From Spain to Virginia The Life and Times of Pierre Daura - Catalog - Page 12
FROM SPAIN TO VIRGINIA
The Art and Times of Pierre Daura
Karl Emil Willers, Ph.D.
The Taubman Museum of Art is privileged to hold a
range of impressive works by Pierre Daura spanning his
career and his practice as an artist, and it is our honor
and pleasure to present a focused exploration of his art
and times. Alongside works by Pierre Daura from several
distinguished collections, the exhibition From Spain to
Virginia showcases a variety of Daura’s works from the
Museum’s permanent collection.
Daura is of the generation of early twentieth-century
modernists who immigrated to the United States with the
outbreak of World War II. In 1939, Daura, his wife, Louise,
and their young daughter, Martha, visited Louise’s family
in Virginia. With the outbreak of the Second World War in
Europe, the Dauras stayed in America for the duration of the
conflict, not returning to their home in south central France
until the hostilities had ended in 1948. In relocating close to
Louise’s family in Rockbridge Baths, Daura was very much
a part of the larger displacement of European artists around
the world during the late 1930s and throughout the early
1940s. That migration to the Americas of European artists
is a formative part of the history and spread of modernism
and the dissemination of avant-garde artistic practices
throughout the world.
With the notable exception of his ventures into abstraction,
Daura’s different modes of expression remained firmly
anchored in his immediate, intimate, and domestic
surroundings. Throughout his career, Daura’s painting
continued to advance the artistic genres of portraiture,
landscape, and still life. Possibly more than any other
artist of his generation, Daura’s portraits are focused
largely on his own visage as well as that of his wife and
daughter – or their close friends and associates who were
part of the Daura family’s daily life. Daura’s still-life works
most commonly depict vases filled with cut flowers or
tabletops piled with fresh fruits and everyday household
items. In the landscapes, canvases portray either the
immediate neighborhood of the Daura family’s dwelling in
Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France, or the nearby surroundings of
their homes in western Virginia. While providing a close
look at works in the permanent collection of the Taubman
Apples and Grapes (detail), 1940, Oil on wood, Taubman Museum of Art, Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.028
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