NYMPH AND SATYR by Bob Kessel apres Poussin

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NYMPH AND SATYR by Nicolas Poussin

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Bob Kessel has created an art series titled, “MYTHOLOGY”. It features pictures based on the works of famous artists throughout history like the picture “NYMPH AND SATYR” originally by Poussin, shown above. These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

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Nicolas Poussin (1594 - 1665) was a French painter in the classical style. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century.

Initially, Poussin’s genius was recognized only by small circles of collectors. (In the two decades following his death, a particularly large collection of his works was amassed by Louis XIV.) At the same time, it was recognized that he had contributed a new theme of “classical severity” to French art.

Benjamin West, an American painter of the 18th century who worked in Britain, based his canvas of the death of General Wolfe at Quebec on Poussin’s example. As a result, the image is one in which each character gazes with appropriate seriousness on Wolfe’s death after securing British domination of North America.

Jacques-Louis David resurrected a style already known as “Poussinesque” during the French Revolution in part because the leaders of the Revolution looked to replace the frivolity and oppression of the court with Republican severity and civic-mindedness, most obvious in David’s dramatic canvas of Brutus receiving the bodies of his sons, sacrificed to his own principles, and the famous death of Marat.

Throughout the 19th century, Poussin, available to the ordinary person’s gaze because the Revolution had opened the collections of the Louvre, was inspirational for thoughtful and self-reflexive artists who pondered their own work methods, notably Cézanne, who strove to “recreate Poussin after nature”, and the Post-Impressionists. The less thoughtful enjoyed the eroticism of some of Poussin’s classicizing subjects.

In the twentieth century art critics have suggested that the “analytic Cubist” experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were founded upon Poussin’s example.

The most famous 20th-century scholar of Poussin was the Englishman Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, who in 1979 was disgraced by revelations of his complicity with Soviet intelligence.

Today, Poussin’s paintings at the Louvre reside in a gallery dedicated to him.

DYING MINOTAUR by Bob Kessel

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

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.