Eileen Gray: Reclaiming the Modernist Interior
Modernist philosophy would seem to argue that man and culture must constantly make an effort to improve upon itself, locked in a state of progress and improvement. Nevertheless, we tend to dwell on the great modernist designers of decades past, contradicting their stated goal of future utopias with the dogma of the heroic individual. Modernism of the early 20th pursues certainty and clarity, and the ability of an individual to identify the object in it’s totality, and so, we also attempt to understand modernist designers in totality. Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) critiques this desired totality of view, designing modernist spaces with ambiguity, privacy, and interiority. Avoiding clarity to the visitor or viewer, she instead relies on sensation and pleasure validate the occupant’s domestic existence and interior. This makes it quite impossible to give the impression of understanding Gray. She hid a great deal of herself from the media and therefore from history, only showing intentionally crafted glimpses into her interior of thought and expression, just as she does with her architecture. Her works allowed to decay, irreversibly altered by vandalism, war, and preservation as museums, opportunities to gain understanding through sensuality as intended are lost. Without the intrusive gaze available to identify Gray as either an object or individual, we are left with the imagined bodily experience of her lived experience and interiority as queer woman, designer, and human being.
“Woman designer” presents something of an oxymoron. According to patriarchal myth, the woman does not “design.” To design implies intention, intelligence, and rational applied to the invention of an object with functional and aesthetic form. There is an assumption that there is a perfect version of a designed object, that the designer must strive to continually improve in pursuit of this ideal in order to contribute to the progression of culture. The woman, however, as a static idea, cannot engage with this pursuit. In her article “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design,” Cheryl Buckley writes that, “Even women designers, who through the design process transform nature into culture, are tied to their biology by patriarchal ideology, which defines their design skills as a product of their sex — as natural or innate.” (5) This idea of a “natural” ability, according to Buckley, devalues the designs of woman. Her work— textiles, dressmaking, pottery, and decoration of the interior— is assumed to be the work of instinct, and is therefore not a contribution to culture.
I do think that Buckley’s use of “culture” in her argument requires some more examination. While the woman’s individual design does not constitute high culture according to critics and academia, it is studied under the pretext of social culture, or anthropology. Her work has a lasting impression on what we picture of an era or location. The default household and costume of the day set a scene for whichever historical figures act within them. This set dressing is collectively sourced from social patterns— the design of a vase, the cut of a dress, and the pattern of a rug are all averages, selected by an unnamed woman from a library of acceptable options. This creates a sense that women’s design is simply a natural aspect of the man’s environment. He does not compliment a forest for it’s trees, so he does not acknowledge the woman for her design. He might appreciate its beauty upon perception, but this a universal constant within the social environment. In contrast, he has a complete blind spot for the social origins of male designs. Because he only considers “formal arrangement of elements,” “The design is thereby isolated from its material origins and function, and if it conforms to dominant definitions of "good" design, it and its designer are obvious candidates for the history books.” (Buckley 10) Even if a man designs a an object according to a socially defined style (such as “Art Nouveau,” “Arts and Crafts,” or “Modernist”), it is often assumed to be either an intentional progression of the style towards some evolved state, if not a critique or commentary. If it fails to do either, it is “derivative,” and therefore a failure of the designer to establish his identity as an individual.
Depending on the author, Eileen Gray can be represented according to the narrative of instinct— a singular feminine phenomenon, raised to greatness by association with her male contemporaries, particularly her romantic partner Jean Badovici. For example, Dorothy Walker’s 1999 article “L’Art de Vivre: The Designs of Eileen Gray” reads, “Eileen Gray's designs, however, show a more personal, feminine concern for practical use than those of her male contemporaries,”(122) attributing her consideration of details like built in storage space and swiveling nightstand trays to some learned or innate womanly mastery over the domestic sphere. Contradicting this is the Walker’s later proclamation that “her designs invariably included rooms for the chauffeur and housekeeper; she may have worked all her life but not at house work!” followed by the almost secretive parenthetical tidbit, “(In fact, she had the same housekeeper, Louise, from the 1920s until her death in 1976.)” (124)
When her design innovations cannot be attributed to instinct, and do, in fact, possess undeniable theoretical consideration, they cannot exist without the influence of a man. As found in Joseph Rykwert’s 1971 article “Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior, 1926,” “In this house at Roquebrune Eileen Gray’s previous work is eclipsed and transformed, purged of any Art Deco velleities. How much this is due to Badovici's influence is now difficult to tell; certainly he had a familiarity with all the latest developments of the modern movement which Eileen Gray herself probably lacked.” (68) The “art deco velleities” he refers to are critical material features of her early work, which would go on to influence her critique of purist modern architecture. His title alone reveals what he considers valuable work, as the “Interior” he refers to is her design for Badovici’s studio apartment, implying that her work both before and after his presence were irrelevant. It excludes her installation “Boudoir de Monte Carlo,” which is decidedly an interior, as well as her successful furniture design business Jean Desért and its contribution to interiors such as Paul Ruaud’s “Glass Salon.” It also dismisses her work in lacquer, such as “Brick Screen,” despite having clear influence her later interest in mystery and permeability. Of course, lacquer, as a foreign (Japanese, at least in Gray’s study of the material) and a decidedly decorative and useless material, can be safely relocated to the unexamined history of craft.
Nevertheless, Gray’s presence as a noted figure in the history of design, while largely unexamined, implies that she has overcome these barriers and successfully established herself as an individual. Her life and theory certainly contribute to (and complicate) this identity, but she only qualifies for acknowledgment because of her work meets certain qualifiers. First, through Jean Désert (both as a storefront and an implied pseudonym), she introduces her design to the marketplace. This grants her work inherent value according to capitalism, by allowing objects to be bought and sold rather than a solely domestic product. (Buckley 5) Within the modernist moral structure, this grants her the additional virtue of productivity, and the appearance of attempting to better herself as an individual through accumulated wealth. Her interest in mass production accentuates this with the implication that she has a desire to make her design somewhat widespread within society, giving it a place within the ever-improving cultural modernity. Second, she legitimizes herself among male designers through her success in architecture. Perhaps partially due to it’s association with precision and engineering, the correlation between architecture and masculinity was deeply ingrained. At the point she was working, Walter Gropius prohibited women from studying architecture in the Bauhaus, and her only female contemporaries associated modernist architecture were Charlotte Perriand and Lilly Reich. Both, of course, tend to be overshadowed by their more famous male collaborators, Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe. (Rault 131) Not only does this illustrate a certain level of gumption that indicates the heroic character of the modern individual, it also demonstrates her mind’s capability for celebrated feats of rational design. By apparently mastering every element from furniture design, interior design, and architectural design, she establishes absolute control over the spaces she constructs. She can no longer be characterized as consumer, since she has produced every element of the home.
Further separating her from the feminine decorative default is her rejection of the design conventions of social culture, to the point of perversity. Her installation “Boudoir de Monte Carlo”, for example, mixes modernist machine-produced interior with luxurious and sensual materiality reminiscent of the late 19th century, to much critical distress. According to Jasmine Rault in Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity:
"The mixed aesthetics… evoked such bewildered responses from her reviewers because they accommodate the disquieting and faintly perverse elements by the start of the twentieth century were firmly associated with the pathologically degenerate, sick and sickening people that modern architecture was designed to inoculate its reformed subjects against. That is… they provided in some way recognizably modern spaces for subjects that modern architecture and design had recognized as pathological threats to their reformed occupants." (33)
“Pathological” is repeated here in reference to the conflation of mental health and the physical toll of modernity, but the idea of obsessive or compulsive degeneracy is also interesting. Either by disease or by nature, it implies that the degenerate has contracted his perversity through no obvious fault of his own. However, it also implies agency through action— the degenerate might do anything, because he has no inhibitions. The boudoir as an implicitly feminine space is an unusual setting for Gray, who generally avoided gendered terms and construction. However, “Boudoir de Monte Carlo” is considered theatrical, more of a set than something intended for use. As described by Caroline Constant in “E. 1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray, “[Gray] subordinated the object qualities of her furnishings to the ambiance of the whole, which she directed toward enhancing the room’s experiential character as lived and felt rather than conceptualized.” The disturbing decadence and implication of “character” implies a hypothetical female degenerate who decorated the space in such a manner, and who might use her agency as a degenerate to act contrary to the morals of the modern woman.
“Degeneracy” as Rault uses it does not simply imply sickness and immorality, but a decadence and indulgence associated with male homosexual identity. (50) While I follow her logic, this connection involves assumed immorality of homosexuality which, in the context of unspiritual modernity, requires more examination. She implies her reasoning by describing the prescribed treatment of, “…the house-tool, purged and whitewashed, invested with the power to ensure the healthy body— industrially and sexually productive and designed in contrast to the fruitless, decadent, primitive, lounging body that threatened the future of the family and the nation.” (44) “Sexually productive” is clearly the connection here, with a sort of parallel to a Catholic understanding of pleasure, in that it is only indulged with the goal of progressing culture through the bearing of children. However, we encounter a notable contradiction in Le Corbusier. Rault describes his work as, “designed to reawaken the heroic modern man and drive out the lounging, orgiastic perverts….” And yet, his lifelong fetish of Algerian women, described by Beatriz Colomina, in “War on Architecture: E.1027,” drove him to obsessively and repeatedly copy and modify Delacroix’s Femmes d’Algiers, never committing to a final composition. (28)
This is, ostensibly, an indulgent and lust-fueled waste of time, echoing a twisted and heterosexual version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Barring hypocrisy, however, there is still a sort of logical consistency to his behavior, despite being deeply and irredeemably wrong. The immorality of the modern homosexual does not stem from simply lust or desire, but in the passion and romance and the energy it consumes. Both participants in the relationship qualify as male individuals, and are therefore both exercise agency towards continuing the relationship, at the risk of being ostracized. They sacrifice their individuality, wasting it on intimate connection. This is not to ignore hook-up culture— seeking out a reciprocating partner as a homosexual is simply a lot of work. Because the myth of capitalistic modernity implies that the individual is unaffected by social class, and both participants are male individuals, there is no power dynamic which grants either man an assumed right to pleasure. In contrast, women are not individuals. At worst, they are objects. According to modernism, objects must be undecorated and highly functional. To “undecorate” a woman— to view and depict her in the nude— is to improve her function of the facilitation of male pleasure. Sentimentality for the woman object, removed of her decoration and distinguishing features, is contradictory to the universal modernist morality.
Modernism considers decoration, and by extension, women’s design, to be an oppressive force that impedes the individual. The mind must be able to express itself fully, without conforming the body to its material surroundings. To be confronted with decoration is to be confronted with existing social convention, and what’s more, the tastes and actions of a woman. Instead, she is placed in a home devoid of decorations, including of herself. She is expected to be viewed plainly, in totality, and in essence. As Rault writes, “Le Corbusier’s writings are driven by visual fantasy, a desire for not just healthy bodies but visible bodies, stripped of degenerate ornamentation and exposed to view.” (105) This visibility is created by the white wall, which, along with the rest of the house, must remain spotless. To the woman, hygienic purity is a threat, both of domestic labor and against degenerate deviancy: intimacy, indulgence, and rest. Gray’s construction of E.1027 explicitly challenges the priority of total clarity. Rather, “Gray admits the desire of the eye, but is less interested in it’s satisfaction than in it’s obstruction or deflection.” She does not deny pleasure of the eye, but engages it by creating ambiguity rather than eliminating it. E.1027 indulges in privacy through partial walls, screens, and shutters. Rooms are intentionally kept clearly separate from each other, with exits in each one, allowing one to navigate the house unobserved. Even in the entryway, view into the living room is blocked, requiring a visitor to be invited in before casting his gaze. (Rault 99) Because the intrusive male gaze relegates her to object and body, she requires privacy and spatially distinct independence to experience the agency and freedom of the individual.
E.1027 explores privacy and independence in the context of assumed entertainment, visitors, and collaborators. The bodily experience of privacy is important here, and Gray recognizes this, going so far as to create diagrams indicating the likely movement and paths of both the occupants and the housekeepers (Constant 275). Rather than using moving walls to redefine space around the body as with Gerrit Rietveld’s and Truus Schröder’s Schöderhuis, or attempting to create an entirely pure space limitless space as Le Corbusier does, E.1027 instead encourages the body to move according to its needs. Agency is granted to the person, who may join or retreat from the social function as needed, and whose location and body becomes ambiguous to viewers upon doing so. E.1027 specifically accommodates and makes room for the eye of the visitor. It entertains it with glimpses into private spaces, as likely to invite someone deeper into the space of intimacy as it is to grant the occupant privacy and respite. Unfortunately, to Le Corbusier, this ambiguity represented an opportunity to bring this intimacy into the realm of clarity. Through his murals, painted between 1937 and 1939, he inserts his individualist gaze into the space of the ambiguous body, attempting to make it known. This impulse, a fetishistic desire to occupy, destroy, and document the violation of the domestic sphere, in part validates Gray’s theory. There is a possibility for desire in the ambiguous, hidden, and intimate interior. While the intruding individual sees it as an opportunity to reveal and make visible, another person might find an opportunity to explore and engage. Gray had created a space where a human could exist as simultaneous body and mind, interacting as a private individual.
Private individual, however, is another oxymoron. To be “individual” is to intentionally separate and distinguish oneself from the social default, and to be perceived as a unique and extraordinary identity. In privacy, there is no social reference for the uniqueness of a person. While she embraces building homes for the individual human being and, through her totality of control over her designs, establishes her as an individual in the intellectual sense, Gray’s rejection of media and modern communication prevent her from being easily compared to her contemporaries. While her lack of publicity after the late 20’s is generally described as a tragic effect of her shyness, Rault proposes that it is, “no simple coincidence that Gray’s position in mass communication at the time when both the new architecture and the new woman were stripped of their ambiguities and reductively defined through their unprecedented engagement with media.” (127) Her reclusively reflected a desire to not be defined according to her architectural style or social identity, coinciding with both Modernism’s success in advertising for commercial mass production and the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall for her lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Rault connects Hall’s trial and the resulting exposure to the media with the loss of ambiguity in the masculine new woman fashion, “transforming the image of Hall from chic, fashionably skirt-suited new woman to the picture of deviant and criminal mannish lesbian.” (116) While “new woman” had previously been a method of communicating the desire to be viewed as an individual, and perhaps a quiet indication to other women familiar with the Parisian lesbian salon of Natalie Barney, the ambiguity of this indication had held both safety and agency. Losing it’s ambiguity in the contrast of the media spotlight, the lesbian loses any individualist allure her masculine appearance may have granted her. While the homosexual man sacrifices his place as a modern individual through his indulgence, the lesbian is exposed as a woman masquerading as a free-thinking individual. Any unique genius she might have possessed is reduced to a part of this facade, losing all validity in the eyes of the modern man.
Gray’s Tempe á Pailla, constructed on an isolated plot of land in Castaller shortly after E.1027’s completion, presents a possible solution to the problem of the intrusive gaze. Rault describes the numerous physical barriers to fully perceive the house, writing, “Tempe a Pailla, even more so than E.1027, is constructed towards privacy and visual ambiguity, so that any perspective or image of the house will always obstruct another. frustrating one’s desire for a reductive total view….” (137) Built into a rugged stone terrace, all views of the white concrete walls are carefully interrupted by natural obstacles— if not the stone walls, then the surrounding unsculpted foliage, as well as the sheer size of the plot of land. While both Rault and Joseph Rykwert point out the effect of privacy, the natural form these barriers take (also present with E.1027’s scenic location, to a lesser extent) seems like a critical aspect of their effectiveness from the perspective of the recluse. Even the blank white wall— perhaps especially so— is deeply penetrable to the gaze, despite it’s apparent opacity. If a house is constructed for an individual, it necessarily reflects that individual. The viewer sees an unobstructed white wall, and is made aware of the modern heroic individual on the other side. Typically, this is part of the desired effect. By cultivating natural barriers, however, Gray grants the individual refuge in the unquestioned environment of her viewer. She suggests that reason, as a human trait, rises naturally from essence. Further, by indulging in the decadence of materiality in the interior, she defends the ambiguous intimate as an extension of the natural self, rather than condemning it to degeneracy.
Even alone in the interior of Tempe á Pailla, Gray grants the occupant this opportunity to exist in ambiguity through similar strategies as seen in E.1027, incorporating partial screens and slatted shutters, dropped ceilings, and seemingly unnecessary barriers obstructing the otherwise open layout. However, in contrast to the sensual rugs, throws, and cushions of E.1027, Tempe á Pailla appears relatively bare, indicating a space for a body at work rather than at rest. Without the tactile feedback of her usual multiplicity of textiles and surfaces, the body instead relies on the “heightened haptic awareness of prolonged threshold spaces” (Rault 142), which Caroline Constant connects to theatrical theory. In particular, “…[Adolf] Appia’s notion that because the body in motion required obstacles to enhance self-expression, the stage set should facilitate points of mutual contact, a principle that applies equally to Gray’s furnishings and her architecture.” (276) Sheltered from the gaze and deprived of materiality, the body is only verified in it’s location and actuality by contact with obstacles.The occupant chooses whether or not to self-express or self-actualize through their ability to either consciously move through the space untouched, or interact with it’s physicality. The single space where she appears to indulge in multiplicity, even chaos, is her workspace in the study. Her photographs show her desk backed by a corkboard, pinned with layered and wrinkled notes and papers. To the left, a highly textured abstract painting leans against the wall atop a radiator. While not unclean, the desk surface has clutter. Stacked binders and papers are visible on the right edge of the image, as well as on the low shelf beneath the radiator, which also holds a small decorative pot or vase.
This specific limited allowance of material— paper, cork, and clay— makes an important claim about the role of sensuality and decadence in the life of the individual. It argues that not only is sensuality valuable, but that it is productive. It validates the allowance of interior intimacy in the strict qualifications of the heroic modern individual, therefore greatly expanding the variation of human existence that fulfills those qualifications. The woman, whose assumed sphere is the domestic intimate, suddenly has a space where she can exercise individual thought. Similarly, the male degenerate is no longer wasting any potential for productivity through his indulgence, and the lesbian’s masculine appearance becomes irrelevant to her interior state. As mentioned, Rault compares Gray’s work to the plot of Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, where outcast lesbian Stephen Gordon works to build a physical home for herself and her lover “that will shelter her private tastes, intimacies, and desires— a house that will respond to her individual psychological reality and not the ‘terrible, pitiless and deeply accusing eyes’ that has banished her.” (106) According to purist modernism, the degenerate— deemed unhygienic against the stark contrast of the modernist interior— must be denied respite from the view, as all spaces are expected to show something in it’s totality. Sheltering the degenerate and queer decadence within both the rationality of the modern interior as well as the innate constant of the natural world constructs a space where intimacy is validated as both an extension of the modern rational mind and an aspect of innate animal self, blurring the assumed progressive priorities of modernity.
Empowered by the constraint of isolation, Gray uses sensation and bodily experience to imbue the human being with the agency lost in the identifying gaze. She applies her privilege of solitude to restore the interior, both spacial and psychological. While purist hygienic values use the medicine of architecture to elevate the degenerate to a state of idealistic morality, her allowance for ambiguity suggests healing to restore a particular person to their natural state, whatever that may be. I do wonder whether there is an opportunity to evoke a similar effect without employing Gray’s emphasis on individualized architecture. Like many of her contemporaries, she comes from a privileged upbringing with a sizable inheritance, granting her considerable freedom compared to the average woman of her day, or, for example, any young person dealing with the current American housing crisis. I wonder if the universalist values of early Dutch explorations into social housing (the work of J.J.P Oud comes to mind) could feasibly be applied alongside Gray’s ambiguity of form and surface, enabling a less antisocial and individualist introspection.
As a brief note before I make my concluding remarks, I suspect that Gray’s interest in ambiguous spaces, domestic privacy, and ambiguity of light might have been far more influenced by her Japanese lacquer instructor, Seizo Sugawara, than any sources I have consulted seem to give credit to. (O’Reilly 43) Walker writes that, “her knowledge and expertise in the design and fabrication of Japanese lacquer objects and her empathy with the simplicity and spiritual quality of traditional lapanese design were hugely influential in introducing these characteristics into European design of the 1920s and ‘30s,” and that she is “considered one of the great lacquer artists of all time,” but no further exploration is given other than an implication that her patience and sensitivity (femininity) were what granted her such master. (119) I do not intend to imply any Japanese essentialism in the process, on the contrary, I am interested in the specific works and innovations of designers and schools of design which are implied to be influential to Gray through references to De Stijl. I also find it amusing and potentially telling that Badovici is given so much credit for her success, while Sugawara— a true mentor figure— is largely ignored. I suspect a Western bias towards viewing Eastern design as some mass of influential character, compounded by a cultural inclination towards communalism, has made it easy to ignore the influence of Sugawara and other artists collected by the Western avant-garde. However, I have yet to read Caroline Constant’s full biography of Eileen Gray, or Peter Adam’s earlier version, and one of them may well have beat me to it.
Despite her apparent acceptance into architectural and design canon, Gray, as a female degenerate, is denied the full privileges of the individual associated with an artist’s recognition. She does not have the individual’s agency of external self representation, nor is she granted the power of the penetrative gaze. Her defining Le Corbusier’s murals as vandalism asserts no meaning over them, despite their presence in her home. In order to preserve her deviant self actualization, she retreats into solitude, protecting herself from external identification with physical barriers and implied validity. Rather than allow herself to be identified, she allows her bodily presence in the space to confirm her internal sense of self, and clings to sensual materiality as a necessary confirmation that the full self— in it’s totality— is sheltered. Her self is confirmed by the bodily experience of isolation.
While Modernism’s white wall argues that it does not assert meaning onto the individual, Gray argues that it only does so at the expense of the non-individual, the decorative presence of the designed interior. The woman is expected to maintain this environment, to render it pleasing to the male eye, yet unobtrusive, as she must not assert herself as an individual transcending the social default beyond possessing “good taste.” Yet, in it’s abolishment, she loses what little agency of self representation she does have. However, the solution is not to return to the unrecognized environmental design of the woman. She must make her design must be unavoidably noticeable, her hand clear in each decision. By obstructing the gaze, and impeding penetration, she dissolves the dynamic of viewer and object, leaving her with the ability to cultivate her interior as she wishes.
Works Cited
Buckley, Cheryl. “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design.” Design Issues, vol. 3, no. 2, 1986, pp. 3–14. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1511480. Accessed 19 Dec. 2024.
Colomina, Beatriz. “War on Architecture: E.1027.” Assemblage, no. 20, 1993, pp. 28–29. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3181684. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
Constant, Caroline. “E. 1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 53, no. 3, 1994, pp. 265–79. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/990937. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
O’Reilly, Patricia. “FURNITURE AS ART: The Work of Eileen Gray.” History Ireland, vol. 18, no. 3, 2010, pp. 42–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40664797. Accessed 21 Dec. 2024.
Rault, Jasmine. Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In. Routledge, 2017.
Rykwert, Joseph. “Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior, 1926-1933.” Perspecta, vol. 13/14, 1971, pp. 67–73. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1566971. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
Walker, Dorothy. “L’Art de Vivre: The Designs of Eileen Gray (1878-1976).” Irish Arts Review Yearbook, vol. 15, 1999, pp. 118–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493052. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.