CHRONOLOGY
Eileen Gray’s earliest artistic training began at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She continued to study painting in Paris and also began learning about lacquer. After moving to Paris permanently in 1906, she became one of the first European designers to adapt traditional Asian lacquer techniques to contemporary Western taste. Gray was an important contributor to French decorative arts during the first quarter of the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s, largely because of her connection with the Romanian architect Jean Badovici, Gray’s design thinking underwent a radical change as she pursued a career as a modern designer and architect. The house called E 1027, completed in 1929 when Gray was fifty-one years old, was both her first major commission as an architect and a summation of her individual approach to modernism that would develop in a range of other projects that were largely unbuilt.
Scroll down to explore the timeline of Eileen Gray’s life and work on view in the exhibition.
CHRONOLOGY
Eileen Gray’s earliest artistic training began at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She continued to study painting in Paris and also began learning about lacquer. After moving to Paris permanently in 1906, she became one of the first European designers to adapt traditional Asian lacquer techniques to contemporary Western taste. Gray was an important contributor to French decorative arts during the first quarter of the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s, largely because of her connection with the Romanian architect Jean Badovici, Gray’s design thinking underwent a radical change as she pursued a career as a modern designer and architect. The house called E 1027, completed in 1929 when Gray was fifty-one years old, was both her first major commission as an architect and a summation of her individual approach to modernism that would develop in a range of other projects that were largely unbuilt.
Scroll down to explore the timeline of Eileen Gray’s life and work on view in the exhibition.
BEGINNINGS: 1878–1918
BEGINNINGS: 1878–1918
Eileen spends her childhood in both Enniscorthy, Ireland, and the family residence in South Kensington, London. She takes frequent trips abroad to France, Europe, and Egypt, among other places.
Gray begins studying lacquer with Dean Charles in his workshop at 92 Dean Street in Soho.
Gray exhibits a painting called Femme au sablier (Woman with Hourglass) at the 123rd Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, in the Grand Palais.
Gray returns to London to see her sick mother; she resumes studying at the Slade School and at D. Charles’s lacquer workshop.
She contracts severe typhoid and goes to Algeria to recover.
Gray opens a lacquer workshop with Sugawara at 11, rue Guénégaud in Paris.
She also opens a weaving workshop with Wyld at 17–19, rue Visconti, and begins designing rug patterns. The two women buy looms in England and invite a weaver to Paris to teach a group of trainees they hired.
Gray exhibits four pieces at the 8th Salon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, in the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs including an overmantel panel, Aum Mane Padme Aum, also known as Le magicien de la nuit (Magician of the Night). Four versions of this panel are recorded, each with differences in composition and color. She also exhibited another lacquered panel titled La forêt enchantée (Enchanted Forest).
Her work draws the attention of several future patrons, including couturier Jacques Doucet and Élisabeth de Gramont, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre.
Gray is known to have exhibited multiple lacquer panels, including Oriental Mountebanks, as well as a lacquered piece of furniture in the French section of the modern decorative arts pavilion at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
During the war, Gray returns to London with Sugawara and they open a workshop near Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Her older brother, James, is killed in the war.
Gray returns to Paris and resumes working in her lacquer and weaving workshops.
British Vogue publishes an article discussing her lacquer work.
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DESIGNER: 1919–1929
DESIGNER: 1919–1929
Gray displays the lacquer screen, La nuit (Night) at the 19th Salon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Juliette Lévy, also known as Madame Mathieu Lévy, a milliner and owner of the fashion brand J. Suzanne Talbot, commissions Gray to design her apartment on the rue de Lota in 1919 and later her apartment on the boulevard Suchet in 1933. Gray hires Kichizo Inagaki to help her with the challenging work in the apartment’s entryway, which features walls encased in a bold array of lacquer bricks.
Gray buys a small weekend house on rue du Bas-Samois in Samois-su-Seine. Two years later, she buys the adjacent house, using it first as a lacquer workshop for Sugawara and later joining the two houses together.
On May 17, Gray opens the Galerie Jean Désert at 217, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, where she sells her furniture and her rugs.
This year Gray also exhibits at the Salon d’Automne in the Grand Palais and participates in the group exhibition Exposition Française d’Amsterdam. Industrie d’Art et de Luxe, organized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Paleis Voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam.
Gray participates in the 14th Salon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, held in the Grand Palais. She exhibits the Chambre à coucher boudoir pour Monte-Carlo (Bedroom/Boudoir for Monte Carlo) which receives mostly negative reviews from the French press. However, the design is very popular with Dutch critics, including De Stijl architects J. J. P. Oud and Jan Wils.
Gray also starts designing the plans for an experimental project inspired by Adolf Loos’s Villa Moissi. This project was never completed.
Together with Badovici, Gray starts designing a vacation home for him in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, called E 1027. Gray designs the seaside structure and all of the interior furnishings.
Gray designs House for an Engineer, which is never built. She makes several sketches for the renovation of the Battachon-Renaudin House in Vézelay.
Gray and Wyld also display rugs at the annual Exposition d’Art Appliqué in the Musée Galliera in Paris.
Gray plays an essential role in the renovation of Badovici’s house located on rue de l’Argenterie in Vézelay. She provides financial assistance to carry out the original plan of the building and creates several sets of sketches and plans for the kitchen and bathroom (1927–31). She also provides financial assistance to help Badovici to purchase and renovate a small building on rue de la Porte-Neuve in Vézelay.
Gray’s friend and collaborator Evelyn Wyld leaves Gray’s weaving workshop to open her own rug business with the American painter Eyre de Lanux.
Gray starts designing plans for a small Parisian studio apartment for Badovici at 7, rue Châteaubriand (completed in 1931).
Badovici publishes a special issue of L’Architecture Vivante called E 1027. Maison en bord de mer, dedicated to the villa.
Gray is one of the founding members of the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM), a group of dissidents of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs.
Gray sells the family home in Enniscorthy.
Gray renovates her apartment at 21, rue Bonaparte in Paris.
In collaboration with Badovici, Gray shows photographs and plans of E 1027 at the first UAM exhibition in the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris. She is given a minor location and her work is not included in the catalogue.
Gray closes her Galerie Jean Désert and her lacquer workshop at 11, rue Guénégaud.
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ARCHITECT-DESIGNER: 1930–1976
ARCHITECT-DESIGNER: 1930–1976
At the second annual UAM exhibition, held in the Galerie Georges Petit, Gray shows plans for storage systems for modern apartments, photographs of the studio she designed for Badovici on rue Châteaubriand, and designs for a Camping tent (1930–31).
Gray begins work on Tempe a Pailla, her first independent architectural project, on a site overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Castellar. Construction begins in 1934 and ends in 1935.
Gray receives a second commission from Juliette Lévy to design an apartment on the boulevard Suchet in Paris. She designs a white sofa and two white Bibendum armchairs for the interiors that are featured in the May issue of L’Illustration with no mention of Gray’s name.
Gray also begins work on a private commission for House for Two Sculptors and participates in the 23rd Salon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, in the Grand Palais, where she exhibits furniture and chairs for an entryway as well as photographs and architectural models. She shows furniture at the Salon d’Automne, also held in the Grand Palais.
Gray finishes construction on Tempe a Pailla in Castellar. The house is located in the mountainous terrain that rises above the port city of Menton. The constricted site lay below the crest of a ridge along a steep and winding mountain road, at an altitude where the cultivated terraces planted with lemon trees meet the heath and pine trees. It afforded magnificent vistas of both mountains and sea, as well as a welcome refuge from the mistral winds. Her property, which included three cisterns and a simple farm building, or cabanon, was wedged between the roadway and a footpath that led to a neighboring farm structure. To preserve the mountain vistas, she also purchased a lemon grove across the road and a second terraced garden across the footpath, signing the sales contract for the three adjoining parcels in April 1926.
Gray’s plans for the Vacation Center are exhibited at the Paris Exposition Internationale in Le Corbusier’s Pavillion des Temps Nouveaux. The project includes a parking platform, an office area, several holiday resorts, a campground, a restaurant, a recreational area, and a gymnasium.
Le Décor de la vie de 1900 à 1925 (The Decor of Life from 1900 to 1925), an exhibit held in the Pavillon de Marsan during the Exposition Internationale, includes two pieces of furniture designed by Gray for couturier Jacques Doucet in the 1910s: a red-lacquered table known as Table aux chars (Chariot table) and a double-sided lacquered screen entitled Le destin (Fate).
Gray buys a vineyard that includes an old stone building at Chapelle-Sainte-Anne, on the outskirts of Saint-Tropez. Here, fifteen years later, Gray will create her last architectural work: the house called Lou Pérou she designed for herself.
Gray designs a meditation garden for La Bastide Blanche in Saint-Tropez and also designs a house for Jean Badovici, slated for land purchased in Casablanca, which will never be realized.
As foreigners during the Second World War, Gray and several of her friends, including Kate Weatherby and Evelyn Wyld, are forced to leave the coastline for Lourmarin, in the Vaucluse.
Gray begins designing a Cultural and Social Center that includes a recreational area, a dining area, and a library. The design is never built.
Gray rejoins the UAM and plans to show designs for Tempe a Pailla in the exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, which is cancelled.
Gray renovates Lou Pérou, which will be completed in 1961.
Gray sells Tempe a Pailla to British painter Graham Sutherland.
René Herbst publishes a catalogue that celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the UAM and includes the villas E 1027 and Tempe a Pailla.
Jean Badovici dies in Monaco on August 17.
Gray begins to gather documentation about her architectural work in two portfolios.
Gray’s Cultural and Social Center (1946–47) is published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.
Gray finishes Lou Pérou.
Gray’s Le destin screen, the “Lotus” table, and the Bilboquet table are included in the Jacques Doucet sale at the Hôtel des Ventes de Drouot in Paris.
Gray is appointed “Royal Designer for Industry” by the British Society of Arts.
A retrospective entitled Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design is organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London.
Gray is elected an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Irish Architects.
Eileen Gray dies in Paris on October 31 at the age of 98.
