In 1937, the critic and historian Dorette Berthoud dubbed the informal gathering of several artists who were laureates of the Prix de Rome between 1910 and 1922 as the "Groupe de Rome" These artists practiced a form of figuration characterized by decorative and archaizing stylizations. This study focuses on the careers and works of the painters Jean Dupas (1882-1964), Robert Pougheon (1886-1955), Jean Despujols (1886-1965), the sculptor Alfred Janniot (1889-1969), and several of their peers, who forged connections at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici) around 1920. It aims to demonstrate how these artists developed their careers and cultivated a shared aesthetic and political project, in a context marked by the decline of the institutions from which they emerged and the artistic models inherited from their training.

By tracing their parallel trajectories at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, at the Villa Medici in Rome, in the "official" Parisian salons, in French museums, and for some, at the Académie des beaux-arts, this study seeks to assess the support their careers received through their collective action. The examination of the monumental commissions received by members of the group from the State and French local authorities, between 1920 and 1950, allows for an exploration of their connections with artistic institutions and their ambition to embody an "official" art in service of public authorities. In the "grand décor," they also sought to assert their position as continuators of a national artistic tradition, adopting a style that blended references to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Italian Renaissance with a stylization of forms sometimes reminiscent of Cubism. Finally, the study of their various uses of references to Italian art and landscapes, ranging from neo-classical appropriation to a subversion that claimed its "fantasy," helps to better understand the ambiguity of the group's artistic project, situated between reactionary political engagement and a claim to aesthetic autonomy.

This work is based on a critical reading of largely unpublished public and private archival sources, using the tools of social art history, while paying particular attention to the formal analysis of the works. It thus aims to contribute to the writing of a more precise and nuanced history of the institutions and non-modernist artistic production of the interwar period.