“Jeune Arabe” (Young Arab) painted in 1910 by Van Dongen when the Dutch-born painter still remembered the coloristic fury of his Fauve days a few years earlier. The linear simplification has a Matisse touch about it. Its impact is multiplied tenfold by the blazing red color of the boy’s skin, which is underlined by the off-white ground. This may not be the greatest Van Dongen in the world, but its punch hits you in the stomach, like a brilliant poster adorned with a master’s signature. Bidders sent it flying to a world record of $13.8 million.
Last year he was rated as one of Holland’s 50 wealthiest individuals. But recently his business empire has been entangled in a web of debt amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last May, accompanied by representatives of JP Morgan Chase, which had secured a court order to recover artworks which had been used as collateral for a loan, deputy sheriffs in New York removed an estimated 29 paintings belonging to Reijtenbagh, valued at some $23 million, from an apartment in the Trump Tower.
