Gray matters – An Irishwoman’s Diary on architect and designer Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray was 24 years old when she moved to Paris in 1902. For three-quarters of a century, the Irish architect and designer from Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, would be a pioneer of modernity.

Gray frequented Rodin and Modigliani, knew Picasso, Braque, Cocteau, Léger, Duchamp and Miró. She influenced Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus school in Germany.

Retrospective

Gray’s friends from the Slade School of Fine Art in London crossed the Channel with her. “Paris was much more free, especially for women,” explains Cloé Pitiot, curator of the 2013 Eileen Gray retrospective at the Pompidou Centre. “They could let loose sexually, live with men or women, cross-dress – unthinkable then in London or Dublin.”

Gray and her pre-first World War lover, the singer Damia, belonged to a coterie of Paris lesbians known as the Amazons.

Gray bobbed her hair and wore tailor-made men’s suits. She and Damia walked their pet panther on a lead in the streets of Paris.

For Damia, Gray made six laquered mermaid chairs, showing a mermaid embracing a seahorse.

Villa

After the war, Gray loved a Romanian architect called Jean Badovici, 15 years her junior. She designed and built a stunningly modern villa at Roquebrune Cap Martin for him, which she named E-1027, a code for their initials.

In 2009, Gray’s dragon chair, from the Yves Saint-Laurent-Pierre Bergé collection, sold at auction for €21.9 million, the record for a piece of 20th-century furniture. It was, the buyer said, “the price of desire”.

It has been a common misconception that Gray turned her back on Ireland.

Jennifer Goff, the curator of the Eileen Gray archive at the National Museum of Ireland and author of Eileen Gray: Her Work and Her World, worked closely with Petiot on the 2013 exhibition, which moved on to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and is about to go to the Bard Graduate Center in New York.

Affection

Goff was thrilled to discover Gray’s deep affection for Ireland. “We call her ‘Anglo-Irish’, but she corrected everybody and would say, ‘No. I am Irish’,” Goff says.

In a series of panels that Gray made for the French couturier Paul Poiret, people are transformed into swans. Goff recognised the legend of the Children of Lir. She explored Gray’s library and discovered the designer’s interest in Cúchulainn and the Táin.

Eight months before Gray’s death at the age of 98, Maeve Binchy interviewed the ageing designer for this newspaper. Gray was, Binchy wrote, “everyone’s picture of a demure, elderly aunt . . . too frail and gentle to have to talk about racy days”.

Gray told Binchy of cutting flowering branches for the house in Enniscorthy, of boating on the Slaney river, and accompanying her mother to the Dublin horse show in the summer.

In the 1970s Gray showed photographs of Brownswood House to journalists, telling them it was her family home. “She always hoped to inherit the house, and was heartbroken when it went to her sister Ethel,” Goff says.

Concert

So Gray did not turn her back on Ireland, but for many decades Ireland recognised her only intermittently. She is not likely to be forgotten again.

On May 18th, Ireland’s ambassador to Paris, Geraldine Byrne-Nason, held a concert and reception to mark the 40th anniversary of Gray’s death.

Scenes from Mary McGuckian's biopic of Gray, titled The Price of Desire, were projected above the landing of the Embassy's grand staircase. The film was launched at the Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield, Dublin, on May 28th.

This autumn, a plaque will be unveiled at 21, rue Bonaparte in Paris’s sixth district, where Gray lived for 70 years.

Michael Likierman, the president of the Cap Moderne association that is restoring E-1027, used the Irish Embassy reception to raise funds to preserve the villa.

Prince Albert of Monaco, the honorary president of Cap Moderne, arrived late because he had been golfing with Michael Smurfit at the K Club in Kildare. E-1027 is only six kilometres from his palace, Albert noted.

Asked if he felt Irish, he replied, “Yes, of course!” He always supports Ireland “when they play rugby or football or any other sports”.

Patrick Mellett, the Paris-based Irish architect who 20 years ago tried unsuccessfully to convince the Irish government to purchase E-1027, wants Ireland to establish an Eileen Gray award for international design, comparable to the Pritzker prize for architecture.

Friend

Ambassador Byrne-Nason read a note from Peter Adam, the ageing British filmmaker and author who was Gray’s friend and biographer: “I can hardly believe that it is already 40 years that Eileen’s niece Prunella Clough and I buried the beloved old lady in a simple ceremony in Paris, without music or speech,” Adam wrote.

"Just three people on a windswept day. Nobody took any notice then. How things have changed since. 'C'est absurde!' she used to say, and I can still her voice in her flat in the rue Bonaparte."