Pierre Girieud

In December 1909 a new artists' group opened its first exhibition at Heinrich Thannhauser's Moderne Galerie in Munich, and among the guests whose pictures hung beside those of Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Münter was a painter from Paris. Pierre Girieud had grown up near Marseille and settled in Montmartre in 1900, where he became a close friend of Picasso. In 1905 he sent a large triptych of the Temptation of Saint Anthony to the Salon d'Automne, the exhibition that gave the Fauves their name, and critics counted him among those wild colourists.

The Munich group was the Neue Künstlervereinigung, the New Artists' Association. Girieud became a member in 1910 and showed in all three of its exhibitions, one of very few French painters inside the Munich avant-garde before the First World War. The war cut him off from his friends there. In the years that followed he turned more and more to fresco, drawing on the early Sienese painters he had studied in Italy, and he taught the technique at the school of fine arts in Cairo.