NIGHT CAFE by Bob Kessel after Van Gogh

“NIGHT CAFE” by Bob Kessel, based on Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, can be purchased as a signed and numbered limited edition original fine art print. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

The Night Café in the Place Lamartine in Arles is one of Vincent van Gogh’s best known paintings from his Arles period. The work depicts the interior of the Café de la Gare, an all night tavern owned by Joseph-Michel Ginoux and his wife Marie.

NIGHT CAFE by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh often visited brothels and disreputable drinking establishments. The desolate setting of the Café de la Gare served as an inspiration for Van Gogh who wrote of the painting to his brother, Theo:

In my picture of the “Night Café” I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur.

Vincent Van Gogh, Letter 534, 9 September 1888

The subject matter conveys a sense of loneliness and desperation. The slouched drinkers and lone figure (the owner, Joseph-Michel Ginoux) behind the billiard table, along with the skewed perspective and stark colouring, create a jarring and disturbing work. Van Gogh himself compared the tone of the painting as delirium tremens in full swing (Letter 534).

As a general rule, Van Gogh only signed the works that he felt were the most well executed. In the lower right corner of this painting Van Gogh wrote “Vincent le café de nuit”.

Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh’s friend and fellow artist, would come to live with Vincent shortly after The Night Café was painted. In fact, Gauguin himself would paint his own version. The atmosphere of the two works is quite different. In Van Gogh’s version, one finds isolation and despair, while Gauguin’s is more lively with a focus on Madame Ginoux. Gauguin wrote to Emile Bernard about his painting: ” . . . a café that Vincent likes a lot and that I like less. At bottom it’s not my sort of thing and local low life doesn’t work for me. I like it well enough when others do it but it always makes me uneasy.”

NIGHT CAFE by Paul Gauguin

DIAMOND VAN GOGH BY GAUGUIN by Bob Kessel

“DIAMOND VAN GOGH BY GAUGUIN” by Bob Kessel, from the new art series “PAINTERS PAINTING PAINTERS”, can be purchased as a signed and numbered limited edition original fine art print. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

VAN GOGH PAINTING by Paul Gauguin

Gauguin’s arrival in Arles on October 23 1888 signaled the inauguration of the Studio of the South. The following two months, during which the artists lived, ate, and worked together, were marked by an intensity that van Gogh described as “excessively electric,” as they debated aesthetic influences and working methods and sought to refine and maintain their individual artistic identities. Van Gogh, who painted very rapidly, applying thick coats of pigment, preferred working from models or directly from nature.

Gauguin, on the other hand, counseled: “art is an abstraction; extract it from nature while dreaming in front of it,”

and preferred to work from memory, building up thin layers of color in a slow, methodical style.

Testing their theories, the two artists painted a number of identical motifs side by side. In the ancient Roman cemetery known as the Alyscamps, Van Gogh worked with characteristic speed, quickly producing what he called “a study of the whole avenue, entirely yellow.” Gauguin proceeded more deliberately, creating a more abstract composition featuring three Arlésiennes (women of Arles), whom he ironically referred to as “the three graces.” Later the artists produced similarly divergent results in their depictions of the proprietress of the local café: Van Gogh’s Night Café and Gauguin’s The Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux).

As winter approached, the two artists were increasingly confined to the tiny yellow house. Their aesthetic debates intensified and the tension of living and working together soon proved to be too great; Gauguin began to speak of returning to Paris. At the end of December, van Gogh, distraught, threatened Gauguin with a knife, then cut off part of his own ear. Gauguin fled, never to see van Gogh again.

Pablo Picasso quote by Bob Kessel

Bob Kessel has created a new art series titled, “ARTISTS ON ART” based on not so well known quotes by well known artists. The pictures are available as limited edition fine art prints, signed and numbered by the artist. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

Bob Kessel’s “ARTISTS ON ART” series includes the following artists; Salvador Dali, Leonardo Da Vinci, Giorgio DeChirico, Roy Lichtenstein, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Paul Klee, Rene Magritte, Henri Matisse, Michelangelo, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, Peter Paul Rubens, John Singer Sargent, Ben Shahn, Su Tung Po, Vincent Van Gogh, Orson Welles, James McNeill Whistler

NUDE WITH MONET by Bob Kessel

Bob Kessel has created a new art series titled, “THE NUDE” based on the works of artists throughout time. The pictures are available as limited edition fine art prints, signed and numbered by the artist. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

If there is one genre of art that seems to have played a greater role than any other, it is the nude. For at least 30,000 years, humans have represented the naked form in a variety of ways. From the ideal to the real, the Romantic to the Surrealist, there has been almost no end of works devoted to the unclothed human body.

The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. … In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early 18th century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued … the naked human body was the central subject of art.

Rubens did for the female nude what Michelangelo had done for the male. He realised so fully its expressive possibilities that, for the next century, all those that were not slaves of academism, inherited his vision of the body as pearly and plump. Round the Venuses or Dianas of the Fontainebleau School hangs a smell of stylish erotism, impossible, like all smells, to describe, but strong as ambergris or musk. One reason is that a trace of Gothicism, with all that it implies of seductive guesswork, persists in their proportions. Up to the time of le Moyne or even Houdon, the bodies of French goddesses retain the small breasts, long tapering limbs, and slightly accented stomachs of the sixteenth century. To this tradition of quasi-Gothic elegance certain painters of the dix-huitieme, Watteau above all, added Rubens’ feeling for the colour and texture of skin. No other painter has had a more sensitive eye for texture than Watteau, and the rarity of his nudes may even reflect a kind of shyness born of too tremulous desire which the spectacle of the living surface aroused in him. Perhaps the very unfrigid statues in his parks are telling us that he could only contain his excitement when the body was supposed to be of stone.