7 YEAR ITCH MARILYN MONROE by Bob Kessel

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MARILYN MONROE by Bob Kessel

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Marilyn Monroe publicity photo for The Seven Year Itch

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Bob Kessel’s pictures are of Marilyn Monroe from the movie “The Seven Year Itch”. These pictures are available as a limited edition original fine art print. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

Quotes by Marilyn Monroe;

“I want to grow old without face-lifts…I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know yourself.”

“With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself -for survival and living day to day with what comes up.”

“I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.”

“Fame is fickle and I know it. It has its compensations, but it also has its drawbacks and I’ve experienced them both.”

“No-one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren’t.”

“My illusions didn’t have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!”

“Only the public can make a star. It’s the studios who try to make a system out of it.”

“If I play a stupid girl and ask a stupid question I’ve got to follow it through. What am I supposed to do -look intelligent?”

Bob Kessel’s American Icons art series also includes Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis, Charles Bukowski, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, John F Kennedy and many more.

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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LEDA AND THE SWAN by Bob Kessel

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“LEDA AND THE SWAN” by Bob Kessel is available as a signed and numbered limited edition original fine art print. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

In Greek mythology, Leda was daughter of the Aetolian king Thestius, and wife of the king Tyndareus, of Sparta. Her myth gave rise to the popular motif in Renaissance and later art of Leda and the Swan. She was the mother of Helen  of Troy, Clytemnestra, and Castor and Pollux.

Leda was admired by Zeus, who seduced her in the guise of a swan. As a swan, Zeus fell into her arms for protection from a pursuing eagle. Their consummation, on the same night as Leda lay with her husband Tyndareus, resulted in two eggs from which hatched Helen — later known as the beautiful “Helen of Troy” — Clytemnestra, and Castor and Pollux. Which children are the progeny of Tyndareus, the mortal king, and which are of Zeus, and are thus half-immortal, is not consistent among accounts, nor is which child hatched from which egg. The split is almost always half mortal, half divine, although the pairings do not always reflect the children’s heritage pairings. Castor and Polydeuces are sometimes both mortal, sometimes both divine. One consistent point is that if only one of them is immortal, it is Polydeuces.

DIAMOND MINOTAUR AND NYMPH by Bob Kessel

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“DIAMOND MINOTAUR AND NYMPH” by Bob Kessel is available as a signed and numbered limited edition original fine art print. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

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MINOTAUR by Pablo Picasso

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The classic Grecian Minotaur appeared in Picasso’s art between 1933-1937. Picasso uses the myth of the Minotaur to illustrate the loss of raw and natural balance in the world around him. Picasso used the Minotaur in a series of paintings to illustrate this lost balance between the raw desire of nature and the human world—the balance embodied in the Minotaur.

The Minotaur is the compilation of the unconscious desires of man and the conscious societal constraints that the individual puts on him or herself, thus Picasso’s portrayal of the Minotaur goes beyond the simple myth to comment on the labyrinth of the human condition.

The Minotaur is portrayed by Picasso as a tragic character caught between the two worlds he was created from. The Minotaur evolves in Picasso’s art beyond just a mythological creature to an existential figure who comments on the constraints of human life. Picasso portrays the Minotaur condition as what every human experiences, and the rhetoric in his painting declares that this existence is Sisyphus-ian and tragic. He is directed and punished by the complex world and laws of humanity, when he would rather live like the Bull—free and unburdened by humanity.