| (....) Music and Dance were composed on the front. These opulent decorative panels intended, one would believe, to adorn the residence of some rich patrician, painted on paper, adorned the simple plank walls of a mess of officers. (....) Of this beautiful decoration, all idea of ??pain is absent, all feeling of disorder or revolt. Joy alone triumphs over it, the calmness of intelligence, the fullness of thought and heart in the robustness of full-blown senses and happy life. (...)
The great virtue of M. Pierre Girieud, moreover, already visible in his old compositions, is that of harmony. He too, as Baudelaire said Delacroix, he painted "the beautiful days of the spirit." (....)
Among the paintings on display at Mr. Paul Rosenberg, the Provençal Afternoon, which I am very close to consider both as the masterpiece of Mr. Girieud and as that, so far, of our modern Renaissance, responds perfectly to this ideal. (....)
M. Girieud thinks, by the color. I mean, he infuses his meditation with his tones and, by the mere organization of his values, translates the order of his ideas. In the only meeting of nuances, he finds his style, and by awakening him in sources asleep in us, makes our imagination participate. He had, formerly, the most dangerous masters. Italy, a year full of work and fertile dreams in Siena, from which he brought back such beautiful landscapes, fortunately turned him away from the literary fashions of his early youth. His culture, which is considerable, ended up balancing a sensibility, ardent and passionate, which, in its beginnings, was perhaps bogged down in useless researches of originality. We must leave the originality to those who have nothing to reveal to us of themselves or the world, the ignorant who, to amuse us and hold us back for a moment, have only the resources of the emphasis or the 'artifice. Mr. Pierre Girieud, who brings a vision of things to him, quickly realized that tradition alone could provide him with the means to translate it. The war has completely matured. He now has the quiet audacity of these substantial classics that he has always loved and which, like Ingres or Chasseriau, to whom he is related, do not hesitate to appear simple to always remain profound.
Go see the great compositions I just told you, as well as the two paintings that give them the replica, the Jas de David and the Concert du Baou, surprise his thought and his craft in motion for his project of decoration for a chapel and in his sketch for the Damned Women, love his tender and pagan gouaches, opulent and subtle, linger before the rich series of his still lifes as before that of his landscapes. (....) |