untitled [nude]

The thirty-three paintings, drawings, and prints and one sketchbook in the Pierre Daura Study Collection represent a cross-section of this versatile artist's work and span his entire career. They demonstrate his abilities as a draftsman, painter, and printmaker in a variety of media, and highlight his concern for specific themes and subjects. The earliest work, untitled [Boats in Harbor] (TF 2000.37), which may date to the artist's adolescent years, evinces a precocious sense of color and form along with an awareness of the then-current expressive emphasis on tactile paint and exaggerated hues. Similar qualities are evident in the latest dated work, untitled [Daura House] (TF 2000.11), in which angular planes and vivid brushwork superimpose a modernist sensibility on the medieval irregularity of the artist's home in the southern French town of St. Cirq-Lapopie, a lifelong source of inspiration.

  Other works attest to Daura's attraction to streetscapes and architectural subjects in his native Spain and in Paris. Untitled [chimneys] (TF 2000.13) and untitled [streetlights] (TF 2000.14) of 1921, his economical renderings of Paris scenes, prophesy his involvement by the decade's end in the short-lived avant-garde group Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square), dedicated to a reductivist non-representational art based on geometry. Although Daura experimented with abstraction throughout his career, his art was fundamentally grounded in the truths he found in the visible world around him.

Like many other early twentieth-century modernist artists, Daura worked out problems of composition and color in still life arrangements. The figure nonetheless remained central to his art, from intimate nude studies to the numerous bust self-portraits he created in the course of his career. The artist explored his own elegant features and penetrating gaze in the media of drawing untitled [Daura] (TF 2000.16), engraving untitled [Daura with scarf] (TF 2000.28), and oil painting untitled [Daura, winter cap] (TF 2000.40). Un Observador de la 59 Brigada Mixta, Teruel, 1937 (TF 2000.31) is his self-portrait as a military observer in a brigade of anti-Fascist fighters during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Daura devoted many other portrait heads and figural compositions to recording the experience of individual fighters, and he created a series of powerful print images to express the horrors of the conflict for soldiers and civilians alike, as in CIVILISATION 1937: Bronchales Teruel, Facist Clean-up, Spain (TF 2000.32) and CIVILISATION 1937: The Innocent Victims of Valdecuenca Teruel (TF 2000.33), two examples from the group ironically titled <1>Civilisation 1937. During World War II, by which time he had settled in Virginia with his American-born wife and their daughter, Daura made poster designs promoting the war effort on the home front, of which untitled [Americans at Work] (TF 2000.34) and untitled [Remember Pearl Harbor] (TF 2000.35) are examples.

In Daura's paintings, form largely takes precedence over color, an approach born out in his tireless activity as a draftsman. Daura also was a prolific printmaker who experimented in virtually every medium of intaglio technique, often combining them for a variety of effects. In an untitled view of his own house untitled [Maison Daura] (TF 2000.27), a picturesque medieval structure in the southern French town of St. Cirq-Lapopie, for example, he juxtaposed the delicate lines of etching and the soft, blurry tones of aquatint. Vivid contrasts of light and dark areas infuse drama into Daura's view of a Spanish town in Asco - Spain (TF 2000.25). His use of formal means to energize his compositions is a unifying feature of the wide-ranging body of work Daura created in the course of his prolific career.