ENCOUNTERS
ENCOUNTERS
Throughout her life, Eileen Gray cultivated relationships in a number of different networks: artists and writers she met in London and Paris; dancers, choreographers, and set designers who influenced her design work; couturiers, socialites, and nobility who formed the clientele at her Paris Galerie Jean Désert; and architects and designers whose friendship and collaboration spanned much of her adult life. Explore Gray’s creative networks below.
Throughout her life, Eileen Gray cultivated relationships in a number of different networks: artists and writers she met in London and Paris; dancers, choreographers, and set designers who influenced her design work; couturiers, socialites, and nobility who formed the clientele at her Paris Galerie Jean Désert; and architects and designers whose friendship and collaboration spanned much of her adult life. Explore Gray’s creative networks below.
Chana Orloff introduces Gray to the Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine. Though Gray likes his work, their rapport is relatively distant.
Gray’s design for a table in 1922 is an homage to the ideals of De Stijl and furniture designs by Gerrit Rietveld.
In 1922, Gray participates in an exhibition of French designers in Amsterdam. Her work attracts the attention of Jan Wils, a member of the Dutch avant-garde De Stijl, and the two exchange letters.
After her trip to Mexico in 1920, Gray travels back to Paris through New York, where she meets Austrian-American architect and artist Frederick Kiesler.
In 1923, Gray’s Chambre à coucher boudoir pour Monte-Carlo (Bedroom/Boudoir for Monte Carlo) attracts favorable attention from J.J.P. Oud, a Dutch architect and member of De Stijl. Their correspondence is an important stimulus for Gray to work in a more progressive design idiom.
Gray meets Mexican painters Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, in the spring of 1934 when she travels to Mexico by boat with Badovici. She visits Acapulco and Oaxaca on this trip as well, and while in Mexico City has lunch with Rivera and Kahlo.
The Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles were wealthy patrons of Gray’s Galerie Jean Désert. Eileen Gray designed a rug and a table for Marie-Laure’s bedroom at the Villa Noailles in 1926.
Gray meets sculptor Auguste Rodin while she is a student in Paris. She corresponds with him and buys his Danaïd in 1903.
In 1901 while at the Slade School in London, Gray meets furniture restorer Dean Charles who teaches her lacquer techniques at his Soho company at 92 Dean Street.
Evelyn Wyld was a lifelong friend and business partner who produced Gray’s rug designs beginning in 1910 in their Paris studio at 17–19, rue Visconti.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gray becomes increasingly reliant on her niece, artist Prunella Clough, due to her deteriorating eyesight. Gray feels that she found a kindred spirit in Clough, and their friendship and regular letters become Gray’s lifeline until her death in 1976.