Pierre François Daura (21 February 1896–1 January 1976), painter, was born Pere Francesc Joan Daura i García on the Spanish island of Minorca. His father, Joan Daura i Sendra, ran a small textile business and played in the opera-house orchestra of Barcelona, where Daura grew up. His mother, Rosa de Lima García i Martínez de Daura, died when he was seven. One of Daura's godparents, the renowned cellist Pablo Casals, encouraged his interest in painting. Determined from childhood to become an artist, Daura studied locally at the School of Fine Arts (La Llotja), where one of his teachers was the father of Pablo Picasso.
In 1914 Daura set out for Paris, where a French official issued his identity card in the name Pierre, by which the artist was known for the rest of his life. Daura studied engraving and printmaking and apprenticed with the painter Émile Bernard, who educated him about the work and philosophies of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh. Later Amadeo Modigliani's bold and original expression further inspired him. During his compulsory military service from 1917 to 1920 Daura was stationed on Minorca, where he spent his free time drawing the local landscape. Late in the 1910s he helped found the Agrupació d'Artistes Catalans (Group of Catalan Artists), with whom he exhibited in Barcelona during the next decade and with whom he retained a connection long after he had left Catalonia. Daura returned to Paris but traveled in Spain, France, and Belgium throughout the 1920s. In 1927 he met Louise Heron Blair, a Richmond native and daughter of the author Lewis Harvie Blair, while she was studying painting in Europe. They married in Paris on 20 December 1928 and had one daughter.
The couple spent the next six months painting in Daura's Catalan homeland. He returned to Paris reinvigorated and began to pursue an increasingly modernist style. Late in 1929 Daura joined Michel Seuphor and Joaquín Torres-García in organizing Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square), a group of about eighty artists who called themselves Constructivists and emphasized geometric abstraction over Surrealism. Daura devised the group's simple logo of a black circle and a black square. He participated in its important Paris exhibition of April 1930, but the diverse group, whose members included Jean (Hans) Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky, disbanded within two years.
In 1930 in Saint-Cirq Lapopie, a small town located in the valley of the Lot River in southern France, the Dauras purchased a thirteenth-century house that served as their principal residence for the next decade. The region's scenery inspired Daura's landscapes, and representational imagery returned to his canvases. In 1934 Daura made his first visit to Virginia to meet his wife's family. He spent much of his fifteen-month sojourn at Rockbridge Baths, where his widowed mother-in-law had purchased property that included several mineral baths and the remaining buildings of an old resort hotel. She gave Louise Daura the icehouse and a log cabin as a wedding present. Captivated by the Shenandoah Valley countryside, Daura set to work producing canvases that he exhibited in Barcelona the following winter.
During the Spanish Civil War, Daura was an artillery observer in the Loyalist army for eight months in 1937. Before sustaining wounds that forced him out of military service, he made sketches of war scenes and of his fellow soldiers that later formed the basis for a series of etchings and paintings. In 1939 his wife's health necessitated a return to Virginia, where the family resided in Rockbridge County until after World War II. Having been forced to give up his Spanish citizenship, Daura became a naturalized United States citizen on 7 June 1943.
Throughout the 1940s Daura painted the Virginia landscape with enthusiasm akin to that he had known at Saint-Cirq before the Spanish Civil War. He also painted portraits, still lifes, and religious scenes. Daura sculpted and taught art, first at Lynchburg College, where he chaired the art department in the academic year 1945–1946, and then at Randolph-Macon Woman's College (later Randolph College) from 1946 to 1953. His most famous student was Cy Twombly, who as a Lexington teenager received private lessons from Daura. Galleries and museums in his adopted home almost immediately exhibited Daura's work, including a solo show in Lynchburg in 1941 and an exhibition of forty-six oil, black-and-white, and gouache works with his brother-in-law Jean Hélion at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1942.
Daura's schedule early in the 1950s allowed him little time to paint, and he began to question his accomplishment as an artist. After retiring from teaching and restoring the unoccupied house at Saint-Cirq he found revitalization and joy in his art. Daura painted with greater expressiveness and used brighter, more vibrant colors. During the next two decades his work appeared in exhibitions almost every year, including one-man shows in Lexington, Lynchburg, Roanoke, and Staunton. The family spent winters in Lynchburg and summers in Rockbridge Baths or Saint-Cirq. In 1959 Daura completed a weatherized house at Rockbridge Baths, where he remained prolific and spent most of his time. In 1962 the Virginia Military Institute commissioned him to design its New Market Medal.
Following his wife's death on 10 November 1972, Daura continued to paint and to exhibit despite increasingly frail health. Pierre François Daura died of pneumonia at a Lexington hospital on 1 January 1976. He was buried next to his wife at Bethesda Presbyterian Church, in Rockbridge Baths. His daughter later dispersed Daura's extensive collection of paintings, drawings, etchings, watercolors, and sculptures to museums in the United States, France, and Spain. The permanent collections at the Art Museum of Western Virginia, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, in Perpignan, France, and the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, in Barcelona, feature his works. Lynchburg College established the Daura Gallery to house his artwork in 1990, and in 2002 Daura's daughter endowed the Pierre Daura Center at the Georgia Museum of Art, in Athens. Daura's beloved home in Saint-Cirq became an artists' residence known as Les Maisons Daura.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Teresa Macià, Pierre Daura, 1896–1976 (1999), in Macià et al., Pere Daura 1896–1976, retorn a Catalunya (1999), with English translation on 137–141, in Virginia Irby Davis, A Biography of Catalan-American Artist Pierre Daura, 1896–1976: The Man and His Art (2001), Martha R. Daura, "Pierre Daura: My Father Remembered," in Martha R. Daura and Kerry Greaves, Pierre Daura: A Retrospective, 1896–1976 (2002), in William M. S. Rasmussen, "The Beauty of the Land": Pierre Daura's Vision of Virginia (2006), and in Adelheid M. Gealt, Pierre Daura (1896–1876): Picturing Attachments (2014); correspondence, diaries, oral histories, and exhibition catalogs in Pierre Daura Archive, Pierre Daura Center, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Ga.; Roanoke Times, 3 Dec. 1939, 25 Nov. 1951, 8 Jan. 1961, 28 Oct. 1962, 24 Mar. 2004; Lynchburg News, 8 June 1943; Lynchburg News and Advance, 14 Jan. 1996, 30 Mar. 1997; obituaries in Lynchburg Daily Advance, Lynchburg News, and Richmond News Leader, all 2 Jan. 1976, and Lexington News-Gazette, 7 Jan. 1976; editorial tribute in Lynchburg News, 6 Jan. 1976.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by William M. S. Rasmussen.
Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia, State Art Collection.
How to cite this page:
William M. S. Rasmussen,"Pierre François Daura (1896–1976)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Daura_Pierre_Francois, accessed [today's date]).
Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.
