MIND OF THE ARTIST
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Eileen Gray, Standard lamp, circa 1925. Lacquered wood, patinated brass, paper. Photography: Christian Baraja, studio SLB and Provenance: Private collection, Paris
Goff. “Everybody would classify her early lacquer pieces as art deco, but they’re not. She abhorred the art deco movement. She didn’t like any of the furniture that was being produced in the 1920s and she openly stated that the things she made were a revolt against that. And the pieces that she really felt were a revolt against art deco furniture were her block screens. “She had always wanted to mass produce lacquer. It was a naive ambition
but that was initially the idea, because she did not connect with what was being classified as the French modernist movement. She was way more influenced by the Deutscher Werkbund, who had exhibited in Paris in 1909. They looked to creating mass produced work for a moderate household budget. “Gray, from 1910, immediately had an affinity with their ideas. So, alongside
the grandiose pieces of lacquer that she did for rich, bourgeoisie clientele, she also did everyday moderate objects – cups, plates, saucers, bowls and trays – in a very plain natural lacquer.”
MOVE FROM LACQUER Goff points to two pieces that started her move away from lacquer. “The first would have been the block screen which was produced in 1922/23. It was unadorned plain wood with movable brick panels. She did 11 screens in total. Five were painted white and the rest were done in black lacquer. The second would have been the Transat chair. In 1925–6 she did a series of six Transat chairs.” In 1924, Gray and Badovici began working on the ‘maison minimum’ E-1027.
She described the villa as “a house envisaged from a social point of view: minimum of space, maximum of comfort”. “This house is a manifesto of modernity, but a very sensible modernity,” says
Eileen Gray, Armchair, circa 1926- 1929. Lacquered metal tube, wood. Piece of furniture from the E-1027 villa. Centre Pompidou, Musée National D’art Moderne, Paris. Purchase, 1992
Pitiot. “Eileen Gray wasn’t like Le Corbusier, for example, who spoke about architecture like a machine for humans. For Eileen Gray, the architecture and the pieces of furniture are here for the humans, with a lot of sensibility, with a lot of generosity.” Furniture that was produced specifically for the villa include her Transat armchair and the tubular steel E-1027 Table. In 1934, she began the construction of Tempe à Pailla near Menton, also
in the south of France. “The thinking between the Twenties and the Thirties had changed,” says Goff. “The furniture now had to be multifunctional and lightweight. “From 1933 to 1936, the pieces she produced were of a completely different
language. At that stage she had really plunged into a more purist train of thought and she was looking much more at minimalism. She hated clutter and she liked things to be neatly stored and neatly packed away. “Furniture that was produced in the Thirties had a completely different
resonance to the material that was produced in the Twenties. The Transat chair from the 1920s evolved into the S Bend Chair. This chair when it’s opened is a lovely sinuous S shape, but little rods at the side can be undone and the whole chair collapses in on itself. In the later part of the Thirties, she again felt the S Bend Chair was still too big so she developed a very simple, but highly comfortable deck chair that folds into a neat little square. It’s exceedingly lightweight. When you look at the pictures of the interiors from E-1027 to Tempe à Pailla, the latter is completely Spartan. And that was deliberate. “In the Twenties she was gaining her whole architectural thought and interior
design thinking. She always said that was one of the reasons why she never wrote a manifesto, unlike other architects and designers. She said a manifesto would come back to haunt her. Even through to the latter years of her life, she still was developing her thought. A prime example would be her very last
Issue 7 Autumn/Winter 2013 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW 69
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