PARIS - Etchings have been the salient feature in Paris art life recently and so numerous were they as to give the impression that the galleries had agreed to hold them in concert. The beautiful collection of Watteau and Janinet prints at Brunner's is still a draw while the success of Louis Orr's exhibition more than warranted Guiot's decision to give it a longer run.
Another surprise sprung upon the art-loving public has been the work of Auguste Brouet (Galerie Barbazanges) shown for the first time in France. Full of. significance is the circumstance that this artist's name should have enjoyed celebrity in the United States before reaching us over here. The display of etchings is extensive and various. Brouet owes his great freedom of manner to masterly draughtsmanship and wide knowledge of the secrets of his craft. The majority of his plates picture the life of the streets, whose mystery so attracts him. He depicts the most miserable by-lanes, the most wretched slums, sordid booths in the people's fairs, and rag pickers, hawkers and peddlers have found their painter-poet in him. He portrays them with wonderful and genial sympathy and with almost incomparable skill. The magic name of Rembrandt has already been pronounced in comparison with that of Brouet. Other might be obscured by this comparison, but Brouet's reading of the pitiful side of life and the power of his technique both warrant the challenge.
Being so fond of the street he is naturally drawn to gipsies, tumblers, mountebanks and all the wanderers of the road, and their constant portrayal naturally led him to undertake the illustration of Goncourt's "Freres Zemganno," in which the characters are acrobats and the setting is a circus. The sequence of the task and the nature of the subject have been favorable to an evolution in Brouet's habitual manner as also to the display of his happiest and most original gifts. A set of plates representing dancers recalls neither Degas, Forain nor Louis Legrand, which is saying much for their originality, while the nudes combine the precision of Rops with the delicacy of Whistler. Lastly, some plates directly suggested by the war evoke its tragic aspects while illustrating some of its more familiar phases.