The purpose of this exhibition is to show off four extremely talented young French painters. It is convenient, but not strictly accurate, to call these painters ‘Realists’. They have sometimes called themselves ‘Expressionists’; but although one may discover in some of them, the influence of Van Gogh, even more apparent is the influence of Courbet.
While Ginette Rapp exults in the groom of the approaching tempest, André Minaux delights in the play of sunlight upon fool waters. Where she stands back to survey an extensive landscape, he seems almost to mingle with his crowd of solid stately girls and children, occasionaly leaving one to search for the landscape that lies behind them.
Montané is an urban, asocial artist who finds his material in the kaleidoscopic effects of animated streets, loving and painting not so much individuals, as the crowd itself, for, as is the case with Minaux, there is a certain duality in his approach; the subjects of his scenes being much less characterized than the scene itself.
The world of Jean Vinay stands somewhere between that of Roger Montané and Ginette Rapp. A solitary, and at times very poetical observer of the Parisian scene, he is less melancholic than the one, less exuberant than the other.
For them the painter’s task is to come to terms with reason while preserving the imaginative force and, above all, to make an original contribution to the art of painting without esoterism or mystification.
Quentin Bell