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Eileen Gray

1879–1976

 

In a culture for a long time dominated by words and music, artists and designers were once rare things in Ireland.  Eileen Gray was an even rarer thing: a designer in the modernist European style, a stylist whose influence is only now being appreciated.

      She was born in Brownswood, near Enniscorthy in County Wexford, on 9th August 1879.  She was the daughter of James Maclaren Smith (who died in 1900), and his wife, formerly Eveleen Pounden (1841-1918); the family home Brownswood belonged to Eveleen.  The Pounden family was of English origin, long settled in Ireland: an ancestor had died fighting the rebel Irish at the siege of Wexford in 1798.  Eileen's maternal grandmother had been Lady Jane, sister of the Scottish aristocrat the 14th Earl of Moray.  In 1895 her mother inherited the title Baroness Gray on the death of her uncle, and shortly after the family changed their name to Smith-Gray, afterwards simply Gray.

      This landed, wealthy, aristocratic background marked Eileen Gray for life.  In later years she often felt that she lacked any real education, for this had been placed in the hands of a series of governesses selected more for their pleasing manners than their sharp minds.

      Yet hers was a happy childhood.  She had fond memories of boating on the River Slaney, and perhaps some of the swirling shapes and colours of her later work derive from sights there.  On a rare later visit to Ireland she was disappointed to see that her brother had decorated the family home in a very provincial style, showing little imagination.

      Her father had worked as an illustrator in the 1870s - he showed some designs for wall decorations on Homeric themes at the Royal Academy in 1873.  Other work included landscapes of England and Switzerland, and illustrations to The Pearl Fountain, a children's book.  Though he ceased to exhibit after he married, he continued to paint, and often took his daughter on paintings tours of the Continent.

      The rest of Eileen Gray's time was divided between Ireland and her mother's home in London.  A noted society beauty of the day, Eileen led an adventurous life, even going ballooning with Mr Royce, the car maker, and flying in early airplanes.

      She enrolled at the Slade School of Art in 1898 and it was in London that she learnt the difficult art of lacquer work in the workshops of D. Charles in Soho.  Leaving the Slade in 1902, she migrated to Paris, to study drawing at the Académie Julian and at the Académie Colarossi, between 1902 and 1905.   She learnt yet more from the Japanese artist Seigo Sugawara in Paris, developing her skills in applying lacquer to furniture which would be her early claim to fame as a designer.  Sugawara urged her to be adventurous.  In 1905 Eileen fell seriously ill with typhus and to recover her health she visited Algeria, seeing there for the first time the traditional white, plain-walled, flat-roofed houses of the North African Berber culture, which were to affect all her later work.  (The vernacular cottage style of her native Ireland should not be overlooked, however, in the search for influences towards her minimalist style.)

      She did not plan to stay in Paris for the rest of her life; it just turned out that way.  In 1906 she bought an apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte that remained her base to the end.  Her ambition was to 'make useful things', but also she said on another occasion that she wanted 'to create things for our own time', in contrast to the persistent taste of Britain and France for sombre classic styles of furniture and design.

      It was her original interest in lacquer work which had brought her to Paris, and her furniture and designs using this material were seen as both imaginative and exotic, for of course lacquer work originated in the cultures of the distant Orient, but its tones and surfaces were very much in the modern idiom.  However, this rich decorative style had little in relation with the kind of architecture she evolved later on.

      Since 1909 she had been working for herself as an interior decorator and furniture designer, adding textiles and carpets to her repertoire in 1910.  These were made in her studio in the rue Visconti which was in the charge of her friend and colleague Evelyn Wyld.  Though all her life she was shy of publicity, by the end of 1913 she was well established.  She exhibited that year at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, and her work was already being purchased and collected by Paul Poiret and by the couturier Jacques Doucet whom she met first in 1912.  When the Great War broke out, she worked as an ambulance driver with the French army in 1914 and 1915.

      With her mentor Sugawara, Eileen opened a workshop in London in 1915, which returned to Paris in 1917.  The British edition of Vogue published a long and enthusiastic article about her that year and an important commission followed in 1919 from Mme Mathieu-Levy, for whom she created a sensational lacquered brick screen.

      From 1922 to 1930 Eileen Gray was director of the Jean Désert shop and showrooms (217 rue du Faubourg St Honoré), this lasted to 1930.  She showed her 1923 designs for a Bedroom-Boudoir in Monte Carlo at the Salon des Artistes Moderns where it attracted much attention.  In 1926 she created an interior for an exhibition, which was so unusual that it brought with it critical disdain.  Her ideas attracted the attention of the artists associated with the de Stijl group in Holland, where her work was admired and exhibited, and the Dutch journal Wendingen devoted an issue to her in 1924, but from 1926 her interests veered more towards architecture, working with Jean Badovici (1893-1936), a Roumanian-born, Paris-educated theorist of architecture.

      At Roquebrune, Cap Martin, in 1926 she created E.1027, her 'Maison en Bord de Mer', working with Badovici, which was for her personal use.  In 1929 she undertook the conversion of a Paris apartment for Badovici in rue de Chateaubriand.  At Castellar she built another house, again for her own use, 'Tempe á Pailla' at Castellar near Menton - a house in which Graham Southerland later lived.  In 1939 she created the interior design and decoration of a small apartment for herself at St Tropez, then beginning its rise as a chic resort.

      These and other schemes and projects led to a connection with the modern movement, represented by Gropius and Le Corbusier.  Her own house at Roquebrune, designed with Jan Badovici, attracted very great attention.  This was furnished with her own work, in tubular steel, glass, and aluminium - her use of steel and other 'new materials' was a hint of the international style that was to emerge in the 1950s in Europe and America.  Badovici, one of the leading exponents of modernism in France, was the editor of L'Architecture Vivante, and the major influence in moving her from interior design to total architecture, from making the furniture to creating the environment.  It was in a special issue of Badovici's journal that E.1027 was displayed to the architectural world, and acclaimed a classic of the period.

      She built other houses for herself, and did work for private clients, but all too many of her schemes remained merely design projects.  These included a holiday camp, for she had foreseen the effect that the introduction of paid summer holidays in France would have, though not all its consequences for her beloved Mediterranean littoral.  This was exhibited at the invitation of Le Corbusier, a friend of Badovici, at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition.  Her furniture, Le Corbusier admitted, had introduced the 'transatlantic style' two years before his better-known innovations.

      From 1937 onwards, through awards and exhibitions, her unique role as a modern designer was recognised.  In 1938 Le Corbusier painted, without her leave, a large mural of three female nudes in E.1027, which she thought ruined the house.  This ungracious act to a fellow architect's work led to a falling out with Le Corbusier.  Perhaps it was this split that caused her professional eclipse, though as a woman, a bisexual, and an Irish émigré in Europe, she was an outsider by nature in the world of modernist architecture.  In contrast to the dehumanising public schemes of Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray's designs are small, private and intimate, and so retain their appeal to this day.  (Ironically, Le Corbusier was to drown while swimming off the rocks below E.1027.)

      From 1938 onwards her achievements became obscured by the emergence of other artists and designers over the next two decades.  During the war she was interned as an enemy alien and she returned to find her homes had been wrecked and much of her work destroyed: her small apartment in St Tropez was gone, and the house at Castellar vandalized.

      Much of her later work also went into projects.  Her idea for a culture and social centre (1946-49) remained unrealized, even though it was published in a professional journal in 1959.  In 1956 she gave up 'Tempe á Pailla' and returned to Paris, only to begin work in 1958 on converting a small barn outside St Tropez into a small summer home ('Lou Pérou'), once again deploying many of her most characteristic ideas.

      Unrealized projects aside, Eileen Gray's talents were remarkable.  What placed her was the fact that she was one of the very few women working in architecture and design during the Art Deco and modern period between the wars.  In 1968 the Dutch architectural historian Joseph Rykwert wrote a critical article on her work, bringing her, after a thirty year period of obscurity, to the attention of a new generation of designers and artists.

      In 1972 a screen she had made in 1913 for Paul Drouet was sold to an American collector in a Paris auction for £18,000, a record price.  At an auction in the Hôtel Drouet in 1973 the collection of Jacques Doucet, her first real patron, included a screen sold for $41,700, a sofa for $31,000, and a table for $15,000.  The notion of monetary value had a wonderful effect on journalists who flocked to interview her.

      Commercial fame was followed by professional reappraisal.  An exhibition was held of her work at the RIBA Heinz Gallery, and at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1973, followed by others in Paris, in 1976, and at the V&A in 1979.  She was elected a fellow of the Royal Institute of Irish Architects in 1973.  New editions of her furniture designs came on to the market.

      In her nineties Eileen Gray was once more as famous as she had been in the 1920s, her contributions to the trend of modern art and modern lifestyles fully recognized.  She lived on in the rue Bonaparte apartment, protected by her somewhat fiercesome Breton companion and housekeeper.

      She reminded one Irish visitor of one's very demure maiden aunt, but it had been a far from demure life that Eileen Gray lived.  At first she had developed her father's artistic tastes on the basis of clients in her mother's sort of wealthy social circle, eventually breaking through these to provide a modern minimalist house for an entirely new way of life that emerged in the decades between the wars.  All in all, it was a life of extraordinary achievement.  She died in Paris on 30th/31st October 1976, a much fêted lady.  Earlier that year she had told another visitor from Ireland, who was interested in her family's past, 'I am without roots, but if I have any, they are in Ireland.'