Inspiring Innovators

EILEEN GRAY:THE FIELD OF DESIGN develops on an unpredictable trajectory: usually we see incremental variations on pre-existing fashions, while every so often it is prone to disruptive changes, whereby the previous style is suddenly replaced by an entirely new order and philosophy.

For designers of any type, being at the cusp of those disruptive changes is a matter of luck as much as talent. Are you fortunate enough to be working at a time when the previous approach has run its course, and when a sizable audience is receptive to your new ideas? Crucially, will your ideas gain enough traction with other thinkers and designers, thereby moving from discrete innovation to mainstream movement? And will history recognise your role, or will the accepted narrative conspire to credit others at your expense? More so even than technological inventions, determining authorhood in the field of design can be a difficult business.

It is a testimony to the pioneering work of Eileen Gray, a radical innovator whose legacy is possibly the most substantial of any Irish designer, that she is now widely acknowledged as one of the foremost modernist designers of the 20th century. It was not always the case, however. She was unjustly neglected and underappreciated until the final few years of her life, demonstrating just how fickle and arbitrary conventional wisdom can be. But despite her reclusive later years, and a reputation built on just a handful of buildings, her place in the modernist firmament was finally established.

Born in Enniscorthy in 1878 to an aristocratic Scottish-Irish family, Gray was raised in Ireland and London. Her father was an accomplished amateur painter, and Gray inherited the artistic gene, enrolling in the Slade School of Art in London in the late 1890s. In the early years of the 20th century, she divided her time between London and Paris, eventually learning the painstaking art of lacquer work from a Japanese craftsman called Seizo Sugawara in the French capital. For more than a decade, Gray focused exclusively on this time-consuming artform, earning relatively little attention or money.

Her breakthrough was to come in 1917 when, on her return to Paris as the first World War drew to a close, a socialite by the name of Madame Mathieu Lévy asked Gray to use her distinctive designs to decorate her apartment on Rue de Lota in Paris. Her elaborate interior, with numerous lacquer panels and furniture pieces, drew great praise and Gray’s reputation grew among the luminaries of the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs of Paris, culminating in the opening of her Galerie Jean Désert in 1922. At this point, her designs were seen as the cutting edge of Art Deco, but the shop front was her first attempt at exterior design, a direction that was to define the rest of her career.

The Romanian architecture critic Jean Badovici was fulsome in his praise for Gray, and encouraged her to engage more seriously in architecture; they were also to engage in a protracted on-off relationship. Their first project, begun in the mid-1920s, was the acclaimed E-1027, a groundbreaking modernist house on the south coast of France near Monaco. It was compact yet spacious, taking up a minimal footprint on the steep cliff-face, yet offering flexible, light-filled spaces. The esoteric name is a tangled code of their intertwined initials, though the design is usually credited to Gray, with Badovici assisting in the technical details. Gray also created a number of furniture pieces specifically for the house, including the iconic Bibendum chair and E-1027 table.

It was at Badovici’s invitation that Le Corbusier added nine large murals to the bare walls of E-1027, which enraged Gray. Le Corbusier was fascinated by the house, and was later ambivalent about those controversial paintings. It is often noted that Le Corbusier died of a heart attack while swimming in the Mediterranean directly below E-1027, a final twist in his complex relationship with the building.

Badovici was only one of a number of Gray’s lovers, both men and women, who inspired and challenged her throughout her life. By the early 1930s they had separated, and Gray began work on her own house, Tempe à Pailla, her second great architectural achievement. There she lived a quiet life until after the second World War, when she returned to her flat in Paris. In Paris she became something of a recluse, her achievements largely forgotten, until she died in 1976 at the age of 98.

It was only in the final few years of her life that her reputation was revived, with retrospective exhibitions, auctions, awards and the reproduction of her furniture designs.

An interview in 1975 shows her wizened but still sharp, that angular profile still so distinctive, her Anglo-Irish accent untainted by her years of living in France. Her nationality was always ambiguous – splitting her time between Ireland, London and Paris meant she was never “of” any particular place.

Certainly, she was a member of the illustrious list of creative Irish souls who left the country to practise their craft, but Gray was never defined by that exile. Indeed, it might be said that by so thoroughly reimagining her immediate surroundings – and creating a design ethos so vivid and new – Gray inhabited a reality of her own creation, a world of her own imagination.