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Description: Kees van Dongen 1877-1968 NU SUR FOND NOIR Signed; signed, titled and dated 1905 on the reverse Oil on canvas 39 1/4 by 317/8 in. 100 by 81cm. Provenance Galerie Bourdon, Paris Sale: Vente des Floralies, Hotel Rameau, Versailles, June 3, 1965, lot 55 Sale: Hotel Rameau, Versailles, June 4, 1980, lot 76 Charles Tabachnik, Toronto (sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 15, 1984, lot 54) Fujii Gallery, Tokyo (acquired at the above sale) Exhibited Paris, Salon d'Automne, Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, dessin, gravure, architecture et art, 1908, no. 581 Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne; Rotterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Van Dongen, 1967-68, no. 19 Literature Burlington Magazine, London, May 1965, illustrated Nu sur Fond Noir was painted in 1905, the year Kees van Dongen participated in the pivotal Salon d'Automne in which those painters, later to be known as Fauves, first exhibited their experimental art. The critic Louis Vauxcelles, coined the term 'Fauves' when he responded to a small Florentine style sculpture amidst the exuberant work of Derain, Matisse, Marquet and Vlaminck, by writing that it was like seeing Donatello surrounded by the wild beasts: 'On dirait Donatello parmi les Fauves.' Van Dongen shared with these artists an interest in the essentials of painting and immediacy of the image through aggressively gestural brushwork and vibrant use of color. As John Elderfield explains: 'By 1905, he had found his way into a loose impromptu style analogous to the mixed-technique Fauvism of the Matisse circle, especially in his paintings of nudes. But the main direction of his art was fast becoming geared to the representation of subjects different from those of most of the other Fauves. . . His carnal and expressionist obsessions made him perhaps the wildest of the Fauves, but because of this an atypical one'(John Elderfield, 'The Wild Beasts': Fauvism and Its Affinities, New York, 1976, pp. 66, 68). Indeed, van Dongen's primary focus on the huma

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Dimensions: 39 1/4 by 317/8 in. 100 by