| .... It is for the opposite reason that the walls are missing - still missing - to Mr. Pierre Girieud. The positive and negative qualities of Mr. Girieud are precisely the virtues of which Mr. Denis is deprived and the faults from which he is exempt. Mr. Denis seeks the classical style from Pompei, after having, for a time, art from Gauguin. It was also with Gauguin that M. Girieud studied. But the advice of the Master, by personalizing itself in the pupil, put him on the path of the great tradition, otherwise pure, magnificently powerful, and his concerns travel from the great frescoes of Siena to the great figures of archaic Greece and Egypt. His art is above all cerebral; many will say literary, who will want to blame it and, really, will praise it, for what is literary art, provided it does not rush its providential limits, if not great art, that which arouses thought in the joining by plastic means? There was a time in M. Girieud's career when excessively exclusive spiritual preoccupations threatened to embarrass him, to reduce him plastically; the desire for style led him to the monotony of forms, to the poverty of colors. He evaded this danger. Without his inner life losing any of its personal intensity, he returned to the direct study of nature, and the synthetic lines of his large figures took on the consistency and tone of life. If, at least, we find in Les Baigneuses some more traces of an error into which he might have fallen, it is no more than a memory; it will always fade away. The new work has the grace of strength. Decorative, absolutely, it breaks its frame, it appeals to the section of the wall, like these stained glass windows, - Water, Earth and Air, really call the destination they formulate and not false semblances of stained glass, excuses for painting.
Never was a decorative artist more expressly designated by his gifts, as by the studious joy he tastes, one feels, in putting them into practice....
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