From Spain to Virginia The Life and Times of Pierre Daura - Catalog - Page 28
Tulips, 1971
Oil on canvas
Taubman Museum of Art
Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.030
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Daura’s paintings of flowers simply arranged in household
vases also exhibit a continuity with compositions by the
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists of the late
nineteenth century. Possibly because the motif again
provides a ready means for investigating pure shape and
free form in the visible world, Daura’s still life compositions
exhibit a diversity of color and variation of texture that
verge on total abstraction. Forays into pure abstraction –
that is, paintings that contain no effort to capture the visible
array, but rather create new visual experiences – were
never foreign to Daura’s art. Unadulterated explorations
into the abstract (rather than the abstracted) is evident in
two works — Geometric and Pyramids — both of which
are on display within the exhibition. Geometric is notably
a linear composition limited exclusively to horizontals and
verticals, a style readily associated with the early twentiethcentury Dutch artist and friend of Daura, Piet Mondrian.
Often referred to as “De Stijl” (literally “The Style”) or
De Nieuwe Beelding” (“The New Design”), this radical
abstraction when taken up in America during the late 1940s
and early 1950s became known as “Neo-Plasticism” (i.e.,
“New Form” – in the sense that the arts of painting and
sculpture are commonly referred to as the plastic or formal
arts). In contrast to the Geometric, Daura’s work Pyramids
exuberantly explores the dynamism of the diagonal that
is more characteristic of Constructivist and Suprematist
sensibilities – that is, a more Russian avant-garde praxis
and an art aiming to represent a revolutionary era, the
continuous transformation or continual change or idealistic
flux toward wholly new social and political realities that
were, for many, the hallmarks of modern existence and
contemporary life.
Above: Geometric, ca. 1962
Oil on canvas
Taubman Museum of Art
Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.034
Right: Pyramids (detail), 1945-1965
Oil on cardboard
Taubman Museum of Art
Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.033
