Pierre Daura was a Catalan artist. Although the main body of Daura's work was strongly rooted in representation and the celebration of nature, he returned to abstract themes throughout his life.
Background
Mr. Daura was born on February 21, 1896, in Minorca, Balearic Islands, Spain. His father, Joan Daura Sendra, was a musician in the Barcelona Liceo Orchestra and a textile merchant. After his mother's, Rosa de Lima Garcia y Martínez, death at age seven, his father raised Daura and his younger brother and sister, Ricardo and Mercedes. His father never remarried.
Education
In his youth, Pierre Daura attended the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, "La Llotja." Here he was taught by Pablo Picasso's father, Jose Ruiz Blasco. In 1910, at age 14, he rented a studio with friends and sold his first painting at their inaugural exhibition. Daura traveled to Paris in 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the World War I and stayed there until 1917. He worked for some time in the studio of Émile Bernard, developing a friendship with the master that lasted many years. He also studied engraving with André Lambert, editor of Janus.
Career
From 1917 to 1920, Mr. Daura served his three years of compulsory Spanish military service on Minorca and then returned to Paris. In 1923, while painting a mural in Normandy, the scaffolding collapsed. He was badly injured, and his left hand became permanently useless because of nerve damage. From 1925 to 1927, Pierre Daura and Gustavo Cochet, an Argentine artist, designed and made batik material for couturiers until fire destroyed their studio and business. In the 1920s he frequently exhibited with the group Agrupacio d'Artistes Catalans, usually in Barcelona.
In 1922 and 1926 Pierre Daura exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, but in 1928 he joined four others rejected by the Salon, Joaquín Torres-García, Jean Hélion, Ernest Engel-Rozier, and Alfred Aberdam, and held a critically acclaimed exhibition at Gallery Marck: Cinq Peintres Refusés par le Jury du Salon. At the request of Charles Logasa, Mr. Daura went to Villefranche-sur-Mer to meet Torres-García in 1925. He obtained and supervised a successful show for Torres-García in Paris at Gallery A.G. Fabre in 1926. With the sale proceeds, Torres-García moved to Paris.
In 1929-1930 Mr. Daura joined Michel Seuphor and Torres-García in organizing the group Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square), which promoted geometric construction and abstraction in opposition to Surrealism. Cercle et Carré included Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Antoine Pevsner, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Stella, Georges Vantongerloo, and others. He designed the group's logo, which appeared on stationery, posters, and the three issues of a review; Torres-García also used it later for his Círculo y Cuadrado (a name that also translates as Circle and Square) group in Uruguay. The only Cercle et Carré exhibition was held at Gallery 23, in Paris in April 1930. Virtually ignored by the French press at the time, Cercle et Carré is now considered of great importance in the history of modern art.
Pierre Daura had sketched in the village in 1914 and had admired the terracotta-roofed houses clustered around the towering church. One particular thirteenth-century house, although in bad condition, had especially intrigued him, and in 1929 he and his wife purchased it. They moved to St. Cirq in July 1930 and began the house restoration project that continued for most of their lives.
Mr. Daura exhibited frequently in the years prior to the Spanish Civil War, with solo exhibitions in Paris at Gallery René Zivy in 1928, in Barcelona at Gallery Badrinas in 1929 and 1931, at Gallery Syra in 1932 and 1933, and at Gallery Barcino in 1935.
Pierre Daura, with his family, made his first trip to the United States in 1934-1935, where he and Martha met Louise's family. Many Virginia landscapes he painted during this period were sold at the Gallery Barcino exhibition in Barcelona. In February 1937, at age forty-one, Daura joined the Republican militia to fight against General Francisco Franco's forces. He was a forward artillery observer and was seriously wounded on the Teruel Front in August 1937. Sent home to France to convalesce, Pierre Daura was given a medical discharge.
Because he refused to return to Spain after the war, his Spanish citizenship was revoked by the victorious Franco government. His wife became seriously ill, and in early July 1939, the family made an emergency medical trip to Virginia. She recovered, but World War II prevented their return to France. They established permanent residence in Virginia, and Pierre Daura and his daughter, Martha, became naturalized United States citizens in 1943. Following the war, the family returned to their home in St. Cirq most summers. Rockbridge Baths is a small village in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, near Lexington, Virginia, named after the warm springs once used as a spa. Her wife's mother gave her property there, including the springs, and the Dauras used a modest building on the land as a vacation home beginning with their first visit to Virginia in 1934-1935. They also lived at the Baths after they came to Virginia in July 1939 until early 1942, when they moved as caretakers to "Tuckaway," a historic property in Rockbridge County near Lexington.
In the late summer of 1945, they moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Pierre Daura was chairman of the art department at Lynchburg College for the 1945-1946 academic year. He taught studio art at Randolph-Macon Woman's College from 1946 to 1953, then returned to painting and sculpture full time. In 1959 the Mr. Dauras built a contemporary house beside the springs at Rockbridge Baths where they lived the rest of their lives.
Autumn Trees, possibly Rockbridge County, Virginia
Civilisation 1937: La Cultura del Odio
Breton House and Church
The Couple
Winter Landscape
Untitled (Seated Woman)
Calafons à Minorque
Untitled (Daura in blue and green shirt with cane)
Corn Shocks and Jump Mountain
White Houses
Martha at Thirteen
Louise in a Black Dress
Self-Portrait as a Loyalist Soldier
Martha in Her Graduation Dress
Martha, White Hair Ribbon
Self-Portrait in a White Shirt and Blue Smock
Daura in Overalls, Palette
Pouise in Red Beret
Louise Blair Daura
Martha at the Table
Young Couple
Bodegón
Landscape near Saint-Cirq-Lapopie
Still life with vase
View of Saint Cirq la Popie
Autumn Trees
Return to the Village
Connections
In 1927 Pierre Daura met Louise Heron Blair of Richmond, Virginia, who was studying art in Paris, and they married in 1928. Their only child, Martha, was born September 24, 1930.