Bold and sensual, Lailla dates from the period of the height of Fauvism in Van Dongen. 1908 was a particularly busy year for the artist, and Lailla is one of the most beautiful nudes of this period, if not of his entire career. These nudes painted by the artist during the first ten years of the 20th century combine a very refined treatment of Fauvism, characteristic of Van Dongen, with a great ability to transpose sensuality and eroticism onto the canvas.

Lailla shows an artist who is fully aware of his immense potential, both in his choice of subjects and his own style. Even as Fauvism was coming to an end as a movement, Van Dongen continued to use it with a very personal style in many of his paintings. The texture and density of his painting, combined with a bold use of color, express a powerful Fauvism, a painting of desire directly transposed onto the canvas.

Sold in Christie's € 3.3 M in 2006

Lailla

signed 'Van Dongen' (top left); indistinctly inscribed and dated 'La illa ella Aila 1908' (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

130.8 x 97.3 cm. (51½ x 38 3/8 in.)

Painted in 1908

The title Anita en almée alludes to the Near Eastern tradition of the almah, the term in Arabic that originally denoted a ‘learned woman’ skilled in the arts of improvising poems and songs. By the mid-19th century, however, the status of the almah had degenerated to the point where these women had become little more than dancing girls and prostitutes. In Egypt, an edict of 1834 removed the almahs from Cairo and allowed them to practice their trade in three cities only, Qena, Esna and Aswan. When the novelist Gustave Flaubert travelled to Egypt in 1849, he made a point of visiting these places and indulging in their illicit pleasures. In Esna he had a liaison with the courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, who performed for him, in the presence of blindfolded musicians, the scandalous ‘dance of the bee’, so-named because a bee is supposed to have gotten into the dancer’s veiled costume, causing her to writhe uncontrollably and piece by piece discard her garments, in a form of striptease, until at the end she was briefly nude before being covered up by an attendant. In ancient Sumerian mythology the goddess Ishtar was compelled to remove her veils one by one as she descended into the underworld to reunite with her lover Tammuz. Flaubert later described Salomé’s dance in his story Hérodias, published as one of the Three Tales in 1877:

‘Under the bluish veil which concealed her head and chest, one could make out the arches of her eyes, the chalcedony stones in her ears, the whiteness of her skin. A square of dove-grey silk covered her shoulders, and was fastened at the waist by a jeweled girdle... Up on the dais she took off her veil. Then she began to dance... Her attitudes expressed sighs, and her whole body such languor that one could not tell she was mourning for a god or swooning in his embrace. With eyes half closed, she twisted her waist, made her belly ripple like the swell of the sea, made her breasts quiver, while her expression remained fixed, and her feet never stood still. Then came the wild passion of love demanding satisfaction. She danced like the priestesses of India, like the Nubian women from the cataracts, like the Bacchantes of Lydia. She bent over in every direction, like a flower tossed by the storm. The jewels in her ears leaped about, the silk on her back shimmered, from her arms, her feet, her clothes invisible sparks shot out, firing the men with excitement’ (G. Flaubert, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer, Gustave Flaubert: Three Tales, Oxford, 1991, pp. 101-102).

Sold in Christie's GBP 4.2 M in 2015

Anita en almée

signed 'van Dongen.' (lower right); signed again, indistinctly inscribed and dated 'van Dongen Paris XVII 1908' (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

76 ¾ x 44 ¾ in. (194.9 x 113.7 cm.)

Painted in 1908