| or a few days, the Musée de l'Orangerie is exhibiting an important decoration executed by the landscape architect Pierre Girieud for the University of Poitiers. I said with landscape intention because the artist has not been known until now only by interpretations of nature, a very personal character and a remarkable accuracy of accent. Why must he have the ambition to assert himself as a painter of nudes? Nothing obliged him. The Greeks were not used to walking as naked as the Negroes of the Belgian Congo or French Equatorial Africa and to exhibit their anatomy in the open air. It is thus that Girieud, in four large panels, was pleased to appear Pythagoras, Lycurgus, Aesculapius and Homer surrounded by some characters of which some are naked and others draped. He even went further. In half a dozen very narrow panels, he represented symbolic figures, in grisaille, who would have adapted much better to the drapery than to the state of nature. They have nothing michelangesque and appear to us only as thick maritornes. Not to mention the inaccuracies of detail, there burst a heaviness and a vulgarity whose large panels are not exempt. But in these, at least, the artist has given the characters backgrounds nature of imposing solidity and incomparable nobility, and this makes tolerate the screaming colors and redundancy of muscles. In a city with admirable Puvis de Chavannes, the artist should have avoided making style. Girieud is convinced of the opposite. What did he learn to know himself and to undertake only what he was able to do well. Not sutor ultra crepidam. |