Eileen Gray

Neglected for most of her career, EILEEN GRAY (1878-1976) is now regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco.

In the August 1917 issue of British Vogue magazine a writer described the work of Miss Gray, a lacquer artist who had fled her home in Paris to seek refuge in London during World War I. “Influenced by the modernists is Miss Gray’s art, so they say,” it began. “But is it not rather that she stands alone, unique, the champion of a singularly free method of expression.”

Eileen Gray was to “stand alone” throughout her career first as a lacquer artist, then a furniture designer and finally as an architect. At a time when other leading designers were almost all male and mostly members of one movement or another – whether a loose grouping like De Stijl in the Netherlands, or a formal one such as the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne – she remained stalwartly independent.

Her design style was as distinctive as her way of working, and Gray developed an opulent, luxuriant take on the geometric forms and industrially produced materials used by the International Style designers, such as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies Van Der Rohe, who shared many of her ideals. Her voluptuous leather and tubular steel Bibendum Chair and clinically chic E-1027 glass and tubular steel table are now as familiar as icons of the International Style as Le Corbusier and Perriand’s classic Grand Confort club chairs, yet for most of her career she was relegated to obscurity by the same proud singularity that makes her work so prized today.

As a woman, Eileen Gray was denied access to the supportive networks from which her male contemporaries benefited. Neither did she have the advantage of working with a powerful male mentor, like most of the other women who made an impact on early 20th century design: such as Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier, then Jean Prouvé; Anni Albers with her husband Josef; or Lilly Reich with Mies Van Der Röhe. Nor did Gray share a trajectory with other designers: either by studying at the same schools such as the Bauhaus in Germany, or as an apprentice in a studio like Le Corbusier’s in Paris. Instead, her privileged background – like her gender – left her isolated.

The youngest of five children in a wealthy Scottish-Irish family, Eileen Gray was born in 1878 near the Irish market town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford. Her childhood was divided between the family’s houses there and in London’s South Kensington. Gray's father, James Maclaren Gray, was a keen amateur artist who encouraged her creative talent by taking her with him on painting tours of Italy and Switzerland. He also allowed Gray to enrol at the Slade School of Art in London to study painting. After her father’s death in 1900, Gray moved to Paris with two friends from the Slade, Jessie Gavin and Kathleen Bruce, and continued her studies at the Académie Julian and the École Colarossi. For the next few years she shuttled between Paris and the family’s homes in London and Ireland, but moved back to London in 1905 when her mother became ill.

During her stay in London, Gray returned to the Slade but found drawing and painting less and less satisfying. One day she came across a lacquer repair shop run by a Mr Charles on Dean Street in Soho. Allured by the antique Chinese and Japanese lacquer screens in the shop, Eileen asked if she could learn the rudiments of lacquer working. By the time she returned to Paris in 1906, she was obsessed by the art of lacquer and, thanks to Mr Charles’ contacts, had an introduction to a young lacquer craftsman, Sugawara. He came from Jahoji, a village in northern Japan famous for its lacquer work and agreed to teach her. In 1907, Gray found a spacious first floor apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte where she could live and work and persuaded her mother to increase her allowance so that she could afford the rent. Three years later, Gray bought the apartment outright and thereafter it became her main home.

Gray studied with Sugiwara for four years. Lacquer work was not only painstaking, but perilous. Like many people who come into close contact with it, she contracted a painful ‘lacquer disease’ on her hands. Slowly she refined her technique to create stark forms with simple geometric decorations. This simplicity was, however, as much a product of the complexity of the process as of Gray's aesthetic preferences. It was not until 1913 that she felt confident enough to exhibit her work by showing some decorative panels at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. They attracted the attention of the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre and the couturier Jacques Doucet, who bought one of her panels at the Salon and commissioned other pieces of lacquer work from Eileen for his Paris apartment...

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://biladesign.files.wordpress.com/2005/12/copy_6_b1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://biladesign.wordpress.com/2005/12/&usg=__j4Hb6b8vQqul_fMsymHUBW2gJxw=&h=380&w=284&sz=22&hl=en&start=6&um=1&tbnid=JrmCh3OEFSnDkM:&tbnh=123&tbnw=92&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmarianne%2Bbrandt%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN