From Spain to Virginia The Life and Times of Pierre Daura - Catalog - Page 32
waters of the Lot River, these scenes revel in a presentation
of verticality that is unusual to the depiction of landscapes
and vistas. A steeply inclined perspective, in which the
walls and roofs are seemingly piled one atop another,
consistently creates a strong sense of gazing upward from
below. The pigments are often applied thickly and with
slashing brushstrokes. Passages of heaviest impasto are very
likely laid on with the palette knife in a process seemingly
intent on replicating stone-and-mortar construction, a style
pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the first
decade of the twentieth century. Daura’s images of SaintCirq-Lapopie demonstrate a full assimilation of Cubism’s
radical modernist spatial explorations. The visual array is
Left: Stormy Skies Over Saint-Cirq-Lapopie (detail), 1964
Oil on canvas
Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University,
Art department purchase, 1965, 2005.102
Above: Old Window, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, 1955-1970
Watercolor on paper
Taubman Museum of Art, Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.054
Right: Breton House, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, 1955-1971
Oil on canvas
Taubman Museum of Art, Gift of Martha Randolph Daura, 2003.021
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