| Pierre Girieud, in his native Provence, had long guessed the measured and serene majesty of Greece.
The Alpilles had lent him the subjects of the best of his work, his landscapes, seeming once animated, one can say completed and defined by the presence of a grave shepherd like a demi-god or that of an ancient divinity, hatching forms of nature as well as in the canvas of Poussin, Acis and Galatée, the Cyclops Polyphemus both leaves the Sicilian mountain and merges with it. These works are so Hellenic that they seem to interpret the hills between Avignon and Marseille through memories of Attica that the painter had never seen. In the fullness of strength, Girieud has finally made the dreary trip to Greece that he had always longed for. He brought back twenty paintings which he exhibits this fortnight at the Druet gallery. This is the pinnacle of the artist's work. Small canvases but of admirable grandeur. They evoke all the most sublime landscapes of the earth, temples and gods: the Acropolis of Athens, presented from all its points of view, many of which will be new, even for the pilgrims who will have visited it.
Delphi with the ruins of its "treasures" in its rugged rocky gorge; Nafplion, seated on the edge of the most harmonious sea; the "holy Delos"; Epidaurus where so many theories of the sick came to invoke Aesculapius ... A male and pure flower of grace is widespread, diverse and one, on all these incomparable rites.
Girieud looked at them with the eye of a painter who wanted to be only a painter, removing from his gaze any poetic image that poetry could have imposed on him. The emotion is strictly stripped, new like that of an artist to whom Greece would have been absolutely unknown. No flash of light or color. Nothing of these too brilliant watercolors which gave us a slightly flamboyant Greece. The light and immense sky agrees with the stony, somewhat gray terrains, whose pallor lines by Sophocles said.
Girieud has not weakened his brush, which is largely loaded with harmonics, which are moreover close to white; he only muted its discreet richness a little to be more truthful. Never has the simple and incomparable beauty of this privileged region been translated with so much sobriety and force. Certainly, the sketches of the large wall compositions, now in place at the University of Poitiers, and those of the decorations he will paint for Jas de Puyvert, have grandeur and calm rhythm, with a sort of radiance of reason which Poussin is was delighted. But, in their gentle severity, the landscapes, populated in the name of the august vestiges of the most beautiful architecture that the sun has illuminated, and which knew how to harmonize so well with the architectural forms of the noblest of lands, raising a name
an azure and chenue sea, A mutilated temple, as Jean Moréas says, provided Pierre Girieud with his true glory. |