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.
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
Above: Pierre Daura (Catalan-American, 1896-1976), Farm cart, ca. 1940, pen and ink on paper
This installment of the Digging Daura series comes from one of our summer interns, Paul Blakeslee, a senior at Sewanne:
I’ll be honest: cataloging Pierre Daura’s sketches for GMOA has been a startling experience. I like to think that I’m somewhat familiar with 20th-century art. It is, after all, my concentration as an art history major at Sewanee. Before showing up to my first day of work at GMOA, I had had a nagging suspicion that the usual “Gorky begat Hofman begat Pollock begat Rothko begat Motherwell” storyline couldn’t have been the only art being made in the 1940s and ‘50s, but honestly, it makes for a compelling narrative to study.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I realized that my summer would be spent working with works from an artist of whom I had never heard a single word. In first looking through the drawings and paintings I would be cataloguing, I tried to imagine them being shown as slides alongside pieces by Joan Miró or Francis Picabia in a Sewanee seminar room.
As I started working through the objects, studying them for signs of damage and also, from sheer curiosity, trying to figure out Daura’s style, I ended up discovering something entirely different from what I expected. The thing about Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm” or a Warhol soup can is its permanence and autonomy as an image. The works that are taught in art history classrooms exist in a state of semi-independence from their creators. Each work is at least as important as the person who made it. To a large extent, this seems to come from the artist’s efforts; the works that become famous are finished, polished, and intended to be viewed as art objects.
Pierre Daura’s sketches, on the other hand, are quick pen-and-ink or pencil sketches. Several were obviously drawn on whatever paper Daura had lying around the house. I flipped one piece over and found a picture his daughter had drawn on the back as a toddler. That moment, in particular, left me unsettled. I felt voyeuristic. Here I was, someone only recently introduced to Pierre Daura’s work, pawing through drawings he clearly never intended to display for an audience beyond his family. This wasn’t Art, that monolithic notion of human cultural achievement that I had learned about in the isolation of a college classroom in Tennessee; this was Pierre Daura drawing life as he encountered it, often probably for no other purpose than his own enjoyment.
My feelings of intrusion only intensified when I came across a sketchbook that Daura had filled with sketches of his daughter Martha as an infant. Almost every page bore a caption in imperfect English describing the Daura household from Martha’s point of view. Each picture also bore a date; most of the fifty-four sheets had been filled in the space of two weeks before Christmas of one year. A tangible sense of glee runs through the entire sketchbook.
A biography I read about Daura made it clear that he consciously withdrew from the European art world before World War Two to settle into family life in Lynchburg, Virginia. I live less than an hour from Lynchburg and, I’ll be honest, I think it’s kind of a boring place. I live in northern Virginia, within spitting distance of Washington, D.C., so I’ve always thought of the rest of Virginia as kind of a backwater. Pierre Daura’s landscapes of the countryside around Lynchburg, however, have changed my view. Everything he drew, from haystacks to headstones, is shot through with joy and contentment. Trying to title his landscapes is murderous, though; he often drew nearly identical scenes from nearly identical perspectives. I ended up nearly exhausting every combination of the words “Rockbridge Baths,” “cows,” “barn,” and “pasture” imaginable. However, it became clear as I saw more and more that the works had very little to do with the actual scene being drawn. Instead, the important aspect is the works’ almost transparent transmutation of Pierre Daura’s happiness into a landscape scene. After cataloging almost three hundred drawings, I feel confident in inferring that Pierre Daura had few, if any, regrets about uprooting his life and replanting it in rural Virginia.
My work at GMOA has given me a whole new perspective on art history in general. Studying one man’s unfiltered artistic output has been truly eye opening, and an experience that would have been impossible in a classroom setting.
Above: “Making Your Own Christmas Cards No Lost Art Here” from The News, Lynchburg, VA, Sunday Morning, December 14, 1952, section IV, p. 1
As promised in previous “Digging Daura” posts, I’m sharing more images this week, and holiday-themed ones at that. This installment showcases some of the Daura family Christmas cards in the embedded slideshow below.
We are fortunate to have an explanation of the history of these cards from the artist’s daughter, Martha Daura:
Christmas Cards 1930-76
The Daura Christmas/New Year card tradition began with the 1930-31 (Dec. 1930 – Jan. 1931) holiday season after Pierre and Louise moved from Paris to St. Cirq-Lapopie in July 1930. From that season through the 1938-39 season, while Pierre lived in France, with one exception, the “cards” were original engravings or block prints produced by Pierre in limited editions as gifts for family and friends. It is unlikely that prints were made for either the 1934-35 season when Pierre was in Virginia, or the 1937-38 season before Pierre had recovered from his Spanish Civil War wounds. The only information available regarding prints made while Pierre lived in France is from the plates, blocks or prints in the GMOA collection, and inventories. The exception card referred to above was a commercial reprint of an oil painting. From the 1939-40 season until Pierre’s death in 1976, the cards were commercial reprints of original works, usually drawings. They were printed in fairly large editions.
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.
[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.
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 6th, 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.
[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, 20th 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.
This is the first in an ongoing series of blog posts that I dreamt up yesterday afternoon as I was digging through the Pierre Daura archives once again in preparation for my visits to museums in Spain and France with significant collections of Daura’s art. I was thinking about all of the great finds I hope to make and share, and it occurred to me that I should be sharing some of the exciting things I come across in our archives.
My choice for this first post was easy, as this drawing has been omnipresent in my mind since before I even got this job: Daura’s preliminary designs for the Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) logo, 1929, pen and ink on paper, approximately 28 x 21 cm (sorry for the poor image quality; for this to work, I'm having to lower my standards a bit, at least for now).
This is only half of the picture. Daura also created a second page of logo designs on which appears the version adopted by the group. The second page is currently lost, a fact that will vex me until it’s found—I won’t say “or until I die” because as naïve as it may be, I’m not going to give up on finding it. It may be bad form of me, as a museum professional, to “rat out” another institution, but I’m an historian first and foremost, so here’s the story:
In 1974, Daniel Robbins, then director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, was writing a book on Joaquín Torres-García. Robbins wrote to Daura asking for information on the founding of the Cercle et Carré group in 1929/30, and Daura obligingly answered his questions and his request to see Daura’s drawing of the logo. Daura gave him the drawing, asking that Robbins send him a photograph of it. Unfortunately, both Robbins and Daura passed away shortly thereafter, and the photograph was never sent. Worse still, the drawing--and Daura’s answers to Robbin’s questions--have never been seen again.
The Fogg has been helpful in ascertaining that these items are not in their possession, but attempts in the 1990s to track down these documents elsewhere were unsuccessful. The hunt will continue. Possible moral of the story: Don’t take your work home with you if your work involves irreplaceable documents.
It takes only a couple of minutes with GMOA’s new Pierre Daura Curator of European Art Lynn Boland to recognize him as a wonderful addition to the GMOA staff.
Boland came into both his new job here at GMOA and the field of art history by what he calls serendipitous luck. Having moved to Athens while in high school, Boland attended UGA for his undergraduate degree. Boland’s initial intended major was music, but after some exploration, he settled on art history because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, which appealed to his broad range of artistic interests.
It was on the recommendation of an advisor that Boland applied for and landed an internship at GMOA during his senior year. Placed in the development department, partly for his snappy dressing, Boland gained experience in and exposure to all aspects of museum operation. After finishing his undergrad degree, Boland was hired at GMOA as an administrative assistant and he worked this first job at the museum until heading off to graduate school in Austin, Texas.
In Austin, Boland developed his interest in modern European art into a dissertation on modern European art and music. Boland has harbored a passion for modern art and for the abstract since his days as an undergrad. He says it is the energy and the dynamism, along with the difficulty, of these works that inspires him to try to make this type of art accessible to a broader range of people. Rather than strictly an art historian, Boland sees himself as a cultural historian, someone interested in how visual culture fits into the larger cultural framework.
Boland’s choice to enter museum work instead of continuing as a teacher partially arises from his desire to keep expanding the range of his studies. He not only is extremely excited about being able to work with and promote the Daura collection, an invaluable resource he hopes to make more widely available, but also is looking forward to preparing the Cercle et Carré catalogue and exhibition. Next month these projects will take him across the Atlantic, to Spain and to France, for research.
Along with putting the finishing touches on his dissertation, Boland spends his time away from the museum either puttering around in his garden or playing the piano, both favorite hobbies of GMOA’s newest curator.
