| I say "school", not to say achievement, because today that means "school" includes theory. Now, I write to you about painters who only inscribe their and their research in their works. Two years ago, a poet, Joachim Gasquet and a group of painters remarked in a beautiful landscape of Provence, in front of the Luberon mountain a small chapel, an old village style where we still celebrate the miracle of Saint Pancrace . This chapel, preceded by a sort of gallery formed by three whitewashed arches, belongs to the chatelain of Pradines, Mr. Douglas Fitch. The poet suggested to the painters to try on these white walls, in this bucolic and mystical setting, where high cypresses spring up, the rebirth of the fresco, the true fresco that was the glory of the Italian schools. The three painters were Pierre Girieud, Dufrénoy and Alfred Lombard. (....); Girieud with his mastery in composition and an impressionist sensibility in detail, painted a radiant and serene Adoration of the Magi; (....)But if color, the food of the last worries, enslaves its polyphony to the expression of the most abstract predictions, it can not also transfigure, revive the great traditional themes, the composition of Girieud, the Toilet of Venus does not prove it she not? Here, the sea is only a daring green; the sky of a dazzling azure; an island evokes a galley of gold; tall umbrella pines, great lords of this bare landscape, concert their heavy greenery with the transparent greens of the water; and all this violence compels the eye to rest on the admirable development of the flesh which, in the foreground, composes a sensual and mystical hymn. O modern Aphrodite! with what religious delight, glances flow between the eyelashes, opposing their recollection to the infernal dance of light! From what sacred emotion are hugged, beside whom were born neighboring streams, the companions of his mystery! And finally see this box, shimmering with gold, where the pleasure of the eyes exhausted by too bright flames comes down and rest in a more concrete contemplation. The mystery in mad works takes I know not what strength, what a scientific underside. But even more, one must not love these landscapes where Girieud sculpts as if he carved a fabulous herd of watches, the mountains of Provence. Here it is finally! the great and tumultuous earth, the mother nature of invisible gods! It is no longer framed by anything, nor isolated in its continuity, nor locked and retreated in the ring of an opera! No. She is there with her undefined and musical movement, with her underground animation and her struggle against the ambient atmosphere against the impalpable weight. See this boiling of nipples and say if you do not feel before this tumult of synthetic plans, before the pathos of these tones a cosmic emotion. (....) - Reproduction of Toilet of Venus |