The Brownswood woman who broke down barriers and created the most enduring of legacies
BORN IN ENNISCORTHY, EILEEN GRAY MOVED TO PARIS AS A YOUNG WOMAN AND BECAME ONE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED DESIGNERS OF THE 20TH CENTURY
THERE is still some way to go, still some of that glass ceiling left, but for the women of modern-day Ireland the future appears bright.
Theirs is a future which would have seemed unthinkable thirty, twenty, even ten years ago, a future full of possibilities, one which will see them encouraged to follow their dreams, to pursue paths previously closed off, to become scientists, mathematicians, leaders, pioneers, entrepreneurs, whatever their heart desires.
And when they get there, they will show others the way, continue the fight for equality, for parity with those who have for so long stood in their way.
This certainly wasn’t the case in the late 20th century, or even in the early years of this, the 21st century. And the further back you go the deeper the oppression becomes.
Yet there are exceptions to every rule, people who defy convention, regardless of the obstacles placed in front of them.
Eileen Gray was one such person.
Born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith on August 9, 1878, the Brownswood native would not only defy convention, not only overcome those obstacles, she would become a world leader in her field, an iconic figure who continues to be celebrated decades after her death.
Eileen’s father, James McLaren Smith (18321900), was a painter, her mother, Eveleen (18411918) an Anglo-Irish aristocrat whose lineage could be traced back to King James V.
Clearly these were not your average Enniscorthy family.
While the young Eileen undoubtedly had a better start to life than most, a most affluent upbringing, she displayed the single-mindedness which would serve her well in later life from a young age.
Patricia O’Reilly is a Dublin-born author who has written extensively about Eileen Gray, penning two books based on her life as well as a radio play. She has also travelled the world giving talks on Eileen, attempting to shed some light on a woman who remains a somewhat mysterious figure.
‘From talking to the progeny of locals who have long memories about the habits of those living in the “big house”, Eileen had the reputation of being a strange child, a loner, with a habit of sleeping on the floor outside her parents’ bedroom,’ recalls Patricia.
This strangeness, or perhaps just youthful folly, extended to Eileen ‘on occasion adapting the body of the perambulator to toboggan down the slope leading to the river Slaney.’
But the most significant moment of Eileen’s childhood occurred when she was eleven years old with the departure of her father. Described as a ‘mutually civilised arrangement’ between husband and wife, James left Enniscorthy and relocated to Italy, leaving his young daughter bereft. Although the family visited James frequently, this loss had a deep impact on Eileen and perhaps offers an explanation as to why she chose to pour her love into the family home as a teenage girl. At the age of 18 she began redeveloping Brownswood, displaying the first hint of an artistic flair which would one day see her championed across the globe.
‘In Eileen’s opinion the completed job was an ostentatious mock-Tudor structure,’ says Patricia. ‘Throughout her life she kept a photograph showing the original building and another of the renovation.’
Of course, that building, the Gray family home is now occupied by Méanscoil Gharman, the Irish-language school, where many of the home’s original features are protected, such as ‘the half landing stained-glass windows, elegant staircase, plasterwork and sections of the basement kitchens.’
But for all her architectural prowess it was still expected that, having come of age, Eileen would be married off to the most eligible contender and begin a life of motherhood and housekeeping. However, she had other ideas.
‘The family had aristocratic roots reaching back to Scotland and it was expected she’d conform and marry suitably,’ Patricia says. ‘But she was independent from an early age, her own woman who knew her mind and what she wanted to do.’
What she wanted to do was follow in her father’s footsteps, to explore her creative side. To that end she enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art in London. However, after a few months she professed herself ‘disappointed at both her talent and the quality of the teaching and began looking around for another creative outlet.’
That outlet would be found in Paris where, against the wishes of her mother, Eileen moved in the early 1900s. She bought an apartment in the exclusive Sainte-Germain-des-Prés area and attended art classes at the Ecole Colarossi and the Academie Julian and persuaded Seizo Sugawara, a master in lacquerwork, to give her lessons in the art of lacquering.
While she concentrated on her work, on creating an opus worthy of the name, Eileen began to explore her sexuality, as Patricia explains.
‘Within the artistic/creative circle she moved in Paris, sexuality was not a problem. Her friends were lesbian, bi-sexual, whatever.
‘Eileen had relationships with both men and women, but, doubtless, the love of her life was Marie-Louise Damien, better known as Damia. She had taken the Parisian nightclub scene by storm when she opened Concert Damia, in Montmarte, the place to be seen during the years of the First World War.
‘Eileen was a frequent visitor, sitting at her table, sipping champagne, smoking. She created the Sirène chairs for Damia, and the two women were a familiar sight, driving along the Champs-Elysée in Eileen’s roadster with Damia’s pet panther sitting on the back seat of the car.’
Their relationship broke up when Damia switched her affection to Gabrielle Bloch, the daughter of a wealthy German banker. And although Eileen and Damia lived within a few streets of each other for decades it is said they never spoke again.
By this point there were competing passions in Eileen’s life, her work often rendering all other matters obsolete. She began working on ‘Le Destin’ - a four-panel lacquered screen inspired by a drawing reputed to be of a madman incarcerated in La Salpetrière hospital - and the rest of the world simply faded into the background.
‘During the months of creating ‘Le Destin’ she lived like a hermit,’ says Patricia. ‘She slept little and survived on chocolate and cigarettes.
‘She ignored Picasso’s (yes, that Picasso) invitations - he enjoyed discussing cubism with her - shunned the fashionable soirees of Romain Brooks and Natalie Barney; avoided dining with Rodin; and disregarded her friend, Kathleen Bruce, who later married Scott of the Antarctic. Even visits from Jessie Gavin, her lover at the time, were regarded as an interruption.’
‘Le Destin’ caught the attention of several notable figures in the arts world and Eileen was commissioned to do further pieces. But like everyone else in France her ambitions were cut short by the onset of war in 1914. Never one to take a backseat in proceedings, Eileen attained a driving license and drove an ambulance during the early days of World War I, ferrying casualties to hospital as the Allies repelled the German forces.
Only the illness, and subsequent passing, of her mother cut short Eileen’s war-effort.
Upon resuming her career in the post-war years, Eileen designed and created a piece which, 90 years after her death, would sell at auction for €22 million.
‘The Dragon Armchair’, so named because of the ‘ornate sculptures on its sweeping armrests’ was a ‘canoe-shaped day bed, resembling a seashell, in textured brown lacquer and silver leaf, raised on twelve arches, a form without precedence in furniture design.’
Standing just 24cm tall it was purchased by Parisian art-dealer Cheska Vallois at an auction held by Christie’s in 2009. Interestingly, the chair was owned by Yves St Laurent up until his death, Vallois having sold it to him in the 1970s.
Gray’s chair remains the second-most expensive piece of furniture ever made, only an 18th-century Badmington cabinet (€27.5m) selling for more.
While she would never earn that level of riches or acclaim during her own lifetime, The Dragon Armchair did propel Eileen’s career to new heights.
‘The media attention surrounding the chair heightened interest in Gray, drawing enquiries from America, commissions from the beef barons of Argentina and Indian maharajas,’ says Patricia. ‘A poet friend described Eileen as “an alchemist of wood” - a description that stuck, but she was impervious to flattery.’
Indeed, by this point Eileen had almost grown tired of lacquering and furniture, she yearned for greater projects, something all-consuming. She found it at Roquebrune-Cap Martin in the South of France.
Upon completion her E.1027 villa would become one of ‘the most iconic houses of the 20th century’ but, as Patricia explains, the design and construction of the building presented unique challenges.
‘It was challenging - a steep rocky perch, difficult of access but with a fine view over the Mediterranean, and her design for the villa took maximum advantage of the location.’
‘Eileen oversaw the construction of the house herself. Dressed in chic trouser suits, she was a familiar sight driving narrow, hilly roads around Menton, personally overseeing every aspect of the building from foundations to furnishings, frequently sleeping on site.’
Completed in 1929 the villa was named E.1027 in commemoration of a new relationship, one with a man. Jean Bodivici was a Romanian architect whom Eileen had befriended during her time studying the work of prominent Modern Movement architects.
Bodivici would assist Eileen in creating E.1027 (E for Eileen, 10 for Jean, 2 Badovici and 7 for Gray) and become her lover as the project progressed.
‘They were an unlikely couple – he was penniless, a womaniser, ten years younger than her and a drinker. While she was independently wealthy and abstemious,’ says Patricia.
‘On completion, she not only gifted the villa to him, she gave him credit for being a collaborator, although the extant plans are solely in her hand.’
But what made E.1027 so unique, why is it renowned to this day as one of the greatest architectural triumphs of the last 100 years? Patricia O’Reilly once more.
‘The house stood on stilts and its roof was accessible by an exterior staircase. Its south window created an open façade; there was an open-plan living room with a mixture of freestanding and fixed walls and horizontally oriented windows.
‘The interior was sculpted to create a sense of space, light and optimistic modernity; the walls were pristine white and the furniture designed with whimsy in mind – at the touch of a hand a cabinet transformed to a desk; a bedside table could be dropped to half its height. The house’s ambience was playful, talkative.’
Eileen lived in E.1027 with Jean until a visit from La Corbusier who was ‘arguably the most famous architect of the era’. During his stay Le Corbusier painted ‘eight brightly coloured explicitly sexual murals on the pristine white walls of the villa’.
When he refused to remove them, and Jean refused to confront him, Eileen Gray left, never to return.
In 1956 the villa was taken over by the Conservatoire du Litteral, an organisation dedicated to the protection of valuable French resources, and refurbished. It was opened to the public in 2014.
Eileen continued to work as an architect, creating another villa in the village of Castellar and, in a sign of her changing world view, ‘sketched out a scheme for low-cost housing’.
‘Her social conscience had risen to the fore, her preoccupations having moved worlds away from lacquer and luxurious villas,’ Patricia says.
After the Second World War she became even more of a recluse, continuing to design in her apartment in rue Bonaporte, accompanied by her lifelong friend and maid, Louise Dany.
But by now, as she entered her seventies, Eileen’s ‘eyesight was failing, her projects were being ignored and her star was in the descent.’
Yet there was one brief flickering of that star before it faded forever, an unexpected return to the limelight for a woman whose name was in danger of being forgotten.
In 1972, with Eileen now aged 94, an auction was held at the Hotel Drouot in Paris. The items up for sale were part of a collection owned by Jacques Doucet, a French fashion designer who had died in 1929.
Among the collection was ‘Le Destin’. It was valued at 20,000 francs but eventually sold for 170,000 francs, the highest ever price paid at auction for a modern antique. The buyer? Yves Saint Laurent.
‘It was presumed the creator of the screen must be dead. After all it dated back to before the First World War,’ says Patricia.
‘But the story is that an American journalist tracked down Eileen Gray to her apartment. Eileen had the beginnings of Parkinson’s Disease and her eyesight was failing, but she was enjoying the belated recognition with a bemused detachment.
‘Although she refused to see the American, the news was out and the spotlight of the international media was back, firmly focused on her.
‘Her aversion to publicity hadn’t changed during her years as a recluse – she refused to be interviewed by the American or any of the other international TV camera-men, newspaper reporters and radio journalists who came calling.’
Four years later on October 31, 1976, Eileen Gray died in the Paris she so loved. She was 98-years-old. However, her story doesn’t end there.
In 2002 The National Museum of Ireland opened a permanent exhibition of her work at Collins Barracks in Dublin. In 2013 retrospectives of her works were mounted in Centre Pompidou in Paris and IMMA in Dublin.
A documentary on her life Gray Matters was released in 2014, a biopic, The Price of Desire opened in 2016, and several books, including Patricia O’Reilly’s Time and Destiny and The Interview (a fictionalised account of Eileen’s encounter with that American journalist in the 1970s) have been published.
Eileen Gray continues, and will continue, to be celebrated on a global scale. But what about Wexford? What about Enniscorthy? Well, she has not yet got the statue or monument a woman of her standing perhaps deserves, but at the Méanscoil her legacy lives on through the work of its teachers and students.
Danielle Dempsey is the school’s art teacher and she actively encourages her classes to explore the legacy of one of Enniscorthy’s most famous exports. The latest in a series of projects designed to educate and inform her students about Eileen Gray began last year.
‘We’ve done a couple of projects on Eileen in recent years. Obviously because we’re working in the building where she spent her early life it gives it extra significance,’ Danielle says. ‘Two years ago we did a ceramic installation based on her work and last September we began a new project on her in association with Wexford Arts Council.’
Helping to bring this latest project to life is Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Creative Associate with the Irish Arts Council.
‘We started a collaborative art in education project focusing on the innovative and dynamic creative practice of Eileen Gray,’ explains Laura. ‘In partnership with Danielle we devised a workshops series, activating the legacy of Eileen Gray. A series of full-day workshops over the course of the school year are taking place in the Méanscoil with the transition year art students.’
An Irish based architect, Ben Mullen, is delivering the workshop series; exploring approaches to outdoor, sculptural art and architecture, resulting in a series of designed and created outdoor-seating sculptures.
Although the workshops have been curtailed because of lockdown, Laura and Danielle hope the students’ sculptures will be completed by the end of this summer, at which point they will be permanently installed in the grounds of the Méanscoil.
And Laura says one of the core aims of the project is to heighten awareness of Eileen’s work on a local level.
‘This course is about bringing her more to the fore, she is already internationally recognised, what we’re doing is a step in the right direction to embed her as a draw for the county, and maybe encourage designers and architects to come here to work.’
Yet in the process of that workshops, Danielle says her students have developed an appreciation for Eileen Gray both in terms of her creative output and her the times she lived in.
‘The students find her life story very interesting, this was someone in recent history who wasn’t afraid to express her sexuality and was a strong female personality, I do try and push that side of her story when I can.
‘She was someone who made her own way through life, and although she was well off, it was her work ethic that made her a success.’
THE TWO WOMEN WERE A FAMILIAR SIGHT, DRIVING ALONG THE CHAMPS-ELYSÉE IN EILEEN’S ROADSTER WITH DAMIA’S PET PANTHER IN THE BACK SEAT