who designed Orloff’s studio, and painters Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. Her work was imbued with a quiet grace and sensuality. Her early works retain their solid core, yet geometric angles and hollows begin to break the surface. Her elongated figures with their length distortion served to consolidate and heighten emotional expression.
Hungarian Joseph Csáky developed and perfected a streamlined Synthetic Cubism in his sculpture. Csáky’s figures contained rhythmic movements, combined in harmonic, organic, angular forms. The work of Jacques Lipchitz who came from Lithuania completely identifies with Cubism and his unruly figures have a taut angularity in their structure. Lipchitz interwove rhizomatic forms into the figures which drew the surrounding space into the figures themselves. With developments into a more planar, flatly composed Cubist sculpture developing from 1917, his style inherently changed. By 1925 Lipchitz turned away from Cubism, seeking more organic forms filled with concentrated energy. During and after the war Lipchitz’s style was affected by the Jewish persecution. However, unlike the other sculptors who influenced Gray, he revisited Cubism for a second time in his career, where he explored the flow of space into volume.
3.31 Drawing of an abstract sculpture, 1920s, paper, pencil © NMI
Gray did a series of three sketches for an abstract sculpture. Each drawing consists of these abstract Cubic block forms and each is a play on form and space. She has noted that it was to be made from metal wire and wood blocks.115 She never realised the sculpture. The sketches recall the work of Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) who arrived in Paris in 1908. From 1910 he developed his own style of simple, stereometrical, physical volumes in sculpture by creating upwardly spiralling figures. These were created through wedges, acute angles and breaks between form and space. Gray in her drawings addresses the same themes as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Csáky, Orloff and Zadkine, looking at the interaction between volume and space, creating juxtaposition between the two while still producing expressive, lyrical and dynamic forms. It is unknown if Gray ever realised sculptures from these drawings, but they confirm Gray’s interest in the rhythmic energies of volumetric masses and in expressive plastic art.
3.32 Sculptural head, 1920s, lava rock © NMI
3.33 Sculptural head, 1920s, cork © NMI
Of the three sculptural heads which remain from Gray’s oeuvre, two are made from cork and one from volcanic rock. Tête, circa 1929 is a facial sculpture made from a piece of volcanic rock which she found at Roquebrune on the seafront, on which Gray delicately marked the demarcations of facial features. Her choice of material gives the piece a very natural, organic feel.116 The two sculptural heads or masks are made from cork and directly relate to tribal art. Tête, 1920s is primitive, reflecting Gray’s interest, along with Modigliani, in African tribal masks from the West African Baule and Guro tribes and Picasso’s interest in Iberian sculpture. Eileen Gray created this tribal-like mask when she was in the South of France.117 It also coincides with the numerous African influences which were appearing in her lacquer work, especially in several furniture commissions completed for Jacques Doucet and Mme Mathieu-Lévy and in her carpet designs. The other sculptural head Gray made during the 1940s was a large sculptural mask of African style, again in the mode of Modigliani, made from cork.118 She used rubber washers for the eyes and tinted metallic paper to create other facial features. She originally painted it silver and then tinted it grey all over.
3.34 Sculptural head, 1940s, cork, paper, rubber © NMI
Throughout her life Gray never stopped producing artwork. She knew so many artists during her lifetime, but her debilitating shyness thwarted many opportunities to expand on these friendships, attend social occasions or make new acquaintances. In the later years of her life she had regrets, saying that she wished to have known better the artists Picasso, Léger, Miró, Rouault and Modigliani.119 Her letters reveal associations with some painters which until now were unknown. Gray met prominent Mexican painters Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and his wife Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) in the spring of 1934 when she travelled to Mexico by boat with Jean Badovici. She had visited Acapulco and Oaxaca and while in Mexico City she had lunch with Rivera and Kahlo. Rivera arrived in Europe in 1907, firstly to study in Madrid, and from there went to Paris to live and work in Montparnasse, where he remained until 1920. He became very good friends with Amedeo Modigliani and Chana Orloff. Despite such introductions Gray was left unimpressed with both his work and the work of José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949).120
Gray remained acutely aware of the changes occurring in the contemporary art movements of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. However, she had grave concerns.
No one seems to have any imagination, the current has deviated to science, computers, (ordinateurs) and the new generation are wildly realistic though they have never thought of grappling with the most obvious problems. It is obvious that, as the wheel turns now so quickly, all institutions need profound reforms in their structure and the old birds are always reluctant when it comes to any change.121
With the decline in easel painting, with an increase in the use of acrylic instead of oil paint, and the introduction of abstract painting where there was deliberately no meaning to what one painted, Gray felt that contemporary art had lost its identity.122 To her it was stagnant, in comparison to the socially and politically motivated avant-garde art movements at the turn of the century. Minimalist and Post-painterly Abstract art just simply hypnotised its audience ‘like in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes’.123 Critical of the extravagance of new American art – notably Pop and Op Art – Gray wrote, ‘Painting seems to be going through a bad patch... Pop Art and now Pop-optics are the latest thing in England, but here the critics who were never capable of understanding abstract art have tried their best to kill it and now painters are totally divided, some going on with more or less the same things and others attempting what they think is a new figuration but without sincerity; the result is frankly mediocre’.124 She questioned if art could recover from the Pop and Geo-Pop movements.125 In Gray’s opinion Pop Art figurative painting was pretentious as she described it full of ‘pompiérisme’.126
Gray was interested in the work of a number of contemporary artists; Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985),127 Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975),128 Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Bernard Buffet (1928-1999)129 and Frank Stella (b. 1936). However, she criticised Stella’s infamous painting Hyena Stomp, 1962 and the Irregular Polygon series.130
