Pierre Roche: his works donated to the Petit Palais (Paris) on display from March 10 to September 11

Some of his sculptures still adorn the parks and gardens as well as the streets of Paris, such as the Fontaine Avril located in the gardens of the Palais Galliera. A Art Nouveau artist trained in painting by Gervex and Roll then in sculpture by Dalou, the artist is a real touch about experience. He became interested in the decorative arts but also in engraving for which he invents new techniques. This exhibition is made possible by his family's donation of an exceptional 4.000-piece set coming directly from his studio, is divided into 7 chapters around a hundred works. Permission to present the different facets and originality of his work.

During his career as an artist, Pierre Roche never stops traveling: in Switzerland, in England, through France, but also in the East (Egypt, Algeria). He draws and paints in watercolor what he sees in notebooks or on free sheets. He constitutes a sum of motifs which he then declines in various forms. His gipsographies (relief or embossed print made from a plaster matrix), from Fez to Paris, from Egypt to Majorca, testify to his appetite for new horizons. Fauna and flora Pierre Roche's art is at the crossroads of Art Nouveau, Japonism and Symbolism. Animal and plant forms populate his artistic universe and invade his prints, including the delicate menus and invitations he composes. This inspiration she draws from nature is also found in her alguiers (algae herbarium) whose collection of shapes and colors serves as direct inspiration for many designs and prints.

Loie Fuller “Pierre Roche was very close to the dancer he has represented in the drawing, in the sculpture, in the restoration in a virtuoso way the unfolding of his veils. The Petit Palais owns both copies The work of Pierre Roche and his proofs of layout and coloring, but also the autographed copy of Loïe Fuller "to my great friend Pierre Roche". Poster in gold foil For the Salon des Cent dedicated to the graphic arts, organized by the magazine La Plume, Pierre Roche creates two spectacular posters for which he uses gold leaf. These posters are representative of his taste for rare materials and his search for innovative creative processes such as eglomization, a technique that superimposes parchment, paper or mica sheets on gold or silver foil to create fragile works.

His works are often intended for his collector friends, art critics or artists; Pierre Roche's production had a confidential character which explains surely remained unknown to the general public. Among his relatives are Aimé-Jules Dalou, Siegfried Bing, Jean-Paul Laurens, Paul Vitry, Roger Marx, Louis Vauxelles or Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose bust he sculpts and illustrates for him the frontispiece of the Cathedral (1897) .

Death and war occupy an important place in the artist's production, where mythological and allegorical figures such as L'Ankou, personification of death in Brittany and The Reaper are illustrated. The artist also worked in a commemorative register of the First World War, creating medals with a powerful composition declined in gyspographies and gypsotypes. Thus he creates the Metal History of War, a collection of around a hundred medals from 1914 to 1918 and even lectured on the subject at the Petit Palais a few weeks before he died.