href="#ulink_c9cbb4d1-3597-5995-a5a0-7252f5c9cee6">105 On each black and white photographic collage two separate forms are assembled in an abstract manner. The first is composed of an off-white ground with grey or beige triangular shapes and rectangles superimposed on it. Running horizontally across this are strips, a small thin triangle and a large triangle in speckled dark black and off white. The second consists of two different ground colours; a white/cream ground on the left and a speckled black and beige on the right. Superimposed on them is a half circle with five spokes (resembling a hand) joining together and extending outwards. The second form in speckled black and cream is surrounded by a large thick black border and has an acute rectangle in cream in the centre. Stylistically these collages are similar to other gouaches and collages which she produced during this period.106 They are pure abstraction.
Gray had studied sculpture in both London and Paris and in her archive sketches for sculptural pieces and a number of sculptural heads remain. However, it is difficult to place Gray into the canon of twentieth- century sculpture because so few known examples of her work survive. At the end of 1903 or the beginning of 1904 Gray wrote to Auguste Rodin. From the letters that remain she visited the renowned sculptor at Meudon, greatly appreciative of the time they spent together, and subsequently she purchased a small bronze of La Danaïde.107 Gray’s friend Kathleen Bruce went on to study with Rodin and became a successful sculptor in her own right. Rodin sparked the flame of modern sculpture, and students flocked to his studio to meet or study under his tutelage. His work was drenched in pools of light and shadow, and he openly undermined the classical movement by allowing his figures to intrude into the viewer’s real space.
The emergence of modern sculpture between 1906 and 1913 took place almost entirely in Paris. From 1913 other movements and forces began to emerge against the hegemony of Paris. Gray’s work focuses on three movements which influenced her – Cubism, Futurism and the Russian avant-garde – and the work of a number of sculptors, whom she knew, inspired her developments.
From 1906-1916 in the world of sculpture the human form was liberated and a new vocabulary began to be created. There was a block-like archetype, and every sculpture was a solid mass that was modelled, constructed or created. Space penetrated sculpture, and hollow space was treated with equal validity. New subject matter such as still lifes appeared and new media such as metal, glass, plaster, cardboard and wire were all being used. From the moment Gray had arrived in Paris she was exposed to the debates over French colonial policy in Africa that took place in 1905-6 and the resulting outcry of anticolonial opposition from socialists and anarchists at that time. Two representations of African art appeared in modernist culture of the time. The first came from French West Africa with stories appearing in the press of sacrifice, witchcraft, animism and fetishism which created a mystical, almost romanticised, view of native African culture. The second came from the French and Belgian Congos with the destruction of tribal life through white colonists. Since the end of the nineteenth century pre-historic, African and Oceanic art were being explored as new sources for sculpture. Gray’s sculpture developed directly from these sources and a key aspect of Gray’s sculpture was the discovery of tribal art. Artists began addressing anew the aesthetic qualities of the ethnographic collections in the museums of London, Paris, Dresden and Berlin. The rhythmic proportions of African wooden sculptures standing firmly on legs, set parallel and slightly bent at the knee, offered an alternative to classical contraposto.
Gray was also primarily inspired by a number of Cubist sculptors, notably Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Chana Orloff (1888-1968), Joseph Csáky (1888-1971) and Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). She also had a number of publications directly relating to their work notably ‘Lipchitz’ by Maurice Raynal, in Art d’Aujourd’hui, 1920 and an exhibition catalogue of Ossip Zadkine by André de Ridder from the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels in January 1933.108
Originally from Smolensk, Zadkine had come to Paris in 1909 after firstly studying at the London Polytechnic School of Arts and Crafts. Gray was introduced to Zadkine by Chana Orloff, another Russian, who later exhibited in Jean Désert. By nature he was not an Analytical Cubist but more a sculptor of elementary forms. He has been described as the ‘only genuine wood sculptor’ of the Classical Modernist period.109 From early in his career Zadkine’s approach was to animate and dominate his material, be it wood, stone or marble. During his ‘African’ phase the critic André de Ridder stated that it was as though Zadkine went directly into the forest and sculpted straight from a tree trunk. From this period his work evolved, rejecting popular, African and primitive art, and after a trip to Greece his work entered a long Cubist phase. Zadkine modelled his Cubist figures with short legs, long torsos and large heads according to African proportions. Though his work became monumental in size they maintained a simple and passionate sensibility, whilst demonstrating supple movement and harmony.110 Gesture was just as important as sentiment and movement.111 Zadkine emphasised the importance of light by manipulating his forms through the use of concave and convex lines, a regime of high and low reliefs, and through the many hollows and bumps that play with light and shade. Ridder writes that it is ‘the simultaneous disassociation of form and light which leads to a piece’s emancipation’.112 By the 1920s he moved from Cubist expressions to a more curvilinear, organic art, yet borrowed the Cubist freedom of combining viewpoints and off-setting convex forms with concave. During the 1930s his work entered an agile, Baroque phase where his sculptures were monumental in size.
Gray liked Zadkine’s work; however their rapport was distant and somewhat tentative, as Zadkine never mentions Gray in his autobiography, or the fact that he exhibited extensively at Gray’s gallery Jean Désert. His work frequently appears in the photographs of the furniture installations which Gray took at Jean Désert. She owned a still-life photograph taken by photographer Marc Vaux (1895-1971) in 1922 of one of Zadkine’s sculptural heads.113 In 1926 Gray also purchased a sculptural head with rouge painted lips for her collection. This head was lent to an exhibition in Brussels in 1933, and Zadkine sent Gray a catalogue with the inscription ‘To Miss E. Gray in remembrance, Jan 1933’, but he never signed it.114 Gray recommended Ossip Zadkine’s work to Albert Boeken (1891-1951), De Stijl writer and critic, when he came to visit her in Paris. During World War II Zadkine departed for America where he taught in New York, but returned to Paris in 1945. They remained in contact and he came and visited her in her house in the South of France. He died in 1967.
Gray also knew Amedeo Modigliani through Orloff. The Italian painter and sculptor, moved to Paris in 1906 where he attended the Académie Julian. After receiving critical acclaim early in his career, his dissolute lifestyle and consumption of alcohol and drugs took their toll on his health. What appealed to Modigliani in relation to African sculpture was its stylisation and sophistication. The Heads, made from limestone, which he created in 1909-1914, were directly inspired by African tribal masks with their extreme elongation, smooth roundness, graphic scoring, narrow bridged noses and isolated mouths. The masks are expressionless, reduced to symmetrical axiality, and strengthened by a vertical rhythm.
Chana Orloff and Gray had many friends in common. Orloff, born in the Ukraine, came to Paris via Palestine in 1910, intending to train as a dressmaker, but by 1913 was producing prints and sculpture and was exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne. She designed the letterhead for the notepaper for Gray’s gallery Jean Désert. In the 1920s, widowed and with a young son, she enjoyed immense critical success. She sculpted portraits of architects Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) and
