne et le Maroc en 1910 et 1912, l'Egypte en 1913, les Balares en 1914... Au moment o la flambe du fauvisme va s'teindre pour Matisse, Derain et Vlaminck, l'Afrique permet Van Dongen de lui infuser un sang chaud et neuf. Le soleil sur les casbahs, les palmiers et la mer... cre des harmonies et des violences inconnues jusque-l qui relancent le fauvisme de Van Dongen' (Geneva, 1963, pp. 114-5).
Iconographically, Femme arabe is comparable to the most intense portraits of Spanish women, similarly painted by van Dongen at the beginning of 1910 at his return to Paris from Northern Africa. Whilst his Spanish canvases celebrate the rediscovered richness of colour through the enraptured description of the women's shawls and head-gears, his early Arab pictures boast an extraordinary fabric of coloured pigments, added layer upon layer in a unique attempt at rendering the opulence of Oriental silks and jewels. While anticipating the artist's strong attraction to thick, rich impastos, which would become a technical leit-motiv in his late career, Femme arabe is stylistically very important. By focussing on the figure's mezzo busto and emphasising her slim, svelt features cast against an opalescent background, van Dongen eliminates any interest in anectodal narration, more evident in L'Ouled Nail (fig.1), another canvas from the same series, portraying the same most seductive 'femme-enfant' - 'Ouled' meaning 'small child' in Arab. In the present picture, the young woman comes to symbolise the Orient itself - its immense power of fascination upon the artist's pictorial universe. As is typical of van Dongen's best Orientalist feminine portraits, a strong erotic charm exudes from the contrast between the woman's chaste attire and the sensuousness of her unfathomable gaze, underlined by the henna tattoos - the final touch to the woman's magnificent toilette.
Still deeply inspired by the Western feminine icons that characterise van Dongen's portraits of Parisian beauties of the early 1910s, Femme arabe is the painter's ultimate homage to the elegant sensuality of the Arab women. As Louis Vauxelles wrote in the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Van Dongen at the Galerie Borghse (Paris) in 1938, 'On dit: une femme de Van Dongen comme on dit une femme de Lautrec. Cette femme est dmsurment serpentine, flexible comme une liane... des yeux immenses cerns de khl, enduits de Rimmel, la bouche d'un rouge saignant de grenade entrouverte.. Elle vit - si c'est l vivre - sous la froide et dure clart des projecteurs actylne, des arcs voltaques...'Cette peinture, disait Apollinaire, sent l'opium et l'ambre...' (p. IV).
Iconographically, Femme arabe is comparable to the most intense portraits of Spanish women, similarly painted by van Dongen at the beginning of 1910 at his return to Paris from Northern Africa. Whilst his Spanish canvases celebrate the rediscovered richness of colour through the enraptured description of the women's shawls and head-gears, his early Arab pictures boast an extraordinary fabric of coloured pigments, added layer upon layer in a unique attempt at rendering the opulence of Oriental silks and jewels. While anticipating the artist's strong attraction to thick, rich impastos, which would become a technical leit-motiv in his late career, Femme arabe is stylistically very important. By focussing on the figure's mezzo busto and emphasising her slim, svelt features cast against an opalescent background, van Dongen eliminates any interest in anectodal narration, more evident in L'Ouled Nail (fig.1), another canvas from the same series, portraying the same most seductive 'femme-enfant' - 'Ouled' meaning 'small child' in Arab. In the present picture, the young woman comes to symbolise the Orient itself - its immense power of fascination upon the artist's pictorial universe. As is typical of van Dongen's best Orientalist feminine portraits, a strong erotic charm exudes from the contrast between the woman's chaste attire and the sensuousness of her unfathomable gaze, underlined by the henna tattoos - the final touch to the woman's magnificent toilette.
Still deeply inspired by the Western feminine icons that characterise van Dongen's portraits of Parisian beauties of the early 1910s, Femme arabe is the painter's ultimate homage to the elegant sensuality of the Arab women. As Louis Vauxelles wrote in the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Van Dongen at the Galerie Borghse (Paris) in 1938, 'On dit: une femme de Van Dongen comme on dit une femme de Lautrec. Cette femme est dmsurment serpentine, flexible comme une liane... des yeux immenses cerns de khl, enduits de Rimmel, la bouche d'un rouge saignant de grenade entrouverte.. Elle vit - si c'est l vivre - sous la froide et dure clart des projecteurs actylne, des arcs voltaques...'Cette peinture, disait Apollinaire, sent l'opium et l'ambre...' (p. IV).