Eileen Gray
The overlooked pioneer.
Eileen Gray was a lacquer artist, furniture designer and architect. Her house E-1027 and the Bibendum chair are classics of modernism.
Eileen Gray was born in 1878 near Enniscorthy in Ireland into an aristocratic family. She studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and in the early 1900s moved to Paris, where she lived for the rest of her life. There she learned Japanese lacquer techniques from the Japanese craftsman Seizo Sugawara, a painstaking process in which layer upon layer of lacquer must dry and be polished.
Her lacquer work attracted attention, and the couturier Jacques Doucet bought several pieces, including a screen from 1913. In 1922 she opened the Jean Désert gallery in Paris, where she sold furniture, rugs and lamps. Her block screens of movable lacquer panels and the Bibendum armchair, built up of rounded cushions, are among her best-known works. Her design of a flat on the rue de Lota in Paris in the early 1920s showed her ability to create unified interiors.
Encouraged by her friend the architect Jean Badovici, she began designing houses. Villa E-1027 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Mediterranean was built in 1926–29. The house is light and open, with furniture that can be folded out, swivelled and moved, including the adjustable E-1027 side table in tubular steel. Le Corbusier later painted murals in the house without her consent, which she regarded as a violation. She then built a house of her own, Tempe à Pailla, at Castellar.
Gray worked independently, without major commissions and without seeking publicity. She had relationships with both men and women, among them the singer Damia. After the Second World War she was almost forgotten and lived a secluded life in Paris.
She was rediscovered in the late 1960s, and several of her pieces were put back into production. Gray died in 1976. In 2009 her Dragons armchair sold at auction for the equivalent of more than 20 million euros, a record for a piece of 20th-century furniture. E-1027 has been restored and is open to visitors. Today she is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of modernism.