A Look into the Life of Louise Blair Daura

Louise Blair Daura's passport from 1927

Imagine leaving your home, family and country right after graduating college and moving to a bustling city halfway across the world. It’s daunting to think about, yet for Louise Blair Daura, the idea of a fresh start was thrilling, so she moved to Paris with her cousin and soon decided to pursue a dream of becoming an artist. She would achieve success during her career, but over time was overlooked and eventually forgotten about, until now. The Georgia Museum of Art is proud to present the exhibition “Louise Blair Daura: A Virginian in Paris.”

Daura was an accomplished artist during her life, exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and frequently received praise from her friends and fellow artists for her work. Why, then, is she so understudied today? The most likely reason is that, after about 1930, she did not exhibit any of her works. It’s unclear why she gave up her career as an artist, but she may have felt out of place in the Parisian art scene. Her husband, Pierre Daura, whom she met and married in Paris, was also an artist, a co-founder of the artists’ group Cercle et Carré. He was supportive of her career and her art (he actually submitted her painting to the Salon), but her figurative work was very different from what he and his friends were producing.

An untitled portrait of Louise Blair Daura's daughter, Martha, from 1930.

Louise did continue to paint after 1930, but she mainly produced art for herself or her friends, including portraits of her daughter. Although she was not painting much at this time, her works were still of high quality and precisely painted. An untitled painting of her infant daughter shows the baby sleeping, wrapped in a floral bed sheet, with her hands clutching the fabric and her face contorted, as if she is deep in a dream. This skill in portrait painting is evident throughout her career, as in “Self portrait with Mantilla.” The mantilla, a traditional Spanish lace shawl worn over the head, is painted with precision, and Louise depicts herself in a stoic manner. She wrote about refusing to idealize her acquaintances, or herself, for their own pride. Both of these works can be seen in the exhibition.

Louise Blair Daura, "Self-portrait with Mantilla," ca. 1929. Oil on canvas, 24 x 15 inches.
Musée d’art Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan, 95.2.50

The exhibition is not only noteworthy because it examines a lesser-known artist, but also because its exhibition catalogue publishes the letters Louise Blair Daura wrote to her family in the United States, from the time she arrived in Europe until the end of 1930. These letters give an intimate look into her life: from her soirees with prominent artists to her travels around France and Spain and the joyous birth of her daughter, her letters leave the reader feeling as if they were a close friend of hers. The letters also illustrate what life was like for an American in Paris at this time.

The exhibition is up through December 10 at the museum, after which it will travel to the Daura Gallery at Lynchburg College, Virginia. Remaining programs include a Family Day this Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon, Museum Mix (tonight from 8 to 11 p.m.), and a Film Series on Americans in Paris, beginning November 2.

Stephanie Motter

Intern, Department of Communications

From the Publications Office: Using the Study Centers

When you're reading a book, you probably don't think too much about where all the materials in it came from or how they were compiled. A large part of the process of creating something visually exciting for you to hold in your hands consists of tracking down material to illustrate the final result. Sometimes (a lot of times, in fact) that means contacting museums and other lenders to get them to supply high-resolution photographs of works of art. But what if you have a book that's mostly text? How do you give it some visual flair? A lot of that is up to the graphic designer, and the Georgia Museum of Art works with many talented freelance designers, who have won countless awards for their projects with us. In the case of "Louise Blair Daura: A Virginian in Paris" (which opens at the end of September and has a large book to accompany it), we were lucky enough to have the Pierre Daura Study Center close at hand.

The study center includes an amazing trove of material produced by both Pierre Daura and his American wife, Louise Blair Daura, the focus of this upcoming exhibition. The book will include her letters home from Paris to her family in Virginia written from 1928 to 1930, giving wonderful and witty insight on the art and social scene of the time. It also makes use of family photographs in the archive, Louise's creative projects (valentines, for example) and even passports, as in the snapshots here. We wanted some of the script font in the book to resemble Louise's actual signature, which can be small or blurry or written in an abbreviated form in the letters. A passport is a perfect place to get a nice, clear signature.

Other times, as with the image above, Louise makes reference in her letters to a drawing, so we needed to pull the actual letters and scan them to extract her sketches. Going through these pages and family photos gives one an even better feel for the daily life of these people than reading about them in a book, but we're doing our best to capture that feel for everyone who reads the final product.

The contents of the archive are listed through the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, online. To make an appointment to use the archive, you can call the museum's main line, at 706.542.4662 or email gmoa@uga.edu.

Digging Daura: The Daura Diggers

Our Digging Daura series spotlights interesting finds from the Pierre Daura Archive in GMOA's Pierre Daura Center, part of our Study Centers in the Humanities. This installment of the series comes from Daura Graduate Intern, Joan Tkacs:

           Pierre Daura already has an impressive resume– father, artist, teacher, soldier– to this list I would like to add another entry, amateur archaeologist. I came across a story of how the Daura family discovered Neolithic artifacts outside of Saint Cirq in a letter written by Louise Daura to her family. Louise’s story made for such good reading that I thought I’d recount the tale for all of you.

            This adventure begins with a birthday party. Pierre and Louise’s daughter, Martha, was born September 24, 1930 and the Dauras held a special party for Martha’s first birthday on September 27, 1931. During the birthday festivities, the Dauras were visited by Maurice Olombel, a friend of Pierre and a scientist at the station entomolique de Versailles. After everyone had their fill of the traditional birthday cake, Pierre convinced his friend to take part in a small excavation outside of the village of Saint Cirq. Generations before, a villager was said to have discovered an ancient Dolmen, and found coins, jewelry, and pottery from what many believed to be a “Gallo-Roman” grave. The site had not been explored further, and Pierre Daura hypothesized that an even older tomb might be located underneath the ancient gravesite. Olombel agreed to join the Daura family as their guide and advisor when they searched for the dig site and conducted their own excavation.

            The Daura troop departed the next morning. They did not have proper digging equipment so they used tools from their garden as substitutes; trowels and a hoe replaced the more traditional shovels and pickaxes, and Louise carried a bundle of fresh diapers for the baby Martha. According to Louise’s letter the party descended into the Lot Valley, crossed the river, and eventually arrived at a plateau where Pierre discovered a circular pile of stones about twenty-five feet in diameter. After breaking for lunch, Pierre and Olombel began to dig up the site.

            The men were “up to their necks” in dirt when they finally found a large stone slab, which they believed served as the floor of the newer “Gallo-Roman” tomb and the roof of an older Neolithic grave site. Using what must have been Herculean force the two men lifted up the stone slab and continued to dig. The Dauras’ efforts were rewarded. They found teeth, various bones including a vertebra, an arrowhead, and pottery shards. Olombel was so impressed with the findings that he took them back with him to Paris, intending to show them to his colleague Abbé Henri Breuil, the authority on Neolithic settlements in both France and Spain.

            I had come to feel pretty familiar with the happenings of the Daura household after reading through Louise Daura’s family correspondence, but her account of this amateur excavation still managed to surprise me. If anything, her story is a testimony to the family’s unflagging sense of adventure and the influence this adventurous spirit had on their day-to-day life.

Louise Daura’s account of the family excavation can be found in her letter written September 30, 1931. Family Correspondence series, Pierre Daura Archives, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia.

 Map of Saint Cirq in relation to several prehistoric caves in the area

Digging Daura: Mondrian's studio through the eyes of Louise Blair Daura

This week’s “Digging Daura” post is the last in our subseries of excerpts from the letters of Louise Blair Daura to her family. Here she describes a visit to Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio in April of 1930. Her description of the studio’s design, which is, in effect, an extension of Mondrian’s canvases, illustrates the artist’s desire “to establish international unity in life, art, culture, either intellectually or materially.“[1] A photograph of Mondrian’s New York studio in the 1940s is often pictured in art historical texts to demonstrate the same strategy. Louise’s description of Mondrian’s photo album, with which he explained his gradual embrace of a totally abstract painting style, is even more significant, supporting, as it does, the now classic lecture on Mondrian in which art history professors do the same thing with images showing his progression from early works to his mature style.

When I left Jean, I went to join Pierre at Mondrian’s studio.[2] Mondrian is the founder of the Constructivist movement in art, and works with the simplest of elements; red, blue, yellow, black and white, unmixed, are the only colors he uses, and squares, rectangles and black lines the only forms. He is 58, and showed us an album of photos of his paintings from the age of seventeen, clearly showing the evolution which he has undergone from Academicism, through Cubism, to his present form. He has written numerous books on the “neo-Plasticism” as he calls his art, and has paintings in the museums of Holland, Prague, and Germany. His studio is as interesting as his paintings. The walls, chairs, tables and easels are painted with white Ripolin, and all the accessories, such as boxes, victrola, etc. are painted in red, blue or yellow Ripolin, and placed so carefully that nothing must be moved out of its proper place.[3] The walls are decorated with different sized squares of red, blue and yellow, placed at calculated but not symmetrical distances. On the white cupboards and tables would be painted a small rectangle of color, and all so calculated that it was impossible not to admire it, though I had never seen anything like it before. The floor was very dark and highly polished, with grey rugs scattered about, and the divan was grey also. With all of those colors at their maximum intensity, the proportion of each in reference to the whole was so perfect that it was at once gay and restful. He showed us his paintings, one of which is square, and hung by one of its points, in diamond shape, with only four lines on its perfect, white surface. As we discussed it, he explained how long he had worked on it, how difficult it had been, because the slightest increase in size of the top line or change in position made the picture too “tragic.” He works for weeks on one picture, to get a surface as united and perfect as if it had been painted with one stroke of a large brush dipped in Duco, and he is as pre-occupied with the proportions of one square in reference to another as ever Rubens was to suspend the chariot of Victory in air above a riotous scene of battle.[4]

(Louise Blair Daura letter to family, April 17, 1930, Pierre Daura Archive, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia)

Next week’s “Digging Daura” post will present some of the Christmas-themed items in the archive.

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[1] “De Stijl: Maifesto 1,” first published in De Stijl, V, no. 4 (Amsterdam, 1922), reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-2000 (Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2003) p. 281.

[2] Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Dutch painter, founder of De Stijl movement and creator of a style of abstract painting he named Neo-Plasticism, which was both a source for and a subset of the larger Constructivist movement in Europe in the 1920s.

[3] Ripolin remains a popular, French brand of enamel paint.

[4] Duco is an industrial paint invented in 1923 by GM for automobiles.

Above: marginalia drawing by Louise Blair Daura illustrating a painting by Mondrian.

Digging Daura pt. 3: Louise Blair Daura on Jean (Hans) Arp and Dada pranks

As promised last week, here is my third installment of “Digging Daura,” another excerpt from a wonderfully illuminating letter Louise Blair Daura wrote from Paris to her family in Virginia.

One of the most interesting was that of Arp, one of the band of Dadists that centered around Picabia.[1] When they started that movement in Zurich their amusement was to play jokes on the public, and shock people as much as possible. I don’t know whether I wrote to you ages ago that we had tea with Torres the day that the Arps came to visit him, and Arp related all of the pranks that they enjoyed so much on the subject of it.[2] They published that they were going to give a conference on Dadaism in an important hall, with paid seats. The hall was filled, the hour arrived for the lecture, and out came four of the band, among them Picabia, seated themselves in four chairs on the stage, and four barbers came out and shaved each solemnly. Not a word was spoken until the operation was finishes, and then fresh and rosy, the four gave a serious lecture on Dadaism. We went to his exhibition, the first day called the Vernissage when the artist holds court for all his friends. The gallery was a brand new one, very modern, the interior decorator of which was Mme. Arp. The gallery was full of friends and critics. We took a catalogue and made the rounds after having spoken to Arp. His innovation in painting and exhibition was composed entirely of pieces of flat wood, sawed into abstract shapes, about an inch and a half thick, and glued onto a slab of wood, framed with flat wood of the same thickness as the shapes. The hole was painted in one or two tones of ordinary house paint. That was all very well, but he gave names to his pictures, such as “Paolo et Francesca” to two sort of formless chunks of wood that touch each other, and “Deux Hommes Tenant par la Bride une Tete de Cheval” (Two men holding a horse’s head by the bridle). In the midst of that select gathering came four or five young men, who took catalogues and went from one of the pictures to the other shrieking with loud laughter and hearty guffaws. Arp, who once delighted in such, trembled with rage, and said to Pierre: “I am going to put them out!” Pierre said he had a better idea, and dashed out to buy all day suckers to present to each of the young men. They went out with a sorry show of bravado.

(Louise Blair Daura, letter to her family, November 14, 1929, Pierre Daura Archive, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia)

Next week I’ll post another excerpt from Louise in which she describes a visit to Mondrian’s studio.

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[1] Francis Picabia (French, 1879-1930), painter and poet, Cubist, then Dadaist, published the periodical 391 (1917-1921).

[2] Joachim Torres-García (Uruguayan, 1874-1949) painter and sculptor; and Jean (Hans) Arp (German-French, 1886-1966) and Sophie Tauber-Arp (Swiss, 1889-1943) Dada artists who joined Cercle et Carré in 1929/30.

Digging Daura pt. 2: Van Doesburg and cinnamon toast, Xceron and banana ice-cream, Marcel-Lenoir and a murdered mistress, and late night metro rides

I’m long overdue for my second installment of this blog series. I’ve spent less time actively working in the Pierre Daura Archive the last few months than I would like. However, I’ve recently had cause to start “digging” through things again and have a small cache of treasures that I’ll be posting in increments over the next few months. I’ll be sharing more visually engaging items in future posts—I realize that an old letter isn’t the most attractive thing to look at—but one of the really great things about this archive is the insight it provides into the daily lives of artists in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s. As I produce good translations of Pierre’s own writings, I will post them, but for starters, I thought I’d share some excerpts from his wife Louise’s letters, which she wrote in English to her family in Virginia, and are full of revealing anecdotes:

Saturday, September 6^th, I ended my letter saying we were expecting the Doesburgs for tea.[1] We waited all afternoon, and finally had tea by ourselves, and at 8:00 I started preparing dinner. Just as we were sitting down to the meal, the bell rang, and there were the Doesburgs, with Torres and Manolita.[2] It seems the Doesburgs had been “detained.” Pierre and I having eaten up nearly all the cakes, we had to scurry around and make cinnamon toast for them, which they found delicious, an unknown commodity in France. They were impressed with Pierre’s latest paintings, which are abstract, and insisted that he expose them in Holland. They are the ones responsible for the three expositions at Amsterdam, the Hague and Rotterdam. They stayed until ten-thirty, the Torres remaining a little while after. And at last we were able to have supper. Mme. Doesburg is Catholic, her mother very rich. M. Doesburg is protestant, so they were simply married by the civil laws of France, as we were. Now the mother of Mme. Doesburg refuses to recognize that her daughter is married, and refuses to see her because of her immorality in living with a man not her husband in the sight of God.

Sunday we invited the Barbiers and Xceron to dinner.[3] The meal was a big success, in spite of the fact that Pierre, who wanted to buy the chops himself, to be sure of getting good ones, didn’t go down to get them until 1:00, when all the stores were closed. So we had to sacrifice our elegant ham. Pierre had invited Csaky, the sculptor who lives just across the street in buildings exactly like ours, to come up for ice-cream, and he arrived at the right moment.[4] The banana ice-cream was so good that I had a hard time urging people to take third helpings, as I could have polished it all off singlehanded. As we were having coffee in the studio, Torres came up, and we discussed art and artists, principally the latter. . . One incredible story was of Lenoir, the great painter of religious scenes, and frescoes in cathedrals.[5] One day a merchant was coming to see him, to consider giving him a contract. In honor of that occasion, his mistress tried to make him wash his feet. He refused. She insisted, and finally, enraged, he shot her.

…

Friday evening, when we went down to see the Torres, Torres told us with joy that he had found the definitive formula for his paintings. Really, the last painting that he had done was the culmination of his latest manner, a triumph. It was in striking contrast to the photos that Mme. Torres showed me of their home, which they sold to go to New York. Torres had designed it himself. It was like a Greek temple, the pediment frescoed with monumental figures. Inside all the walls were frescoed, the figures classic but stamped with his own personality. When they sold the house, the brutes who bought it thought the figures immoral, because there were one or two nudes, and papered over every wall.

…

Monday we had planned not to go to the Doesburgs, but when two “low companions” of Pierre’s breezed in for supper, we at once decided that we had promised faithfully to be there at nine thirty… As soon as we had finished supper, we expressed our regrets that we were expected at the Doesburgs, and we all left together.

The Doesburgs have a picturesque old studio at the other end of Paris… Doesburg does paintings entirely abstract and very good. His wife, a musician, also does abstract paintings, a little influenced by her husband. Once Doesburg exposed a large painting “The Card Players,” remarkably studied and abstract. The other artists in the salon were so outraged, that they all got together, sneaked in hammers, and tried to massacre it.

We stayed so late that we had to run to catch the last metro, arriving home at 1:30. The idea in Paris is that if anyone goes home before the last metro, it is because they are bored and don’t like the company. I almost fall asleep everywhere I go, and paw the air to leave at the respectable hour of 11:00.

(Louis Blair Daura, letter to her family, Sept. 17, 1929, Pierre Daura Archive, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia)

Next week, I’ll post some more excerpts from Louise’s letters describing an encounter with Dadaist Hans Arp, and another written after a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio.

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[1] Theo van Doesburg (Dutch, 1883-1931), De Stijl painter and designer.

[2] Joachín Torres-Garcia (Uruguayan, 1874-1949), painter and sculptor, cofounder of Cercle et Carré in Paris and founder of Constructive Universalism in Latin America.

[3] Jean Xceron (Greek/American, 1890-1967), abstract painter. Barbier may be the illustrator George Barbier (French, 1882-1932), or more likely, either the painter André Barbier (French, 1883-1970) or the painter Fernand Jean Barbier (French, 20^th c., exact dates unknown), but I’m still working on that. If you’re interested, write a comment saying so and I’ll let you know what I find out.

[4] Joseph Csaky (French, 1888-1971), abstract painter.

[5] Jules Marcel-Lenoir (French, 1872-1931), Symbolist painter.