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In the history of art, few artists have revealed their girl trouble more acutely than the Dutch-born Fauvist artist Kees Van Dongen, whose brilliantly coloured, boldly painted works are on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art.

The Fauves – a group that included the better known artists Henry Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck – got their name from a disgruntled art critic who dubbed their room in the 1905 Parisian Salon d'Automne a “cage aux fauves” or “cage of wild beasts.” Van Dongen was lone among them in his single-minded interest in portraiture, mostly of female subjects.

For the female critic, though, he poses a particular problem: love the painting, a bit creeped-out by the guy. Like his Dutch countryman Willem de Kooning more than half a century later, Van Dongen made the figure of woman a vessel in which to hold the anxieties of the modern age.

Captivated by the freedoms and pleasures of her suddenly available body (prostitution was rampant), harrowed by the infections that lurked in her tumid, rentable flesh (this was the golden age of syphilis, after all), alienated by the sheer fact of her primordial procreative potential (one painting in the show pictures his wife and daughter in a claustrophobic inferno of orange and red, the child's eyes glowing like embers), and threatened by her move to claim her rights (the suffrage movement was steadily gaining momentum), modern man was in a flummox, both attracted and repelled. The paintings provide a record of Van Dongen's distress, an anxiety very much of its time.

The show begins with his first forays in early adulthood in the red-light district of his native Rotterdam, smudgy scenes of sailors and prostitutes that seem tinged with a sad weariness. In 1897, his studies at Rotterdam's Royal Academy of Fine Arts completed, he made his way to Paris, attracted by the anarchist movement there, and the political cartooning of artists like Théophile Steinlen. Soon he was drawing illustrations for left-wing publications like l'Indiscret and La Revue blanche. (Its influential editor, the anarchist art critic Félix Fénéon, became one of Van Dongen's most ardent early supporters.)

The Montreal show includes a vitrine filled with these commissioned editorial illustrations. One cartoon, from a 1903 edition of l'Indiscret, shows a blind, tubercular beggar woman with a crutch selling her papiers d'Arménie in the street (a traditional form of disinfectant much in use at the time). The caption tells us that she is the victim of poor social programs and botched surgery. A drawing from the same year depicts a haggard woman squatting over a metal basin washing herself, the skin on her back and thighs the muddy, soiled grey of dirty sheets.

In other drawings, though, he pictures the rich: faceless women in floor-length capes who are swept up polished staircases on the arms of their escorts, inoculated by privilege against the chill of self-scrutiny. Van Dongen's Paris is a tough world of haves and have-nots, a ruthless Darwinian experiment in survival, and he displays a youthful sympathy for the dispossessed.

But Van Dongen's fledgling social compassion gives way, in the first years of the new century, to a kind of lurid voyeurism. Turning his gaze to the chanteuses, transvestites and hookers of Montparnasse and Montmartre (where he shared lodgings with Picasso at the famed Bateau Lavoir studio), he makes paintings that feel increasingly disaffected, finding a kind of vulgarity in his subjects.

These are the paintings that have made his reputation. The painting Modjesko, Soprano Singer (1907) – one of his best known works – presents a carnivalesque figure in profile, her mouth a rubbery cavern agape, seeming to threaten to swallow whole the world around her. Portrait of a Cabaret Singer (1908) features a woman whose bloated features are harshly lit from below (electricity was the new rage), her fleshy face aflame with synthetic colour, the clotted fakery of face paint and oil paint conflating into a sticky compost.

Other paintings here are decorative and trifling, depicting doll-like beauties sometimes tricked up in exotic Arab attire. Either way, the inner life of the sitter is effaced. Receptacles for male lust or loathing, their fleshy surfaces by turns pleasing or horrifying, these women's humanity is rarely glimpsed.

It's impossible, however, not to admire his handling of paint, which can be, at its best, urgent and unpredictable. The show includes two of his famous horse paintings, which he thought of as exemplars of untamed animal spirit.

Some of his most spontaneous works capture the acrobats at the circus, like his gestural oil sketch Medrano Circus Horseback Riders (1905), in which he delivers just the key details of the two female performers on horseback, their figures edged in thick green strokes of pigment that read as emanations of energy. It's a phenomenon which occurs repeatedly in Van Dongen's art, sometimes generating a torrid visual heat.

Only now and again does he reveal compassion for his subjects. Picasso's mistress Fernande Olivier sat for Van Dongen several times, and his accounts of her typically convey a kind of brutish, almost masculine force. (Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was in the studio at the time, and perhaps, Van Dongen was trying on his fellow artist's aggressive, planar approach to the nude.)

One exception, however, is a small portrait of 1907, in which he builds Olivier's physiognomy sensitively from patches of pigment. Her down-turned eyes are soft and hooded with introspection, ringed with flesh that looks bruised and careworn. It is the face of a woman driven inward for respite, and her aloofness clearly intrigued her portraitist. One senses the stirrings of empathy, flowing in the painting like life blood.

How Van Dongen got from here to the brash and transparently insincere work of the teens and twenties – the emaciated socialites with their fancy dogs and garish, oversized jewels – is anyone's guess, a cautionary tale of artistic sellout, spelled out plainly in oil on canvas. These later canvases reek of misanthropic contempt for their wealthy subjects, with an extra scoop of misogyny on the side.

Van Dongen's story, at the end, seems to be one of artistic talent coupled with a bitter spirit. Vlaminck called him “a historian of postwar cynical debauchery,” but he was also its poster boy.

Unsavoury, too, was his association with the German fascist sculptor Arno Breker, which led to his controversial trip to Germany in 1941 with Vlaminck, Derain and others. The compassionate, left-leaning ministrations of the young man ended up the opportunistic pandering of the social-climbing fat cat.

The exhibition takes no stand in interpreting this trajectory. Instead, its organizers have provided a musical Acoustiguide punctuated by the sound of horse-drawn carriages, popping champagne corks and the titillated giggling of concubines. Well, whatever. We get the picture. Van Dongen learned how to play the game, but he appears to have lost his soul in the bargain. His pictures tell this chilling tale.

Kees Van Dongen: Painting the Town Fauve continues at the

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

until April 19 (514-285-2000 or mmfa.qc.ca).