Fine Arts Paris 2018, Carrousel du Louvre
Georges Leroux, A Classic Modernity
Novembre 2018
Georges Leroux is not a stranger to French museums, his niece having donated to the State in 1974 an important set of paintings, today shared between Beaubourg and the museums of Beauvais (13 paintings), Autun, Brest, Chartres, Épinal and Vernon. In 2017, Les Éparges (1915) inaugurated the exhibition "The Art of Peace" at the Petit Palais, and a painting from 1947, In the Grande Galerie, can now be found hanging in the history of the Louvre rooms.
It is an unknown set of paintings and a few drawings that shed light on the career of the artist, a pupil of Léon Bonnat (1833-1922) at the École des Beaux-Arts, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1906 and resident at the Villa Médicis from 1907 to 1909. Mobilised in 1914, he continued his work on the front, preparing many drawings exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1919 and published as soon as 1915 in the newspaper, L'Illustration.
Between the marvelous landscapes of pines and cypresses of Italy, the tragic or heroic paintings of the 1914-1918 war which earned him his first fame, and the later landscapes of Provence and Savoy, Georges Leroux tried among others, to propose another modernity of resolutely classical inspiration.