| Solliès-la-Ville, Allauch, moustiers, Cucuron, Saint-Tropez, here are some of the names that can be read in the catalog of an exhibition open for a few days in a small gallery on rue Laffitte: Mr. Pierre Girieud exhibits about thirty paintings, mostly landscapes, his latest productions.
The southern countryside celebrated by the brush of this painter appears severe, in its picturesque classic. It is not its sunny lyricism that M. Girieud describes, it is the austere grandeur of its hills, the hieraticism of its cypresses, the strength of its rocks, close to which sometimes shelters, as in Moustiers, the soaring of a steeple.
What some painters achieve by the dash of lyricism: the expression of a filial and admiring emotion, Mr. Girieud achieves it by the persistence of his will. He studies his subject, penetrates it, deepens it, and, by a series of constant and repeated efforts, arouses the interest which others, on the contrary, seem to arouse almost by playing.
This stubborn conscience, which is never satisfied, is not without pitfalls. If the intensity obtained most often rewards meditative work without failure, it sometimes happens that the artist who has restrained his first impulses too much, borders on coldness and does not always avoid it. For those who seek to penetrate the secret that each painting brings, certain struggles can be read openly; these struggles give of the character of the artist the highest idea that can be conceived and oblige us to bow very low before the nobility of his activity.
At the beginning, it seemed that Mr. Girieud wanted above all to manifest himself in monumental decoration. Alas! our time is not favorable to vast pictorial narratives. It does not reveal to the artist the extent of vast walls to be enriched. However, at this exhibition, two projects show that the artist has lost none of his taste for large syntheses, that his qualities of balance in the composition remain intact, and that they await the favorable opportunity to express themselves. fully as in the past.
These projects were sketched out to adorn a corner of the Decorative Arts exhibition. Considering the pictorial merits alone, we regret that they were not followed up favorably. But painters forget too easily that on certain occasions the subject is still important. The frescoes where Mr. Girieud intended to celebrate the Arts of Stone and the Arts of Life were above all a glorification of the Italian Renaissance. What would the people of Marseilles have said if, to adorn the Palais de Longchamp, Puvis de Chavannes had proposed, on the one hand, the evocation of the sweetness of Florentine life; on the other hand, that of the activity of the Port of Genoa? They would have found the joke a bit strong. This is the misadventure that happened to Mr. Pierre Girieud. The friends of his talent deplore it, but here the artist can only make his mea culpa; the contemporary effort that was to be celebrated called for another theme, wanted other allegories.
The fact remains that Mr. Girieud's exhibition is of the greatest interest. It is enough to prove how much is justified the place taken by the author in contemporary painting, and the esteem in which all artists hold him. |