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Introduction

For much of the twentieth century Eileen Gray remained an elusive figure. Born in Ireland, Gray trained as an artist in both London and Paris and continued to produce artwork throughout her life. She is renowned primarily for her work in France during the 1910s and 1920s as a furniture and interior designer. Gray was also a photographer, capturing artistic images in form, light and shade. Forming a successful partnership with lacquer artist Seizo Sugawara (1884-1937), Gray became the first twentieth-century European artist to adapt traditional Asian lacquer techniques to contemporary Western furnishings. Along with her friend Evelyn Wyld ( 1882-1973) she designed wall hangings and carpets which were sold at her shop Jean Désert, opened in May 1922. The house E.1027 and its furnishings are undoubtedly her best known work. Despite the house being published in L’Architecture Vivante in 1929, the design was attributed to other architects and the success which Gray had early in her career as a furniture designer and interior designer was soon forgotten. As a direct result Gray was omitted from the canon of modern architecture until her work was revived by a series of articles written from 1968 onwards and the record prices her work began to achieve at auction.¹

6. Eileen Gray, by Berenice Abbott, 1926, black and white photograph © NMI

Beginning in 1923, Gray experimented with architectural form. She was advised by and collaborated with a number of architects from that period. This resulted in the realisation of interior design projects and new buildings. In her archive there are numerous architectural projects which remain unresolved. As a furniture designer Gray constantly varied the media she used; chrome, celluloid, plastics, perforated metal and cork. Her work was multi-functional, user-friendly, ready for mass production yet succinctly unique, and her designs show great technical virtuosity. Initially she had hoped to mass-produce her lacquer work, but the sheer expense of the process proved prohibitive. As an interior designer, especially in the commissions from Mme Mathieu-Lévy (Juliette Lévy) for her Rue de Lota and Boulevard Suchet apartments, she excelled in the creation of architectonic environments. The planning of walls, decors, lighting and fixtures created a modern interior concept. The Rue de Lota apartment was completed in two stages – the first from 1919-22 and the second from 1922-24. The Boulevard Suchet apartment was completed from 1931-32 and again Gray used white blocks to cover the wall mouldings.²From this simple yet radical interior, Gray continued to show a rare homogeneity of style, exhibiting the Monte Carlo room in 1923. This ambitious project, based on a dual-purpose multi-functional living area with a bedroom boudoir, received much negative criticism from French critics. However, members of the De Stijl art group, set up in Amsterdam in 1917, took notice, praising her. Some, such as J.J.P. Oud (1890-1963), wrote to her requesting copies of reviews of her work and in referring to her native Ireland inquired, ‘Do you have any modern movement in your country?’³

As an architect, she was self-taught, and by 1926 had begun to experiment directly with architectural forms, resulting in House for an Engineer, 1926. Her six-year collaboration with Jean Badovici (1893-1956)provided her with the final impetus for an independent career. Gray was introduced to Adrienne Gorska (1899-1969) whom Badovici had met while studying at architectural school. Gorska tutored her in architectural drawing. Gray’s architectural archives reveal over 100 sketches, drawings, plans, elevations, descriptions and notes. Some projects were collaborative – such as the work that Gray completed with Jean Badovici at Vézelay. Some projects were realised such as E.1027, 1926-29; the bedroom renovations of her apartment in Rue Bonaparte, 1930; Jean Badovici’s Rue Chateaubriand apartment, 1929-31; Tempe a Pailla, 1931-34 and Lou Pérou, 1954-61. She produced numerous models for the Ellipse house, 1936;the House for Two Sculptors, 1933-34; Vacation and Leisure centre, 1936-37 and a huge model of the Cultural and Social centre, 1946-47. Sadly, many projects were left unrealised and unresolved. In response to legislation in 1936 requiring employers to grant workers paid leave, Gray designed the Vacation and Leisure centre, including the Ellipse housing in the project. She exhibited her Vacation and Leisure centre, in Le Corbusier’s Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the Exposition Internationale des Art et des Techniques appliqués à la Vie moderne of 1937.

Gray took copious photographs of her work throughout her career. In the case of her architectural project E.1027, the photographs were published along with her architectural ideas. These were articulated in a dialogue, in a special issue of L’Architetcure Vivante, in 1929. She exhibited frequently at the Salon d’Automne, was a member of the Société Nationale des Artistes Décorateurs and a founding member of the Union des Artistes Moderne.

7. Black lacquer block screen, 1922-3, wood, aluminium, lacquer © Anthony De Lorenzo

Despite such achievements, Gray remained aloof from her contemporaries, and throughout her career her architectural work attracted critical attention only infrequently, although she continued to design throughout her life. Then, in 1968 and 1972, the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert (b.1926) published a series of enlightening articles which reappraised Gray’s architecture.⁴ In November 1972, at the auction of Jacques Doucet’s (1853-1929) collection at the Hôtel Drouot, her screen Le Destin realised a record price. This revived a global interest in her work which still continues since 24 February 2009 after the Serpent chair fetched a world record price at auction. Collectors vie to own her furniture; historians compete to document her life. Many theses, articles, publications, catalogues raisonné and exhibitions examine the artist, designer, architect, her oeuvre, her buildings and her legacy. Some emphatically authenticate her work while others refute it. Collections of Gray’s work exist in museums and private collections across the world. Of those who met her towards the end of her life, some got to know her, while others assumed they did. During her later years Gray attempted, and mostly succeeded in destroying her personal papers, as she wanted to be remembered for her designs and her architecture rather than her personal history. From the archives and ephemera that remain, another fact becomes clear: despite having an aristocratic family background and an illustrious career in France (where she remained all of her working life) Eileen Gray was born in Ireland and she remained throughout her life an Irishwoman at heart.

The primary source material for this publication is drawn from the Eileen Gray collection and archives at the National Museum of Ireland (NMI), which were acquired from 2000–2008 and consist of 1,835 objects. Secondary material was consulted in the collections and archives of the following institutions; the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Tate Gallery Archives, Trinity College Dublin (TCD), the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA), The National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL), the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Le Corbusier, the Musée Rodin, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Columbia University. Relevant Eileen Gray material was also researched in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Getty Centre, Los Angeles, the Portsmouth, Leicester and Bristol City Art Galleries, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, the Mairie de Menton, the Musée National de la Marine, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet and the Vitra Design Museum, Germany. Private collections were also consulted through galleries and through the auction houses of Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Bonham’s and the Maison Camard.

Gray’s reputation has been consolidated by galleries and museums acquiring collections of her work since the early 1970s and through retrospective exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British architects, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Design Museum, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

The Eileen Gray Collection at the National Museum of Ireland represents a veritable anthology of Eileen Gray’s varied career as a designer and architect. This collection embraces so many different disciplines which interested Gray throughout her life, including art, photography, graphic art, new media, lacquer work, architecture and furniture and carpet design. It represents the stream of consciousness of Gray’s design process through a variety of media. It is an intensely personal collection – coming directly from Gray herself. It is Gray’s own assembly of souvenirs, furniture and architecture, which she kept until her death in 1976. The wealth of documentation, correspondence, magazines, books, exhibition catalogues, personal archives, photographs, portfolios and oral history which emerged from this collection provided the information in this book on Gray’s work, probing into her design and architectural thinking. This sheer mass of documentation, which testifies to the lengthy, meticulous process that she applied to every aspect of her design, marks her out not as a feminised subject ruled by emotions and materials, but rather a designer and architect guided by logic and order.

It also affords the opportunity to examine her early years as an artist and her recent past in the latter years which up until now was still lacking in the publications on Gray and how these periods contributed to her career and to her philosophy. This collection, viewed as an ensemble, offers a beacon of light into understanding Gray, the woman and the professional. It gives an appreciation of the world that shaped her, however hard she attempted to shape it, or hide it, by destroying a large amount of her work and documents. It gives an understanding into the one area for which Gray wanted to be remembered: her work.