From Spain to Virginia The Life and Times of Pierre Daura - Catalog - Page 15
Square”) group that united in 1929 to collectively exhibit
work and promote aesthetic allegiances. Daura contributed
his design to the initial three issues of the journal also
named “Cercle et Carré” that appeared in March, April,
and June of 1930 publications, as well as stationary and
exhibition materials, that forever document the group’s
progressive artistic motives and ambitious aesthetic
directions. Though short-lived in Europe of the late 1920s
and early 1930s, this journal later took on a second and
more extended life in Uruguay with Torres Garcia’s
publication in Spanish of “Circulo y Cuadrado” from 1936
through 1943.
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Yellow Pitcher, Apples and Grapes, 1939-1955
Oil on beaverboard
Taubman Museum of Art
Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.029
The Chicken House, Rockbridge Baths, ca. 1962
Oil on canvas
Taubman Museum of Art
Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.018
Museum of Art, this exhibition also examines this range of
genres explored by Daura, including periodic explorations
into pure forms of abstraction. In the mid-twentieth century,
Daura’s art provides a formative link between the Blue
Ridge regions of Virginia and the history of the European
avant-garde. Most significantly, this body of work reinterprets and re-visualizes the landscape of western
Virginia, forever associating that very particular and unique
place with the trajectory of advanced and experimental
modern art. Very few other sites on the American continent
became such a privileged and concentrated subject for
modernist explorations in form and color.
Born in 1896 on the Spanish island of Menorca in the
western Mediterranean, Daura was raised in and around the
highly metropolitan Barcelona, center of the Catalan region
in eastern-most Spain. Daura reportedly took great pride in
the region’s longstanding independent identity, which was
separate and distinct from central Spanish rule. As a citizen
of Catalonia, Daura’s adult life in France and then the
United States can be seen as residencies in foreign lands,
taking on the tenor of the cultural expatriate and political
refugee.
By the time Daura resettled in the United States, his life and
career were already deeply intertwined with a network of
avant-garde European artists that comprise the history of
modernism. Alongside Uruguayan-born modernist Joaquin
Torres Garcia and the Belgian painter and critic Michel
Seuphor (a pseudonym for Fernand Berckelaers), Daura
had been a founder of the “Cercle et Carré” (or “Circle and
Daura studied at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts
in Barcelona under the tutelage of José Ruiz y Blasco,
Pablo Picasso’s father. At a youthful eighteen years of
age, he left for Paris, then the cosmopolitan, sophisticated,
and competitive capital of the European art world. As
an ambitious young artist, Daura became immersed
in a community of artists at the forefront of an artistic
Flowers and Green Fruit, 1931-1939
Oil on canvas
Daura Museum of Art, University of Lynchburg
Purchased with Lynchburg College Art Fund
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