Jonathan Goodman reviews Painters’ Lives: Marguerite Loupe and Maurice Brianchon at the Grossman Gallery, Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Goodman writes: “Louppe and Brianchon may not have been painters of major insight, but their fine possession of craft made them practitioners of genuine realization. They helped maintain the general level of painting practice in France by protecting the accomplishments of modernism, even as they appear to have stayed close to traditional subjects. The realism we encounter in their art is neither deliberately minor nor an attempt at aggrandizement. Instead, they painted the world as they saw it, refusing to reduce the evidence of the world to esthetics alone. At the same time, their adherence to French painting’s legacy is noticeably loyal. Louppe’s Rustic Chair (undated) places a brown chair with a curved back before us—behind it is a series of complicated planes of color that reference cubism. But the work is not a mere historical footnote to French art’s past. Instead, it has become an image infused with a genuine feeling for a realism that communicates depth and esthetic awareness.”