Kees Van Dongen's Princess of Babylon (1904 -
1910), on show in the Hermitage.
Four paintings from the Dutch modernist master Kees Van Dongen have flown north from the Tel-Aviv Art Museum to visit their brethren in the State Hermitage.
"Princess of Babylon," "Bois de Boulogne," "The Baccarat Hall in Deauville" and "Leda Without Swan" are on display until the end of January.
The Hermitage already holds five of Van Dongen's best paintings, including "The Red Dancer" and "The Dame in Black Hat."
The most colorful of the paintings from the new exhibition, "Princess of Babylon," (pictured right) was painted between 1904 and 1910.
The painting shows a woman's profile in tight headware mounted by a feather. Her incredibly big eyes with their excess of make up dominate the picture.
The woman wears a huge necklace, adorned with massive pendants, display the artist's love of jewellery -- he did not care about contemporary reproaches of "salonness."
The unreality of the princess is stressed by the painting's intense green colours, which create an image of a mythical creature from some other world.
But at the same time the image throws up associations of the "femme fatale," and has been interpreted as a view of a prostitute. The woman's name, "Babylon," seems to have been applied with conscious irony, but Van Dongen seems to have succeeded in idealizing her at the same time -- her vulgarity is both mysterious and irresistible.
"Bois de Boulogne" is considered one of Van Dongen's most original landscapes.
Painted in a fauvist style, which as its typical feature depicted objects with sharp outlines, it contains a few strident colors, abruptly separated from each other: green leaves, yellow sand path, brown tree trunks.
The scene is basic. The artist is less preoccupied with the background than with simply highlighting his female subjects -- the women sit in the forest on a blurred base which does not even pretend to be a bench.
Van Dongen said to one of his friends, "I do not put a woman on a pedestal, I do not make a goddess out of her. I just admire her silhouette, her shapes."
The slim, elegant women match the flowing trunks of the trees and emanate an aura of careless leisure.
During the years 1907-1913, the period when "Bois de Bologne" was painted, Van Dongen shared his Parisian studio with Pablo Picasso. Van Dongen had moved to Paris after visiting the city and being greatly impressed by its creative atmosphere. He lived in Monmartre and Monparnas.
In Van Dongen's "The Baccarat Hall in Deauville," painted in 1920, his admiration of the female shape can be seen very clearly.
He places a tall, beautifully shaped woman in pink as the centerpiece of the composition, not bothering even to turn her with to face to the viewer.
"The main rule is to extend women, to make them slim. Then you only have to make the jewellery bigger and they are all admiration," Van Dongen used to say of his female subjects. Yet his "Leda Without Swan" is closer to a Barbie doll than to some glorious mythological character.
A long, slim, shapely woman in a bathing suit is resting on a beach. No sexual details are stressed, the colours are quiet, relaxation is total. The erotic potential of the swan is absent, as the title indicates.
Born in 1877, Van Dongen was considered by some contemporary critics as showing talent and originality, but lacking in seriousness and spoilt by his salon popularity. Some said his prestigious subjects stifled his creativity.
He didn't seem to care much, painting portraits of many fashionable figures, including the Aga Khan and Belgium's King Leopold III.