Gray, Eileen (1878–1976)

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Gray, Eileen (1878–1976)

Irish designer, best known in the 1920s for her lacquerwork, and pioneering architect, whose work achieved belated recognition during the final years of her life. Born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith (her surname was changed to Gray following her mother's inheritance of the Scottish title of Baroness Gray) on August 9, 1878, at Brownswood, Enniscorthy, Ireland; died in Paris, France, on October 31, 1976; daughter of James Maclaren Smith (an artist) and Eveleen (Pounden) Smith; educated at home and at private schools abroad; studied art at the Slade School of Fine Arts, London, and at the École Colarossi and the Académie Julian, Paris; never married; no children.

Settled in Paris (1902); began to study the craft of lacquer under Charles in London and Sougawara in Paris (1907); exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs (1913); received her first commissions from Jacques Doucet (1914); commissioned to redecorate and furnish Mme Mathieu-Lévy's Paris apartment, in the process developing her "block" screens (1919); opened the Galerie Jean Désert as a retail outlet for her work (1922); exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs (1923); built her first house, E. 1027 (1926–29); was founder member of Union des Artistes Modernes (1929); designed and built second house, Tempe à Pailla (1932–34); invited by Le Corbusier to show at his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the Paris Exposition Internationale (1937); completed her third house, Lou Pérou (1958); appreciation of her work by Joseph Rykwert appeared in Domus (1968); exhibited in Graz and Vienna (1970); her screen, "Le destin," achieved a record price for 20th-century furniture at auction in Paris, and work exhibited at the RIBA Heinz Gallery, London (1972); appointed a Royal Designer for Industry (1972); elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (1973); work exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Princeton and Boston (1975); work exhibited at Victoria and Albert Museum, London and at Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979).

Major works:

"La voie lactée" (location un-known, 1912); "Le destin" (private collection, 1913); Lotus table (private collection, c. 1917); Pirogue divan (collection Frances and Sydney Lewis, Richmond VA, 1919–20); Block screen (examples in Victoria and Albert Museum [V&A], London, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1922–25); Transat chair (six known versions, in private collections or location un-known, 1925–26); Bibendum armchair (ten pieces known, one in V&A, London, 1925–26); E. 1027 (1929); Tempe à Pailla (1934); Lou Pérou (1958). A detailed catalogue of her work is included in Peter Adam's Eileen Gray, Architect-Designer: A Biography, pp. 380–395.

In November 1972, the collection of Art Deco furniture which had belonged to the couturier Jacques Doucet was put up for auction at l'hôtel Drouot in Paris. Among the items listed in the catalogue was a four-panel lacquer screen, entitled "Le destin," and "decorated with figures in green and silver on a red background." The designer of the piece was Eileen Gray, then a virtual unknown, who had been celebrated for her lacquerwork and furniture half a century earlier and was later an innovative architect of two houses described by Philippe Garner as "seminal examples of the spirit of the Modern Movement." In any event, the sum fetched by this piece—at $36,000, a world-record price for 20th-century furniture—was to bring Gray out of obscurity. Already over 90 years old, she now found herself celebrated by critics and her work avidly sought by museums and private collectors. Old, ill, and used to neglect as she was, she regarded much of the clamor as "absurde," but some of it, notably the praise from her peers, she accepted with pleasure and with a characteristic modesty. As she told Evelyne Schlumberger , who had written on her work for Connaissance des Arts, "I am so grateful that you spoke not only about my failures, but also about what I planned to do, as you know what I did realise was so very small, reading it I could hardly believe it was me."

Although she was to spend most of her long life in France, Eileen Gray never lost her affection for Ireland as the place where she had spent her earliest years. Brownswood, her birthplace, an austerely elegant house set in the lush County Wexford countryside, was the family home of her mother, Eveleen Pounden , who at the age of 21 had shocked her aristocratic relatives by eloping with an artist, James Maclaren Smith. The couple married in 1864, and over the next 15 years, five children were born to them, of whom Eileen, born on August 9, 1878, and christened Kathleen Eileen Moray, was the last. By the time of Eileen's birth, her parents' marriage was under strain, and within a few years her father had moved to Italy, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Considerably younger than her brothers and sisters and not particularly close to her mother, Eileen was a lonely child with few friends. Intelligent but patchily educated at home and in a variety of schools, she was happiest when traveling with her father in Germany and Italy. However, she also loved Brownswood, keeping a photograph of it by her throughout her life, and she was dismayed when in the 1890s an ambitious brother-in-law dismantled the old house in order to put up what she described as "a horrible brick structure" in its place. This, combined with the death of her father in 1900, and the impression made on her by her first visit to Paris in the same year, determined her to develop her artistic talents and to make an independent life for herself.

In 1901, Gray entered the Slade School in London, where for the next year she attended

classes in copying from the antique and in life drawing. Among her friends at the Slade were Jessie Gavin and Kathleen Bruce , with whom in 1902 she moved to Paris, settling in lodgings in Montparnasse, and enrolling first at the École Colarossi, and later at the Académie Julian. Dissatisfied with her drawing ability, Gray became increasingly interested in the decorative arts, visiting exhibitions such as those of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, held in Paris from 1906, and the first Paris exhibition of the Deutsche Werkbund, which took place in 1910. While at the Slade, she had frequently visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, which had an impressive collection of oriental lacquer screens, and in 1906, while on a visit to London, she began to work in the medium, taking lessons first from a Mr. Charles, a repairer of antique screens, with a business in Bond Street, and, back in Paris, from a Japanese artisan, Sougawara. At about the same time, she moved into the apartment at 21 Rue Bonaparte, which was to be her main home for the rest of her life.

Over the next few years, under Sougawara's instruction, Eileen Gray set herself to master the craft of lacquerwork, experimenting with surface texture and extending the palette available by mixing natural dye with the lacquer to achieve new colors, including a red, a reddish brown, and a blue. In her designs, she developed a distinctive range of motifs and themes, producing an impression of richness combined with simplicity and restraint; her work at this time, she wrote, was "an attempt to simplify the figurative with almost geometrical designs and to replace those ghastly drapes and curves of Tiffany and Art Nouveau." By 1913, her work was beginning to attract attention, and she was invited to show some of her pieces at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs of that year. The exhibition brought her a number of influential clients, most notably the society hostess, Elizabeth de Gramont (the duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre), who in 1922 published the first French-language article on Gray's work in Les feuillets d'art, and the couturier and connoisseur Jacques Doucet. Visiting Gray in her studio, Doucet found her at work on the large screen, "Le destin," which was to be one of his first purchases from her. Among the many other pieces which she produced for him were the "Lotus" table, in green, brown, and white lacquer, an occasional table in black lacquer, with a later bilboquet (cup and ball) design in red on the top, and a display cabinet in red with a blue lacquer interior; these and other works took their place in Doucet's apartment, alongside pieces by artists such as Picasso, Brancusi, Matisse, and Modigliani.

The future projects light, the past only shadows.
—Eileen Gray

The outbreak of war in 1914 put a temporary halt to Gray's designing career. Having served for some months as an ambulance driver at the front, in late 1915 she returned to England, taking Sougawara, her tools and some of her unfinished work with her. In August 1917, she was the subject of an article in British Vogue, which carried photographs of some of her designs, including "Le destin," and her first screen, "La voie lactée," and which described her as "an artist of rather an extraordinary sort." "She stands alone, unique, the champion of a singularly free method of expression … expressing herself with a terseness which is almost Japanese. … She stirs the imagination."

However, despite this favorable publicity, Gray had little commercial success in London. In 1917, she returned to Paris, where, with the ending of the war, she found a new patron in Mme Mathieu-Lévy , who commissioned her to completely refurbish her apartment on the Rue de Lota. In this project, Gray was able for the first time to create a total environment, thus inaugurating a shift from decoration to architecture. Simpler in line than her previous work, the pieces which she produced for Mathieu-Lévy showed a Cubist influence, seen, for instance, in her brick screens, constructed of panels of lacquer, and regarded by Philippe Garner as being among her "most striking inventions, bridging the gaps between furniture, architecture and sculpture." The Bakst designs for the Ballets Russes were another inspiration, particularly apparent in the Pirogue sofa, a boat-shaped daybed on arched legs in lacquer and tortoiseshell, a form which Garner describes as being "without precedent in the history of furniture design, the essence of extravagant elegance."

Such work, however, was necessarily the preserve of just a few wealthy patrons, and in 1921, in an effort to expand her business, Gray opened a shop, under the name of Jean Désert, in the fashionable Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The shop, selling furniture, lacquerwork, screens and rugs, attracted a number of celebrated clients, who included the politician Raymond Poincaré, the designer Elsa Schiaparelli , the singer Damia , and the Indian maharaja of Indore, who ordered furniture from her for his new palace. Her reputation had begun to spread beyond France. In July 1922, the Chicago Tribune praised her "unusual decorative perception and her rare grasp of detail and art." However, with the exception of the rugs woven by her friend, Evelyn Wyld , and her workers, the project was never commercially successful. In 1924, Wyld left to work with another partner, and in 1930, with the Depression further damaging business, Gray finally closed the shop. By now, however, she had moved away from furniture design and decoration to an interest in architecture which was to dominate her later career.

In the spring of 1923, Gray had been invited to create a room for the XIV Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. The "bedroom-boudoir for Monte Carlo" which she produced, while still luxurious, was considerably more austere than the interiors which she had designed for the rue de Lota, and had an extremely mixed reception. Thus, L'Intransigéant, May 5, 1923, described it as "maddening with its chrysalid lamps in parchment and wrapping paper. It is the daughter of Caligari in all its horror." On the other hand, the critic René Chavance, writing in Beaux Arts, June 1, 1923, while regretting Gray's "experiments with disquieting Cubism," nevertheless found that the room "represents, in its eccentricity, a curious harmony." Praise came too from a number of architects, including Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens and, from Holland, Sybold van Ravesteyn, a member of the De Stijl group, founded a few years earlier with a commitment to freeing art and design from traditional constraints. De Stijl was a profound influence on Gray, whose contacts with members such as Van Ravesteyn, Jan Wils, and Jacobus Oud, and her reading of works such as Van Doesburg's "Toward a plastic architecture," fostered her shift in outlook at this time. Already, as a critic had noted in Ère nouvelle, Gray's furniture pieces were "like simple complements to architectural structures," a point which was also made by the young Paris-based Rumanian architect and critic Jean Badovici in an examination of her work in a special 1924 issue of the Dutch magazine Wendingen. Badovici went on to place her unequivocally at the center of the modern movement.

In all her tendencies, visions and expressions she is modern; she rejects the feeling of the old aesthetics and mistrusts old forms. She knows that our time, with its new possibilities of living, necessitates new ways of feeling. The formidable influence of technology has transformed our sensibilities. … All her work reflects a lyrical force, an enthusiasm, and the strength of feeling of this new civilization and spirit.

Already in her mid-40s and entirely without architectural training, Gray, under Badovici's guidance, set out to learn the principles of architecture. The first opportunity to put her newly acquired skills into practice came in 1925, when Badovici suggested that she build him a "little refuge," on a rocky, remote site, high above the Mediterranean, near Roquebrune. Completed in 1929, E. 1027 was an L-shaped, flat-roofed structure, on two floors, linked by a central staircase, and with huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the sea; although the house itself was small, Gray created an illusion of spaciousness by, for instance, using the terrace and gardens as an extension of the interior and by installing furniture which could be easily folded away and adapted to various uses. Among her innovations were a bedside table in tubular steel, whose base could be fitted underneath the bed and whose height could be adjusted by the extension of a trombone which supported the top, and the "Bibendum" chair, consisting of three tire-like rolls on a tubular steel base. She made use of other industrial materials, such as perforated sheet-metal and transparent celluloid, but also incorporated elements of comfort, such as her rugs, and even of humor, in stencilled inscriptions such as "défense de rire" (no laughing) and "entrez lentement" (enter slowly). According to Peter Adam:

The house was permeated in every aspect, inside and out, by an intense desire to reconcile the aesthetic principle with human needs. Walking through the rooms, looking at the many personal touches of comfort, wit and romanticism (and some of its minor shortcomings) is like looking into the mind of the person who conceived it. This house on Cap Martin reveals more of Eileen Gray than any object, piece of furniture, or anecdote.

Contemporary acknowledgements of Gray's achievement included the publication of a special issue of L'Architecture vivante, entitled "E. 1027: maison en bord de mer," and of a report and photographs of the house in the German magazine Der Baumeister (October 1930), as well as an invitation from the Union des Artistes Modernes to display her plans for E. 1027 at its first exhibition, held in Paris in 1930. Gray was particularly touched by the admiration of Le Corbusier, an architect whose ideas had greatly influenced her own development, and who, having visited her house, wrote to her of his appreciation of "the rare spirit which dictated all the organisation inside and outside. A rare spirit which has given the modern furniture and installations such dignified, charming and witty shape."

Gray's next project was the renovation of Badovici's new Paris studio, for which she reproduced much of the furniture which she had designed for E. 1027 and, again, by the use of mirrors and of pieces which could have a variety of uses, managed to obtain an impression of space within a relatively confined area. However, although she spent a number of summers at Roquebrune with Badovici, she was increasingly anxious to have a house which would be hers alone, and in 1932 she obtained permission to build on land which she owned at Castellar, near Menton. On a more difficult site than E. 1027, Gray was nevertheless able to adapt her plans to the terrain, creating in Tempe à Pailla, as she called it, a house which was smaller and more restrained in style than her first attempt, while repeating many of the elements found in E. 1027, such as the flat over-hanging roofs, the terraces and walkways, and the large picture windows. Again, Gray designed all the furniture, integrating it completely into the architecture and crafting it to serve the maximum number of functions and to take up the minimum space: a dining table, on castors for easy movement, could be transformed into a low table; a metal seat became a stepladder, another piece could be used as a towel holder, as steps or as a seat, and her "S" chair, a canvas seat on a wooden frame, could be folded away for storage.

Though the building was finished in 1934, Gray did not complete the furnishing of the house until 1939. During this time, she worked on a number of other projects, among them designs for a "tube house," a prefabricated metal structure, intended as a temporary, emergency or holiday home, which could be easily erected and mass-produced at low cost. Another proposal was a centre de vacances, which incorporated a restaurant and cafe, a cinema, an open-air theater and buildings for young people and for children. At the invitation of Le Corbusier, the model for the center was exhibited in his section of the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. However, neither these, nor any of her other designs were ever built. Disillusioned with the demands of private clients, Gray now preferred to design projects for "the entire people" for which, however, she obtained no commissions. One reason for this was her lack of professional training, with the discipline and organization which that implied. Another was her own preference for working alone: she did not cooperate easily with other architects, belonged to no school, movement or group, and had no agent to promote her work. Moreover, by now her health and, in particular, her eyesight, had begun to deteriorate, affecting her ability to work and tending to distance her even from colleagues and friends.

This alienation was intensified by the out-break of World War II, which forced her to leave Castellar. Forbidden, as a resident alien, to stay either at Tempe à Pailla or at her flat in St. Tropez, Gray, together with her maid Louise Dany , moved further inland to Loumarin, where she lived through the occupation, only to discover at its end that Tempe à Pailla had been looted and vandalized, that most of its contents had been stolen and her drawings and papers burned. The loss was compounded by the destruction of her plans and furniture, when the port of St. Tropez, including her flat, was blown up by the retreating Germans.

With both her homes in the south gone, and with much of her life's work apparently destroyed, Gray returned to Rue Bonaparte, and to the process of reconstruction which preoccupied the architectural world in the aftermath of war. By now, she was all but forgotten by critics and public alike, and her work, when it was photographed or mentioned in exhibitions or publications, was frequently uncredited or wrongly ascribed: E. 1027, for instance, was commonly credited to Badovici alone. Nevertheless, she continued to work as unremittingly as she had always done. In 1946, she reported that she had begun to plan a cultural and social center which, she hoped, would "help solve the problems of the monotony and solitude of those who have to live in provincial towns," and which included a library, theater, exhibition gallery, cinema, restaurant, and conference center. This remained unbuilt, as did a worker's club which she also planned. She also continued to design furniture, experimenting with new materials such as plexiglass, and began the lengthy and difficult process of repairing and refurbishing Tempe à Pailla. When in 1953 the work was finally completed, she put the house up for sale; it was eventually bought by the painter Graham Sutherland, who changed the name and substantially altered and enlarged the house.

In 1956, Badovici died. Although they had parted some years before, Eileen and he were still friends, and it was she who arranged his funeral. Following his death, E. 1027 was bought by his friend, Le Corbusier. However, while he had initially expressed enthusiasm for her work, Gray had been angered by alterations which Le Corbusier had made in the house during Badovici's time there; incensed by his ownership of it and by further changes which he made, she refused to visit her house again. Meanwhile, with Tempe à Pailla gone, she had embarked on the building of her third and last house, on a site near St. Tropez. To a small existing building, she added a wing, which included a bedroom for herself, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. The interior was austere, with the dining and sitting areas bisected by a white brick screen, and furnished with simple wooden benches and a table. On the wall hung a map of Peru, a reminder of the house's Provençal name. Lou Pérou was completed in 1958, and over the next decade Gray spent several months of the year there, living for the rest of the time in Paris, while continuing, despite poor health, to travel and to keep informed on new trends in design and architecture.

After decades of obscurity, Gray's work began to attract renewed attention in the late 1960s. In 1968, an appreciation of her work by Joseph Rykwert appeared in Domus, an Italian publication; the article was reprinted in Architectural Review in December 1972—by which time the sale of the contents of Doucet's flat had established her reputation as a leading Art Deco designer. In the same year, she was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry, and in the following year was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland. Her work also began to be included in exhibitions: in 1972, she had her first show in England, organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects, followed by several exhibitions in the United States. Although her furniture was much sought after by collectors, she herself saw her architecture as the most important aspect of her work, writing in 1970 that:

It seems rather silly to have made these big portfolios giving all the importance to carpets and the early decorations that can interest no-one. Whereas Tempe à Pailla and the Centre de Culture et Loisir and the Maison au Bord de la Mer … might still interest students and are much more important to me.

On October 25, 1976, Gray collapsed in her flat at Rue Bonaparte. Taken to hospital, she died the morning of Sunday, October 31. Her ashes were buried a few days later at Père Lachaise cemetery, in the presence of just a few friends, among them Louise Dany, who had served her faithfully throughout the years of ceaseless work, of neglect, and finally of rediscovery and acclaim.

Since her death, Gray's reputation has continued to grow. Working for the most part alone and for a small clientele—in the case of her architecture, largely for herself—her body of work was inevitably small. Nevertheless, in its entirety, it reflects the development of design through the first decades of this century, while also expressing a vision of modernity which is distinctively her own: thus, denying the concept of the house as simply a machine à habiter, she outlined her own philosophy of design, a philosophy which consistently took account of human needs and aspirations in a technological age.

A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. Not only its visual harmony but its organisation as a whole, the whole work combined together, make it human in the most profound sense.