Large Saint-cirq-lapopie Painting By Pierre Daura

Large oil on canvas signed lower right Daura, countersigned and located on the back by the artist, depicting the village of Saint-Cirq-Lapopie on the hillside and the Lot below. Baguette frame gilded with leaf Dimensions of the canvas 81x100 cm Total dimensions, with frame, 92.5x111 cm Pierre Daura is a painter born in Menorca, in the Balearic Islands, in 1896. Following his studies at the School of Fine Arts from Barcelona during which he was a pupil of the father of Pablo Picasso, he lived for a few years in Paris (1914-1917), where he settled again in 1920. Discovering by chance the Lot valley with which he fell in love, he buys a former hospice in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. Between 1918 and 1929, he participated in collective exhibitions in Barcelona but also in the Parisian Salons with other Catalan artists. Very active in the artistic movement "Circle and square" which opposes constructivism to surrealism, and which notably includes Kandinsky, he then delivers a very abstract painting. He thus participated in the group's major exhibition in 1929 at the Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona, and in April 1930 in Paris at the Cercle et Carré exhibition at the gallery 23. It was Daura who designed the group's logo which, in the 1930s brings together Arp, Clausen, Gorin, Kandinsky, Leger, Mondrian, Pevsner, Russolo, Stella and Vantongerloo and will be a milestone in the history of art. In 1934 he left for the United States to meet the parents of his wife, an art student from Virginia. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he joined the Republicans, but quickly returned to France, victim of an injury. He will refuse to return to Spain. From 1939 he moved to the United States and obtained his naturalization in 1943. At the end of the Second World War, he spent these summers in his house in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a house which was offered by his daughter to the Midi-Pyrénnées region to serve as a place of residence for young artists. He died in Virginia, at Rockbridges Bath, in 1976, leaving a work of rich diversity, essentially figurative: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, watercolors.