| In the magazine Sud, Mr. Paul Sentenac publishes a study on Girieud, illustrated with very characteristic works, from which we detach the following passage: There is in the personality and in the work of Pierre Girieud a tasty mixture of mysticism and voluptuousness, but a voluptuousness that always involves an aesthetic enjoyment. This is because from the land of Provence as well as from the soil of Italy sprang the harmonious colonnades of the temples dedicated to Apollo and Venus, as well as impulses of faith from the primitives to God.
Girieud, originally from the Basses-Alpes, lived in Marseille from childhood and, in the great Mediterranean city, Boulevard de Longchamp.
At ten, a student at the Lycée and already feeling the demon of art shaking him, he skipped school. He will never forget Marseille, which gave him his first artistic emotions. He kept a cult in the big sunny city. Marseille in the memory of the painter, nostalgic in the midst of the mists of Paris, becomes the symbol of light and the symbol of Latin clarity. Also around 1912, he joined other Marseille painters: Camoin, Alfred Lombard, Verdilhan Mathieu, poets: Joachim Gasquet and Xavier de Magallon, all equally fond of Mediterranean culture, to organize a painting exhibition in Marseille. Lombard workshops, Quai Rive-Neuve.
And Girieud himself rents, on the same quay, a workshop next to his friend Lombard whose neighbor he stayed in for several years in the Parisian capital.
At the time of this return to Marseille, Pierre Girieud already won a reputation in Paris, not without having courageously embarked on the fight. The painter had settled in the great city of the arts with the beginning of the century.
We then found him, as bearded as hairy, in the rooms of the Louvre Museum, where he marked long stations in front of Poussin's paintings, and in various artistic circles, at the College of Modern Aesthetics or at the Naturist Crèche |