| In an album of an extremely happy presentation, the Librairie de France publishes twelve large lithographs by Pierre Girieud which accomplishes the miracle of summarizing in twelve pages the grace and the tragic, the tenderness and the fury of love. The qualities of harmony, clarity, flexibility and vigor that Pierre Girieud shows in his painting appear entirely in his lithographs for which he chose an era, a setting, characters, prestigious symbols. In order to delight our eyes, in order to enhance our spirit and to fascinate our heart, he evokes, at the edges of this sea from which Aphrodite was born, he resuscitated under the most indulgent sky, in the midst of the most radiant landscapes of the world: Daphnis and Chloe, Love and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, Perseus and Andromeda, Hercules and Omphale, Râris and Helena, Pan and Syrinx, Pygmalion and Galatea, Jason and Medea, Ulysses and Penelope, Theseus and Ariadne, Pyramus and Thisbe; naive love, divine love, occult love, delivering love, chaining love, august love, whimsical love, animating love, vindictive love, returning love, inconstant love, love that does not grow old. All the pleasure and all the anguish, all the legend and all the life. All the happiness that the burning thrill raises and all who bends, all the beauty that turns and perpetually the sacred breath invents and consumes. With a science and a sensibility equal, and with a singular power of suggestion, Mr. Pierre Girieud offers us what art and poetry, what the reality and the dream produced more pathetic and more charming |