Eileen Gray Biography
Eileen Gray, full name Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray (Enniscorthy, 9 August 1878 – Paris, 31 October 1976), was an Irish furniture designer and architect, considered a pioneer of the International Style aesthetic. Born to a wealthy, aristocratic family in the south east of Ireland, Eileen Gray was the youngest of five children. His parents, Eveleen Pounden Gray and James McLaren Gray, were of Scottish descent. Her father, James, was an amateur painter and encouraged his daughter to dedicate herself to painting, taking her with him to Italy and Switzerland to paint live, which did not fail to help the girl's style mature. Eileen Gray spent much of her childhood in the family homes, in Ireland or in South Kensington in London. Thanks to his father, at the age of twenty he was able to attend the Slade School of Fine Art in 1898, where he studied painting. She was one of the first students admitted to study at the institution and, during her studies, met Jessie Gavin and Kathleen Bruce. In 1900, the year of her father's death, Eileen Gray went to Paris for the first time with her mother, where she was able to visit the Universal Exhibition, remaining influenced by the new Art Nouveau style. Gray especially admired the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh which he saw exhibited at the Universal Exhibition for the first time. Gray decided to move to Paris to study at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi and spent the next five years between Paris, London and Ireland. In 1905 she returned to live in London due to her mother's illness and during her English stay she resumed her studies at the Slade, realizing, however, that painting and drawing were making her less and less satisfied. In this period, frequenting a shop in Soho, he began to be interested in lacquered furniture, trying to master the techniques of lacquering. In 1906 he returned to France and met the Japanese Seizo Sugawara, a master of lacquer work who came from an area of Japan famous for this type of craftsmanship. After a few years of apprenticeship he exhibited his works in lacquer, but achieved only moderate success. During the First World War Eileen moved back to London, continuing to work with lacquer without success. Returning to Paris after the First World War, she was commissioned to decorate a luxurious apartment in rue de Lota. He personally designed the carpets and lamps for the house, having furniture built and decorating the walls with lacquered panels by his own hand. This time it was more successful, with many art critics praising its design as innovative and modern. Eileen Gray opened a small gallery in Paris on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to exhibit her work. Eileen Gray was openly bisexual and in the 1920s frequented the lesbian circles of the Parisian avant-garde together with Romaine Brooks, Gabrielle Bloch, the singer Damia and Natalie Barney. For some time, until 1932, Gray had an intermittent relationship with Jean Badovici, a Romanian architect and writer. In 1923 he designed a bedroom-boudoir, exhibiting it at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, the reviews were terrible, but the work was appreciated by the Dutch of De Stijl. He sent his contributions to the Salon d'Automne which were unanimously praised by the architects Gropius, Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens. It was during this period that she decided to specialize in interior architecture and design, slowly becoming an appreciated representative of modernist trends in furnishings. Le Corbusier painted on the white walls of the house designed by Eileen, infuriating Gray, but this happened after the separation of the spouses, and Mr. Badovici was happy to keep the master's murals. Persuaded by Le Corbusier and Jean Badovici, she began to take an interest in architecture. In 1924, Gray and Badovici began working together on a seaside house in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near Monaco, naming it E-1027. The name chosen is a code that hides the initials of the two (E = Eileen, 10 = Jean, 2 = Badovici, 7 = Gray). The house is L-shaped, has a flat roof and floor-to-ceiling windows with spiral staircases leading to the guest rooms. E-1027 is both an open and compact structure. Eileen Gray designed the furniture with avant-garde criteria, also collaborating with Badovici in the development of the building's structures. His E-1027 circular glass table and rounded Bibendum armchair were inspired by Marcel Breuer's contemporary Bauhaus experiments with tubular steel structures. Le Corbusier was so impressed by the house that he himself built a summer house behind E-1027, the famous "cabanon". The construction was so close to the villa that it annoyed Gray but it seems that the architect had developed such a fixation that he wanted to observe it from his place of retreat. Not satisfied, in 1939, when the couple had already separated, while he was Badovici's guest he took the opportunity to create a series of eight murals alluding to the designer's bisexuality on the immaculate walls of E-1027. Furthermore, he did this act totally naked and made sure to have himself photographed (hence one of the most famous photos of Le Corbusier). Gray was extremely hurt by the act of vandalism both for the sexist offenses it contained and for the attack on the work that she had built with extreme skill for herself and her beloved, so she decided to no longer fall under E-1027 .[1]This is one of the various episodes in which completely overlooked aspects of the figure of Jeanneret emerge. The architectural historian Beatriz Colomina interprets the gesture almost as a psychiatric case: it seems that "Le Corbusier wants to mark the territory, like a dog that pees on the street corners, he wants to make his figure prevail by erasing hers, filling a white living room with colorful drawings, putting his signature in a space that does not belong to him".[2] The episode, which was forgotten for a long time, was shed light above all following the film "The price of desire" in 2015 and the reopening of the villa following restoration work in the same year. The E-1027, however, remains closely linked to Le Corbusier who, when he died, in 1965, was swimming right near the E-1027. Proclaimed a National Monument by the French State, the Villa, which was in a state of complete abandonment, has recently been restored and can now be visited. Restoration work on the ground floor, which housed the kitchen, maid's room and guest room, is still underway. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Gray joined the Union des Artistes Modernes, but at the same time she began to withdraw from public life and be less and less socially active. She designed and built a house for herself, Tempe à Pailla, after studying architecture for four years, remaining secluded there working most of the time. In 1937 he agreed to assist Le Corbusier in setting up his pavilion at the Paris Exposition. With the outbreak of World War II, Eileen Gray was forced to evacuate from the south of France. His apartment in Saint-Tropez, where he had valuable collections of goods, was blown up during the war, while Tempe à Pailla was sacked. After the Second World War, Eileen Gray returned to Paris, inaugurating an even more reclusive lifestyle than before, cutting off contact with everyone except a small group of friends she had known since before the war. She still took on small jobs, but was essentially forgotten by the design industry. Around the age of seventy he began to lose his sight and hearing yet he still had the strength to transform an old barn into a studio and moved to the countryside to continue working. In 1968, thanks to an article by the critic Joseph Rykwert in Domus magazine, the Bibendum armchair and the E-1027 table achieved widespread public success, returning to production and becoming classic design pieces. Shortly before his death in 1970, his works were exhibited in an exhibition in London, which allowed the public to rediscover his genius. Eilen Gray died at the age of ninety-eight in her apartment on the rue Bonaparte in Paris and was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery. The National Museum of Ireland purchased Eileen Gray's entire archive in 2002 and set up a permanent exhibition of her works in Dublin. Eileen Gray's original furniture continues to be sold as collector's items, often fetching very high prices.
