Living is the most beautiful painting, the rest is just paint

I think it was summer because it was hot in the rooms of the Hermitage. I had spent several days without even leaving my adored seventeenth century, when I found myself with Kees Van Dongen. It was a ¨coup de foudre¨ and since then, every time I see one of his paintings, my heart skips a beat. Kees was born in Delfshaven in 1877, a suburb of Rotterdam. Showing early artistic promise, he studied in the evenings at the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Rotterdam from 1892 to 1897. In 1899, van Dongen settled in Paris. What Andy Warhol was to…