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Artist or Maker: Kees van Dongen (1877-1968)
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Provenance: Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 29 March 1988, lot 32.
Daniel B. Grossman, New York.
Acquired from the above by the late owner, November 1991.
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Exhibited: Philadelphia, Exhibition Bond, December 1939, no. 16.
Geneva, Musée de l'Athénée, Van Dongen, July-October 1976, no. 7.
Nice, Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Cheret, Van Dongen, 1977, no. 40 (illustrated in color).
Tokyo, Isetan Museum, Van Dongen, 1978, no. 40 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: Property from the Estate of Joan B. Kroc
From the billions and billions of McDonald's hamburgers served, billions of dollars have been given to charity. Joan B. Kroc, a golden-haired beauty, carefully and deliberately directed the dispersal of the fortune built by her late husband, Ray Kroc, the savvy entrepreneur who built McDonald's into a global superbrand. After Ray Kroc's death at age 82 in 1984, Joan spent the nearly 20 subsequent years giving generously to a wide range of diverse and important causes.
Of modest Midwestern roots, the former Joan Beverly Mansfield was pretty, blonde and passionate, a young married mother working as a music teacher. Ray Kroc was wealthy, worldly and 25 years older. She was playing the piano in a supper club when their eyes met, and 12 years later in 1969, both newly divorced, they married and moved to Southern California.
Joan Kroc was a woman of considerable energies and unbridled spontaneity. When not at home in her gracious, luxurious estate north of San Diego, she enjoyed traveling on her private jet and yacht, both named "Impromptu". She also kept busy with her baseball team, the San Diego Padres. However, a considerable amount of her time was spent doing good. If a cause touched her in some way, she offered significant funding, often to the utter surprise of the recipients. She gave joyously and anonymously--in 1997, the citizens of flood-ravaged Midwestern states learned only by tracking the tail numbers on her jet that Kroc was their $15 million benefactor. Not a college graduate herself, she gave $6 million to establish the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, followed over the years by another $64 million. She also funded the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego with an $80 million donation. She recently bequeathed $203 million to National Public Radio. Even larger gifts went to The Salvation Army: almost $100 million to build a community center for underprivileged youths in San Diego--and then later a $1.5 billion bequest to build similar centers throughout the country, perhaps the largest gift ever given by an individual to a single charity. During her lifetime she gave multi-million dollar gifts too numerous to itemize to local and global causes that touched her heart, including but hardly limited to the San Diego Hospice, the San Diego Zoo, the Betty Ford Center, the Special Olympics, education and the arts, African famine relief, nuclear disarmament and AIDS. "Mrs. Kroc chose her charities not just because there was a need, but because there was a need that got under her skin and into her heart," said Paul G. Schervish, director of the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College. And she gave transforming amounts of money, in order to actually see results.
This remarkable woman could comfortably mix the accoutrements of wealth with a deeply felt need to do good, to make a difference. On the occasion of a grandchild's 21st birthday, Joan Kroc wrote, "I want you to believe that a life of service is a happy one to lead. Serve others joyously and your reward will be great; carry with you the message of charity and brotherly love."
To be included in the forthcoming Kees van Dongen catalogue raisonné being prepared by Jacques Chalom Des Cordes under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.
During the 1920s, les années folles, Van Dongen declared, "I passionately love the life of my time, so animated, so feverish. Ah! Life is even more beautiful than painting" (quoted in W.E. Steadman and D. Sutton, Van Dongen, exh. cat., The University of Arizona Art Museum, 1971, p. 46). Van Dongen pursued his love of modern life in the cabarets, restaurants and salons of Paris, and in the seaside resorts where his upper-class clientele took their holidays. "I love novelty, the unpublished, that which has not been made before" (ibid.). He sought the patronage of the aristocracy and the nouveau riche, was a favorite guest in the salons of Paris, and hosted his own soirées. His social affinities gave him an excellent vantage point from which he could observe and chronicle contemporary glamour, fashion and mores. Indeed, his view of those fabled years between the wars is all the more valuable because he was genuinely a participant in the passing parade. He did not seek or play the roles of the detached moralist or critic; he chose instead to let his sitters and subjects speak for this lifestyle and themselves. Louis Chaumeil called van Dongen "le roi et peintre de son temps" (in Van Dongen, Geneva, 1967, p. 216).
The Folle époque coincided with the classical revival in painting, the "call to order" following the First World War, which sanctioned artists look to earlier styles and subjects as a viable model for treating subjects drawn from contemporary life. In the present painting van Dongen has depicted a thoroughly modern, full frontal Vénus. She may hint at the nude but still demure Renaissance maiden painted by Botticelli, and her pose may even have been inspired by Bouguereau's 19th century rendering of the birth of the goddess of beauty and love (fig. 1). However, the allure of van Dongen's Vénus is more brazenly sexual than of most of her predecessors. She is neither idealized nor sentimentalized, and her presence is strongly felt. She represents a powerful new woman, both in her self-assured attitude and her athletic physique, as also seen in Lempicka's paintings of nudes of the 1920s (see lot 24). If this temptress, like the goddess of the classical legend, makes herself unavailable to most mortals, it is not the outcome of divine strictures or fate, but a matter of her own free will and choice. "You may admire my body," she seems to say, "but you may come near only if I let you."
Venus' pose here is in fact a classic stance used by models in life-drawing classes, lifted to an altogether more dramatic level by Van Dongen's typically bravura brushwork. This picture may even reference the soft-core men's magazines that were published in the 1930s, such as Paris Magazine and Mon Paris, from which Francis Picabia clipped images as sources for his paintings of erotically-charged nudes and scantily clad women. The nude model for Van Dongen's Vénus appears in another painting executed in 1936, Autoportrait, in which the 58-year old artist displayed himself naked, standing before her in his studio (see Van Dongen, le peintre, exh. cat., Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1990, p. 202). Van Dongen revived this Venus pose to depict a beautiful siren with streaming flaxen hair in a lithograph illustrating Voltaire's La Princesse de Babylon, published by Mourlot-frères, Paris, in 1948 (Juffermans, B, no. 12).
(fig. 1) William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Naissance de Vénus, 1879. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. BARCODE 23657663
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