Kees van Dongen

"Painting is the most beautiful lie."

"Life is beautiful, and this work is even more beautiful than life."

"The essential thing is to elongate the women and especially to make them slim. After that it just remains to enlarge their jewels. They are ravished."

"His sarcastic images made no attempt to disguise moral and physical defects. Van Dongen created a feminine type that was half drawing-room prostitute, half sidewalk princess; her murky eyes, livid face with blood- red mouth, spindly arms, and exaggeratedly thin body adorned with sparkling jewels and veiled in silk or tulle, or stripped cynically nude."