Until April 19th, Montreal—Art lovers can visit Van Dongen, Painting the Town Fauve, in the first major North American retrospective of the art of Dutch painter Kees Van Dongen.

Coproduced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, the collection ”brings together some 200 works, including over a hundred paintings, as well as forty rare drawings, prints and other archival documents and photographs, and, for the first time, a dozen Fauvist ceramics.”

In a recent piece for The Globe and Mail, Russell Smith notes a number of groups whose accepted names started off as derogatory nicknames, epithets which became neutral or even favourable through repeated use: Impressionists, Beatniks, and Fashionistas, for example. Count among them les Fauves, a group of artists including Van Dongen and Henri Matisse. Fauve is a French term which roughly translates as “wild beast”.

This Montreal exhibit marks the first  North American showcase of Van Dongen’s major works including Tabarin Wrestlers, Spotted Chimera and Tango of the Archangel, (pictured above) which has not been publicly exhibited for over 50 years.

Spotted Chimera (1985-1907)

Tabarin Wrestlers (1907-1908)