Art: “What’s an Old Man to Do with a Cane and a Brush?”

Here we find Pierre Daura—Catalan-born, modernist-leaning, and likely the kind of man who wore socks even with sandals—staring straight into the wrinkled soul of time itself. The painting, “Daura with Cane and Brushes,” is exactly what it says on the label, and yet so much more. It’s a last stand. A quiet rebellion. A painter’s version of shouting “I’m still here, dammit!” at the void.

Daura, a man who danced on the periphery of art history’s velvet rope, was born in 1896 in Menorca, Spain. He fought the Spanish Civil War, refused to suck up to Franco (which definitely didn’t win him any gallery openings), and ended up in the U.S., where he taught art and painted things no one outside academia could pronounce. But oh, how he painted.

This work? It’s a late-life self-portrait, but don’t mistake it for a quaint grandfatherly ode. It’s not “I Remember Mama.” It’s more like “I Remember When I Had Knees.” He stares down the viewer with that familiar look you’ve seen on every retired professor in a diner at 3 p.m.—equal parts intellectual superiority and digestive regret.

Daura’s palette here is pure existential gumbo: bruised purples, melancholic blues, and greens that look like they were mixed by a man both nostalgic and mildly annoyed. His shirt looks like it lost an argument with a thunderstorm, and that cane loop? It’s not a crutch. It’s a question mark. A literal swirl of “what now?”

And then, the brushes. Tucked off to the side like aging co-conspirators. They’re not props. They’re the reason he’s still showing up. He’s telling us: “The body’s fading, sure—but I can still paint you under the table, kid.”

Historically speaking, this piece comes from a man who saw two world wars, fascism on both sides of the Atlantic, and the rise of Pop Art—which for someone like Daura, must’ve felt like watching your grandchild trade Bach for TikTok. And yet, he doesn’t lash out. He reflects. Softly. Painfully. Stubbornly.

This isn’t a self-portrait. It’s a visual obituary with a punchline. It’s the kind of painting that says, “Art didn’t save me, but it kept me too busy to collapse.”

When the world gives you a cane, do you lean on it—or do you paint with it?

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