Kiki's Memoirs

Cornelius van Dongen was one of the original fauves (wild beasts) of modern art. Today he is one of the tamest pets of Paris. At 75, he is a dapper and well-to-do gentleman who sports a Shavian beard and has a well-appointed studio on the fashionable Rue de Courcelles. Over the past 30 years he has become the most successful portrait painter in France. His models: just about everyone from Maurice Chevalier to Queen Marie of Rumania.

The son of a Rotterdam brewery worker, Van Dongen hardly expected to become a pet of the upper classes: art was more serious than that. At twelve, he sold his first picture to a butcher ("It was the portrait of a cow"), and at 20 set out for Paris. There he shared a shed with young Pablo Picasso, who was peddling his own pictures for 5 francs apiece. "We shared our models and we shared our mistresses," says Van Dongen. "For almost ten years, we got along fine."

After World War I, Van Dongen said goodbye to the old life. Instead of the acrobats and gypsy girls and black-stockinged nudes that had preoccupied him, he turned more & more to painting celebrities. The Aga Khan sat for him ("best model I ever had . . . nice and patient"); so did the vivacious Comtesse Anne-Elisabeth de Noailles, who "gesticulated so much that one of her breasts slipped out of her blouse, so I painted her that way." In time the great and near-great began calling him Kiki, and whenever he gave a party, they flocked to it dressed to the teeth. Kiki himself liked to receive them in a sweater, and he served them nothing but sandwiches and plain water. His formula for giving a party--"Why go to the expense of serving them champagne, when they'll come anyway?"--was as cynical as his formula for success: "I paint the women slimmer than they are and their jewels fatter."

But for all his success, Painter van Dongen never really forgot his Fauvist days, and last week, in a new show in Paris, he proved it. There, instead of society's faces and figures, were dazzling beaches, race tracks and fields, painted in brilliant yellows, blues and reds that seemed as bright as sunlight itself.

"Some people," says Van Dongen, "write their memoirs. I am painting them." To Paris critics, Kiki's memoirs were as fresh and bold as anything he ever did.

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