| Numerous exhibitions follow one another, as well as conferences and auditions creating our raison d'être for our Atelier group.
HE Mahmoud Bey Khalil, President of the Friends of Art, Mr. Rémond, Controller of Fine Arts, thought of extending their artistic activity in Cairo through this second capital of Egypt, thus giving Alexandrians the opportunity to appreciate these exhibitions from overseas which only passed through our city.
The Municipality of Alexandria, having previously recognized the Workshop as being of public utility, has thus prepared, through our means, the path to achievement. (....)
Among all these beautiful events, the astonishing activity of the Comptroller General earned us the visit of an authentic painter, a decorator of high lineage.
Egypt has not had the pleasure of appreciating such a fine talent for many years. The public that follows fashion, evolving faster than it did sixty years ago, is less and less attached to permanent values.
For him, the variety of picturesque research and the concern to amuse the spectator allow him to ask the painter and the sculptor for material that is easy to speculate, worldly, lovable; Helping snobbery we want to be up to date, we favor the beginnings, the vagaries and ... abortions.
Few of the artists who shirk this invitation to the tournament; they seldom remain themselves.
Girieud's work is a beautiful and great lesson in serenity that an accomplished art gives. An art to be great must claim to love the profession. (....)
Nourished with the juice of Provence which by more than one aspect recalls Greece, this Mistral of fresco has taken a liking to great historical syntheses.
Contemplative, having a sense of history and of past civilizations, he reaches this high reverie from which he questions the vestiges of the past with the eyes of a poet and a thinker. We feel in him the inner light of a culture acquired by favor and on the injunction of an art which, to express itself, makes a preponderant part of knowledge.
Girieud's art proceeds in a straight line from the fresco, which is a desire for haughty and suggestive expression, an eminently social high language.
At this hour when Egypt relives the glorious hours of its nationalism for a moment thwarted by aggressive currents and wants to keep imperishable the tangible form of its aspirations, Painting must defend its rights. The art of fresco is the equivalent of sculpture by solemnity and measure. We can entrust him with the consecration of the most beautiful episodes in our history.
This short visit by a great decorator who, through the care of the Controller of Fine Arts, has just brought to light, and within the reach of all the authentic processes of Cennino Cennini, fills us with a noble ambition, as we can imagine.
This orientation of Painting must strike our leaders with the immense social significance of its possibilities.
Today the Painting which lives by expedients is fragmentary, individualistic, poor by the peculiarities of a stupid egotism that too much freedom, that a relaxation of manners encourages in the painter.
This art which comes from all the tics, from the whims of the individual can suddenly become great.
To each citizen who passes this art sanctifying the memory of great actions can say: Remember.
The passage of Girieud and the execution of his fresco at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo strengthened me in this conviction that the future of painting linked to the history of Egypt lies in the wall decoration |