From the museum website, 8 June 2009
This, the first anthology exhibition in Spain of the work of Kees van Dongen (Rotterdam 1877 – Monte Carlo 1968), sets out to reveal the importance of a painter who deserves to be far better known in this country.
Coproduced by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and curated by Jean-Michel Bouhours, the exhibition will bring together almost 100 works by Kees Van Dongen, and will also include a number of works by Picasso, bearing witness to the friendship between the two artists.
This retrospective will on the one hand invite us to appreciate Van Dongen’s early work in Paris in the 1900s and its clear connections with Picasso—whose neighbour he was in the Bateau-Lavoir—and, on the other, bring to light his fundamental contribution to Fauvism.