Partner Jessie Gavin, Gab Sorère,
Damia
Queer Places:
Brownswood House, Brownswood, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Y21 D799, Ireland
14 The Boltons, London SW10 9TD, UK
University College London, Gower St, Kings Cross, London WC1E 6BT, Regno Unito
Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, Gower St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6BT, Regno Unito
3 Rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France
Académie Julian, Passage des Panoramas, Paris, Francia
Académie Colarossi, 10 Rue de la Grande Chaumière, 75006 Paris, Francia
Jean Désert, 217 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris, France
Villa E-1027, Sentier Massolin, 06190 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Francia
Père Lachaise Cemetery, 16 Rue du Repos, 75020 Paris, Francia
Eileen
Gray (born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith; 9 August 1878 – 31 October 1976) was
an Irish-born French-based architect and furniture designer and a pioneer of
the Modern Movement in architecture. Over her career, she was associated with
many notable European artists of her era, including Kathleen Scott, Adrienne
Gorska, Le Corbusier, and Jean Badovici, with whom she was romantically
involved. Gray spent the 1920s in France, first as an interior designer with a
glamorous shop in Paris, then as a practising architect whose modernist
‘E-1027’ villa in the Alpes Maritimes, built in 1926, is iconic. She
influenced Le Corbusier.
Gray was born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith on 9 August 1878, near
Enniscorthy, in County Wexford, Ireland.
She was the youngest of five children
in a Protestant Anglo-Irish family.
Her father, James MacLaren Smith, was a Scottish landscape painter.
He encouraged Gray's interest in painting and drawing.
Although he was a minor figure, James corresponded with major artists of the
day.
Her parents’ marriage broke up when she was eleven and her father left
Ireland to live and paint in Europe.
Gray's mother, Eveleen Pounden, was a granddaughter of Francis Stuart, 10th
Earl of Moray.
She became the 19th Baroness Gray in 1895 after the death of her uncle.
Although the couple was already separated by this point, Gray's father changed
his name to Smith-Gray by royal licence and the four children were from then
on known as Gray.
Both Gray's brother and father died in 1900.
Gray split her upbringing between Brownswood House in Ireland and the
family's home in Kensington, London.
Having never lived in Ireland during her adult life, in her old age she
reportedly stated, "I am without roots, but if I have any, they are in
Ireland".
Gray was bisexual. She mixed in the lesbian circles of the time, being
associated with Romaine
Brooks, Loie Fuller,
Marie-Louise Damien, and
Natalie Barney.
By 1906, Gray had moved away from her family home in London to purchase an apartment in Paris (her primary residence until her death 70 years later) on the Left Bank, around the corner from Natalie Barney, whose famed salon, which Gray sometime visited, served as the hub of that city's primarily female sexual subculture, and several commentators have noted her apparently sexual, intimate relationships with women (Jessie Gavin, Gaby Bloch (aka Gab Sorère) and Damia being the most well known).
She commissioned portraits of herself, with short cropped hair revealing collars and cuffs of masculinized tailoring, from Berenice Abbott, indexing the sartorial codes of an emerging through still crucially ambiguous lesbian identity.
When architect Eileen Gray opened an interior design shop on the rue du
Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1922, she had already been initiated into the louche
secrets of Parisian night-life, having visited bars there with a female
friend, both dressed as men, while training at the Académie Julian in the
early 1900s.
Gray had for some time an intermittent
relationship with Jean Badovici, the Romanian architect and writer. He had written about her design work in 1924 and encouraged her interest in
architecture. Their romantic involvement ended in 1932.
Gray's intermittent relationship with the singer
Damia ended in 1938,
after which they never saw each other again, although both lived into their
nineties in the same city.
Gray was also connected with Elise Djo-Bourgeois.
Renewed interest in Grey's work began in 1967 when historian Joseph Rykwert
published an essay about her the Italian design magazine Domus.
At a Paris auction of 1972, Yves Saint Laurent bought ‘Le Destin’ and
revived interest in Gray's career.
The first retrospective exhibition of her work, titled ‘Eileen Gray:
Pioneer of Design’, was held in London in 1972.
A Dublin exhibition followed the next year.
At the Dublin exhibit, the 95 year old Gray was given an honorary fellowship
by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland.
In 1973 Gray signed a contract to reproduce the Bibendum chair and many of
her pieces for the first time.
They remain in production.
Eileen Gray died on Halloween 1976.
She is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, but because her family
omitted to pay the licence fee her grave is not identifiable.
References:
Other references:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Gray
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