Edgar Degas,  1834-1917, was a French artist, acknowledged as the master of drawing the human figure in motion. Degas worked in many mediums, preferring pastel to all others. He is perhaps best known for his paintings, drawings, and bronzes of ballerinas and of race horses.

Degas’ style reflects his deep respect for the old masters (he was an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age) and his great admiration for Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. He was also a collector of Japanese prints, whose compositional principles influenced his work.

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ORANGE BATHER ALA DEGAS by Bob Kessel apres Degas

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APRES LE BAIN by Bob Kessel apres Degas

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The art of Degas reflects a concern for the psychology of movement and expression and the harmony of line and continuity of contour. These characteristics set Degas apart from the other impressionist painters, although he took part in all but one of the 8 impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Degas was the son of a wealthy banker, and his aristocratic family background instilled into his early art a haughty yet sensitive quality of detachment. As he grew up, his idol was the painter Jean Auguste Ingres, whose example pointed him in the direction of a classical draftsmanship, stressing balance and clarity of outline. After beginning his artistic studies with Louis Lamothes, a pupil of Ingres, he started classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts but left in 1854 and went to Italy. He stayed there for 5 years, studying Italian art, especially Renaissance works.

APRES LE TUB by Bob Kessel apres Degas

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As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he was able to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired: old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Three artists he idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were especially well represented in his collection.

For all the stylistic evolution, certain features of Degas’s work remained the same throughout his life. He always painted indoors, preferring to work in his studio, either from memory or using models. The figure remained his primary subject; his few landscapes were produced from memory or imagination. It was not unusual for him to repeat a subject many times, varying the composition or treatment. He was a deliberative artist whose works, as Andrew Forge has written, “were prepared, calculated, practiced, developed in stages. They were made up of parts. The adjustment of each part to the whole, their linear arrangement, was the occasion for infinite reflection and experiment.”Degas himself explained, “In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement”.

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FEMME APRES LE BAIN by Edgar Degas

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The Dreyfus Affair, which divided Paris from the 1890s to the early 1900s, further intensified his anti-Semitism. By the mid 1890s, he had broken off relations with all of his Jewish friends, publicly disavowed his previous friendships with Jewish artists, and refused to use models who he believed might be Jewish. He remained an outspoken anti-Semite and member of the anti-Semitic “Anti-Dreyfusards” until his death.

His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: “What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn’t stay till the end.”

Although he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy. He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in 1917.

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MATISSE AND HIS MODEL by Bob Kessel

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Bob Kessel’s art series “ARTISTS AND MODELS” features pictures where the artist throughout history has placed himself in the painting along with his subject. These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition original fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

It may be this love is a debt I am paying,
due to the destiny of my line,
and that Aphrodite is exacting a tribute of me for all my race.
Europa - this is the first beginning of our line - was loved of Zeus;
a bull’s form disguised the god,
Pasiphaë, my mother, a victim of the deluded bull,
brought forth in travail her reproach and burden.

- Ovid, Heroides

MINOTAUR AND GLASS OF WINE by Bob Kessel

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Bob Kessel’s art series “PICASSO IN PARIS” features pictures based on the works of the Pablo Picasso. These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition original fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

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MINOTAUR by Pablo Picasso

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Art is a human development before it is an aesthetic phenomenon, and Pablo Picasso, the twentieth century metaphysician, autobiographically represents his world translated into a personal aesthetic expression. As a Spaniard it was inevitable that the bull, the bullfight, and eventually the Minotaur, would concern Picasso.

The Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, virile and noble, but ultimately monstrous. The Surrealists loved the Minotaur and his Labyrinth as a symbol of man’s convoluted mind and animal nature.

The Minotaur myth emerged in the arts: Matisse illustrated Henry de Montherland’s Pasiphaë: Chant de Minos; Max Ernst’s Labyrinth and his Wheel of the Sun both allude to this myth, while his Spanish Physician shows a woman flirtatiously dropping her hankerchief before a minotaur-like figure; Giorgio de Chirico made many versions of sleeping The Soothsayer’s Recompense surrounded by labyrinthine colonnades, arches, and facades; and Victor Brauner depicted a wide-awake Ariadne on conveyance that Ernst Trova could have built for his Falling Man; while Masson continued his variations on the Pasiphaë-Labyrinth-Minotaur idea often greatly influenced by Picasso.

Bob Kessel signing his print based on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel art

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“The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.”

- MICHELANGELO

Sistine Chapel (Italian: Cappella Sistina) is the best-known chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City. It is famous for its architecture, evocative of Solomon’s Temple of the Old Testament, and its decoration which has been frescoed throughout by the greatest Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, and Sandro Botticelli. Under the patronage of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo painted 12,000 square feet of the chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512. He resented the commission, and believed his work only served the Pope’s need for grandeur. However, today the ceiling, and especially The Last Judgement, are widely believed to be Michelangelo’s crowning achievements in painting.

Bob Kessel’s art series “MICHELANGELO” features pictures based on the works of the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti. These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition original fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

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IGNUDI by Bob Kessel
after Michelangelo from the Sistine Chapel

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TEMPTATION by Bob Kessel
after Michelangelo from the Sistine Chapel

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WRESTLERS by Bob Kessel
after Michelangelo from the Sistine Chapel

Wrestlers sketch by Michelangelo