Gray also used circular motifs and circles throughout, with these black and white gouaches which were visually highly effective.51 Some gouaches she actually signed on the back.52
3.15 Black, grey and white gouache with yellow, 1930s, paper, paint © NMI
Gray remained interested in the work of both Braque and Picasso. She purchased the surrealist magazine Documents 3 – published in 1929 which had an article written by Carl Einstein entitled Notes sur le Cubisme with images by Picasso and Braque.53 However, in her notes it is the work of Braque in this particular article which caught her attention. The article illustrates four paintings by Braque which he did in 1912-1914; two figurative works dating 1912 and October 1913, Le Sacré Coeur, 1913, and a Still Life from 1914.54 Gray also continued to follow Picasso’s career. She attended an exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work and preliminary draw- ings completed for Guernica in 1938, held at the New Burlington Galleries, London. Gray also kept the exhibition catalogue in her personal library.55 She was obviously aware of the social and politically charged art which Picasso produced and by 1938 these were ideas which she herself was exploring at the time. She was very much being directed by an interest in the working-class environment. The idea that modern art was capable of producing an impassioned accusation that was triggered by current political events appealed to Gray greatly. This painting transcended mere social criticism to document the destructive side of human behaviour. Picasso describes in this painting not the German attack on the Basque village but the consequences of that attack. In social terms Eileen Gray’s work aspired to address the consequences of a luxurious and elitist lifestyle and she looked to mass-produced pieces and mass-produced housing for the working class. It was different to the social and political statement of Picasso’s painting but the underlying social implications were the same. Gray saw the face of destruction first hand during the war and this influenced her approach to creating a modern society which catered to people of all levels. Picasso said that ‘Painting was not invented to decorate houses. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy’. This statement informed her later attitude against mural painting being used as mere decoration for interiors.
Gray also owned a copy of Du Cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre published in 1920 by the painter Albert Gleizes.56 Gleizes had the most influence over Eileen Gray’s early lacquer work and in some of her carpet designs.57 From about 1910 onward Gleizes had become directly involved with Cubism, both as an artist and as a theorist of the movement. His style had become stripped, linear, consisting of multiple forms and facets where he accentuated colours. He met regularly with Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Robert Delauney (1885-1941) and Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1946). After exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendents in 1911 and then as a group at the Salon d’Automne where their work caused a sensation, Gleizes was introduced to Picasso by Apollinaire and he joined the Puteaux Group. Influenced by the ideas of Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) and Henri Bergson (1859-1941), both of whom Gray read, Gleizes began to represent an object which was viewed from numerous viewpoints. This technique became known as relative motion. Gleizes believed that to understand the space of Cubist painters one needed to examine the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann’s (1826-1866) mathematical series theorems. He also stated that the only way to understand this treatment of space would be to include and integrate the fourth dimension whereby physics, space and time are unified to create a continuum or fourth dimension. Cubism with its multiple viewpoint perspective achieved, in their opinion, a better representation of the world. Gleizes argued that one cannot know the external world; therefore he didn’t attempt to analyse or describe an actual visual reality. Instead he said that one can only know sensations. He sought to synthesise the world through sensation, using volumes to create the structure of objects. As a result he simplified his forms and modulated their shape and their colour in relation to one another. Gleizes’s theories on the notion of ‘Translation and Rotation’ are where flat planes are set in motion simultaneously in order to create space and their relationship with the subject matter.
Gray appreciated how the Cubists’ aim was to completely eschew time and space in favour of relative motion and how they created a sensory experience and the dynamics of the fourth dimension on a flat canvas. It was to become more relevant in her work as a designer and architect than in her gouaches and drawings which she produced during this period. From 1924-26 Gray did a series of pencil drawings. One abstract drawing completed in charcoal and pencil shows a number of geometrical motifs which she used in her carpet designs from this period. However, her rendition of the geometrical forms reflects the work of Albert Gleizes and Andre Lhote (1885-1962).58 This drawing also recalls motifs which Gray used on a lacquer door panel dated 1916, completed for the fashion designer Jacques Doucet (1853-1929).59 Gray’s treatment of these motifs and geometrical forms in this drawing look to the ideas of ‘Translation and Rotation’ as the forms appear in motion, creating space for the subject matter.
Apollinaire helped create the phrase ‘Orphic’ Cubism. After Gleizes and Lhote it was Robert Delauney who became its foremost practitioner. This philosophical notion about the passage of time, or simultaneity, was a concept which was also espoused by the Italian Futurists. The later phase of Cubism became thus more colourful and decorative and had many foreign adherents.
There was a remarkable link between the avant-garde artists, sculptors and writers of the pre-war period. Apollinaire created the literary and art review Les Soirées de Paris. Along with his contributors Apollinaire acted as impresario and publicist for the avant-garde movement by illustrating its principles in each issue. Gray owned a copy of Les Soirées de Paris, No.22, 15 March 1914.60 She was particularly interested in this issue which contained letters by the Symbolist writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and six colour illustrations by Francis Picabia. One illustration of Danseuse étoile sur un transatlantique, 1913 with its abstract planar composition inspired a later charcoal drawing by Gray.61 In this work she depicts an abstracted seascape of a life boat moored at docklands, with a pier receding into the background.62 Though completed many years later, the subject matter of this piece is possibly inspired by her close friend and architect Jean Badovici (1893-1956) who had patented the design for his E-7 lifeboat in 1934. Gray had kept Badovici’s notes on submarine and lifeboat design.63
3.16 Charcoal drawing, circa 1934, paper, pencil © NMI
Modernity became a central theme in Paris from 1880 through to the First World War. Avant-garde artists and writers were acutely aware of the developing modern landscape. They shared an interest in new technology, particularly in its relationship to speed. The Italian Futurists celebrated the railways, the motor car and the airplane. The Manifesto of Futurism, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) was published on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. The Futurists had an enormous impact on the work of Eileen Gray, especially after she visited an exhibition of their work at the Galerie Bernheim
