| (....) You are in the Narbonnaise. You travel through Provence. Have you imported the work that can only be better understood in the color of these horizons? But at least, pious pilgrim of the art that consoles and beautifies our poor lives, do you not go to contemplate these Frescoes of Pradines that the writer celebrated with so much impressive enthusiasm? (...) This is where are the frescoes clear, bright, simple and beautiful look of Pierre Girieud, Alfred Lombard and Dufrénoy. You can not be so close, and deprive yourself of this beauty. How I love Girieud's burning atmosphere, Lombard's purity of landscape, their harmonious lines, their solid, solid dough, and those dissimilarities of talent that come together in an indefinable movement. (....) Think they are renovating the Fresco. This painting incorporated in lime, is particularly appropriate in our time, because it is of emotion and social expression, collective. It is a difficult art, undoubtedly, and male of all. It is the painting of men, said Michelangelo. This man knew himself in art and manliness! The Fresco associates, in the execution, the painter and the mason. This art colors the wall under the sun and puts the sun on the walls of the common room. Brilliant with light and life, it must be encouraged, resumed, solicited everywhere to enchant the houses, the palaces, the great modern monuments that await the wing blow of the magician. In truth, Soubs, the happy gift of peace, as we sang in the Middle Ages, the Fresco treated in the manner of the masters of Pradines, is the decorative solution of our architecture. And since you push your peregrinating mood to Marseille, go visit, Sir, the halls of the Faculty of Sciences. I engage you with a certain malice because you will not have to discover for your delight the frescoes of Mrs. Girieud and Lombard. But good to imagine the pleasure you will take when they are there! If the war had not occurred, you would have seen them in their calm beauty, as the readers of Comoëdia have been able to judge on prestigious models. (....) |