sent ripples through the world of art for years to come.32 Soon followed by Georges Braque, they took simultaneous viewpoints and produced ‘high Analytic’ or ‘Hermetic’ compositions, using a muted palette. Their favourite motifs were still life with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards, figures or the human face. Landscapes were rare. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), the renowned writer and art critic, and an associate of Gray’s, became a chief protagonist for the Cubists. Gray purchased his publication Les Peintres Cubistes, (The Cubist Painters) in 1913.33 He believed that ‘Cubism can in no way be considered a systematic doctrine. It does, however constitute a school, and the painters who make up this school want to transform their art by returning to the original principles with regard to line and inspiration, just as the Fauves – and many of the Cubists were at one time Fauves – returned to original principles with regard to their colour and composition’. This publication explores the work of Cubist painters and their ideas. It was a collection of essays and reviews, written between 1905 and 1912. The text became the essential text in twentieth-century art and presented the poet and critic’s aesthetic meditations on nine painters: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), Marie Laurencin, Juan Gris (1887-1927), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Some of these painters later befriended Gray and with others she later worked on various projects. In the publication Apollinaire advocates a return to pure painting and strives to disentangle four distinct tendencies within Cubism. He speaks of an inner and essential reality whose dictates cubism obeys.
3.11 Abstract drawing, 1916-17, card, pencil, charcoal © NMI
Picasso and Braque’s earlier more austere form of Analytical Cubism was short lived, but it still had an effect on Gray’s development. Gray looked directly to Georges Braque and Analytical Cubism with an early charcoal drawing dated 1916-17 which became a study for a later lacquer door panel. She was more influenced not by his approach to monochromatic colour but by the patterns of faceted form.34
From 1911 the monochromatic colours of Analytical Cubism gave way to the use of bright, vivid colours where pictorial composition became more important than representation. With Synthetic Cubism, as it became known, Picasso and Braque, amongst others, enriched their pictures with references to the physical world, adding words or slogans to paintings. In 1912 Braque began using the technique of papier collé or collage. Newspaper was an early favourite ingredient.35 Realising the tactile qualities of collage Pablo Picasso added more provocative elements to his papier collé with the inclusion of razor blades and broken glass. These were combined with charcoal or pencil by Braque, while Picasso and Juan Gris combined them with oil. Painting now possessed the tactile qualities of sculpture. Whether Gray actually met Braque is debatable; however, she was introduced to Picasso by the writer Henri Pierre Roché (1879-1959), and an interest in the different types of Cubism and the work of several Cubist painters penetrated every aspect of her work for decades to come.36
3.12 Newspaper collage, circa 1920, board, newspaper, paper, paint © NMI
Synthetic Cubism formed a new pictorial language for Gray and she enriched her pictorial compositions through the use of lettering, sheets of music and newspapers. In one early work on board she also created a collage entirely of newspaper.37 Gray also explored the use of wallpaper, theatre programmes and posters advertisements. Then from the mid to late 1920s Gray began using geographical motifs from maps in her artwork. Gray was similar to Braque and Picasso in that her use of lettering usually formed a coded visual image for the viewer to decipher.38 Her fondness for travel and maps appeared on the wall of the living room of the house E.1027 on which Gray hung a large marine chart with stencilled letters which acted as a code. In her own house Tempe à Pailla, in the dining area, she placed a large map of the excavations at Teotihuacán in Mexico. When the Sunday Times journalist Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) interviewed Gray at age 93 in her apartment in Paris he was so impressed by a collage which she had completed of a map of Patagonia that he offered to purchase it.39 His interest resulted in his journey there and his most renowned publication Patagonia, 1977. These geographical locations and motifs from maps all have meaning and symbolism in Gray’s work. As a result she created motifs, representing geographical locations, which she used in her collages. One collage is of the Roquebrune coastline in the south of France and may have been intended as a mural design similar to the marine map with the stencilled words by Baudelaire Invitation au voyage in the living room of E.1027. The collage consists of a bespeckled ground with black, off white, purple, blue, grey and white. Gray had an enduring interest in remote locales and the overall effect is nautical. A central motif composed of curved line represents the exact location of the house E.1027 and where it is situated at Roquebrune.40 Maps appear in other collages which she did during this period using a similar system.41
3.13 Roquebrune collage, 1926, paper, paint © NMI
Other gouaches contain architectural motifs or represented abstract plans of buildings.42 One collage completed in 1931-34 is a site plan for her house Tempe à Pailla.43 There are similarities in the shapes, forms and layout of a coloured site plan which is in Gray’s archives.44 This abstract collage is a larger scale version of the plan. Gray had a number of collage pieces which she used as stencils in her collages.45 These ‘design elements’ as she called them were also used in some of her carpet designs and appear in her architectural portfolios.46 One large square gouache, with a black speckled ground with black linear designs, has in the upper right corner a half circle and plant-like formation similar to the collage elements.47 Gray used some of these elements to represent trees in a hypothetical architectural project she designed titled L’Epopée Irlandaise or the Irish Epic. Dating from 1946-47, photographs remain of the model of the stage set, with rocks and trees.48
3.14 Green, white, blue gouache and collage, 1930s, paper, paint © NMI
By the 1930s Gray changed her style again, paring down her use of coded letters and words. She began a series of black and white Cubist-inspired paper collages with triangular motifs.49 She also injected these monochromatic collages with singular motifs completed in bold bright colours.
