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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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.

LA PARISIENNE by Bob Kessel

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LA PARISIENNE by Pablo Picasso

L’ETREINTE DANS LA MANSARDE by Bob Kessel

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“L’ETREINTE DANS LA MANSARDE” by Bob Kessel, is from his art series “PICASSO IN PARIS” based on the works of Pablo Picasso. This picture and many others, can be purchased as signed and numbered limited edition original fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

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L’ETREINTE DANS LA MANSARDE by Pablo Picasso