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I remember so vividly and will always treasure

the Saint Laurent-Bergé sale.

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It was one of the exceptional,

unrepeatable events of my auction career.

The 24th of February, 2009.

I will never forget that date.

You know, the crowds queued for hours outside

for a glimpse of these works.

When we reached the moment of presenting

the "Dragons" armchair,

we knew there was gonna be a battle for it.

So when the chair came up,

I had seen it,

I had a look at it, like, up close,

and literally it's-- it's small,

it's a very voluptuous chair,

it's not a beautiful chair by any means,

but it is, in my personal opinion,

perfectly an example of the designer who created it.

It's completely unique, it's rather eccentric.

We had set a tentative estimate.

The published estimate was, if I remember rightly,

two and a half to three and a half million euros.

But already we'd been saying to clients

that that would surely be left behind.

Several players were trying to attract attention

through those first few millions,

and then it became a battle

between two determined individuals.

I went to Paris to the Saint Laurent sale,

and you were on the phone with me, and, um,

five million came, five million--it went on,

and he thought I was kidding.

Cheska Vallois towards the front of the room;

a colleague on the telephone executing a bid

for a client that remains anonymous

towards the back of the room.

There was a moment,

was it around ten and a half million,

thereabouts I seem to remember,

where our telephone bidder seemed to hesitate.

I think there was a gasp in the audience, if I remember,

by the time that it arrived to the ten million mark.

There was a dialogue on the phone,

there was a pause, and we thought,

"Well, already we have reached a breathtaking record price

for this work and for the field."

But then he came back in the bidding

until we reached this breathtaking price

of nineteen and a half million euros hammer.

Said, "That is impossible,"

and we lost it, we were so sure

that five million euros was going to buy that chair,

but it was really one of the highlights

of--of the history of this market, that sale.

-And Eileen Gray. -And Eileen Gray, absolutely.

I remember just sitting in the chair,

in the chair in the auction room thinking

not only was this--

this will probably never happen again in the world

in my lifetime in relation to Eileen Gray,

but then I kind of thought, "Oh, crikey,

is this going to be Gray's legacy?"

♪

Record prices,

blockbuster exhibitions,

the passion of collectors,

and the darling of tastemakers,

Eileen Gray matters more than ever.

♪

But just why she matters and how

is less obvious and well understood.

♪

Eileen Gray's work, in a sense,

is just a rolling experiment through the decades.

♪

She's anticipated things in the design world

which, at the moment,

designers are still striving to achieve.

It took me 20 years before I could really figure out

how to understand what it was

that was so interesting to me about her work.

It was the understanding that I think feminist theory

brought to thinking about architecture

that involved basically all the degrees of gray

in between black and white,

and I think it was those kinds of nuances

that is really what Gray's work was about.

She's categorized in many collections

as an Art Deco artist,

but she abhorred this.

Actually, she was never part of any...movement.

For instance, the Bauhaus or De Stijl.

You know, she was in her own category.

She was doing her own thing.

Gray didn't adhere to any one particular movement.

When you look at her work and you really examine her work,

at the full length, she was a chameleon,

and she did it with her architecture too.

Always true to herself

through phases where, if you took, for instance,

an exemplary piece from 1915 or '20

and an exemplary piece from 1930,

it might look like chalk and cheese.

You might think that these are

two different people, two different careers.

If one can say that Le Corbusier

is one of the fathers of Modernity,

then one can say that Eileen Gray

is one of the mothers of modernity.

I think that really,

what really probably, as a woman, um,

appealed to me a lot about Eileen Gray is

I think there were two women basically in this century

that totally understood that a piece of furniture

is not only a piece of furniture,

it's something which is related to the art of living

that has been changed so much, and it is for me Eileen Gray

and Charlotte Perriand.

Both really understand that a piece of furniture

is not only just a piece of furniture.

It has multiple functions regarding the way you live.

And I think that Eileen Gray's story

does matter...

...not just because of the extraordinary legacy

of works of art,

of truly thrilling, magical, inspirational

objects and designs,

but it matters as a human story,

and I think it is a fascinating story

of one person, one woman's determined journey

to stay, through the decades,

true to her muse, true to herself...

...and true to her changing times.

♪

Eileen Gray was born near Enniscorthy,

County Wexford, Ireland, in 1878.

The youngest of five children,

she spent her childhood between Ireland and London.

♪

Her mother had eloped at the age of 21

to marry a middle-class painter from Hazelgrun in Lancashire,

and caused quite a sensation

and a family scandal when this happened.

Gray was from an aristocratic background,

and she was of Anglo-Irish descent

on her mother's side, and her father was

a kind of free-spirited artist,

and I think she got a lot of her independence of thought

from that influence of her father,

and she certainly got the financial independence

to kind of pursue the life that she wanted

through her mother's inheritance.

In the archive, there is a very--

there's a large collection of family photographs.

She kept the two photographs of the family home

in Brownswood and Enniscorthy

pre-1895 and post-1896.

Her family had renovated their family house

into a kind of Victorian pile which she detested.

This very simple, unadorned Georgian structure

would be very paramount to her design ethic.

♪

In 1892,

after her parents separated,

her father preferring to live and paint

in Italy and Switzerland,

Gray's mother was persuaded by her titled son-in-law,

Henry Tufnell Campbell,

to assert an inheritance claim to the Barony of Gray,

an eminent peerage connected

to the Stuart royalty of Scotland.

Her application was approved

in Commons and by the House of Lords.

Along with a newsworthy change of family position,

Eileen gained the surname of Gray

and the right to style herself as "The Honourable,"

a title she refused to adopt.

In 1900, she went to the Paris exhibition

and was captivated by symbolism and Art Nouveau.

Her mother had brought her in 1900

after both her father

and her brother Lonsdale's death.

She had gone to Paris for the Exposition Universelle,

and at that stage,

it was literally, I think, for diversion,

but it opened up Gray much more so

to the world of the arts.

Returning from Paris,

Gray convinced her mother to allow her to study art.

She started her career

by studying drawing at the Slade School in London.

But it was a very Bohemian choice.

Women who attended the Slade School

were considered advanced women,

so it wasn't a very conventional choice

for her mother to agree to.

In 1902, Gray and her Slade classmates,

Jessie Gavin and Kathleen Bruce,

moved to Paris to pursue their studies,

enrolling at the Bohemian Ecole Colarossi.

"Les trois jolies anglaises," as they were known,

later transferred to the more formally organized

Académie Julian.

Kathleen Bruce, in her autobiography,

stated, using pseudonyms

for both Gray and for Jessie Gavin,

that there was an intimate relationship

between the two of them.

Gray's behavior,

especially with Jessie Gavin

at the Ecole Colarossi,

was...not considered conventional

to ladylike behavior at the time,

especially not of her class.

It will be another couple of years

before Gray moved to Paris.

In the meantime, Gray became fascinated by lacquer

and apprenticed herself to its technique.

♪

That literally had begun when she was in London

and she'd ended up in Dean Street,

and they were doing furniture restoration

on ancient Chinese and Japanese lacquer,

and she went in and she asked if she could observe,

and then asked if she could start learning.

Lacquer is a material that Eileen Gray was very fond of

and used in the early part of her career,

and when I speak of lacquer, I'm talking about Japanese

or Chinese lacquer, which is basically a resin

that's on the surface of a substrate,

and in this case, wood,

and it's a material that wasn't used, really,

beyond the 1920s.

I think the kind of layering of lacquer

and the kind of sensuous of the material

was really important to her.

In 1907,

Gray established her residence in Paris

where she would live for the next 70 years.

With the emergence of modernism,

she was on the ball, she went to exhibitions,

she read art journals, she was engaged in dialogue,

she knew about the avant-garde Dutch,

she knew about what was happening in Germany.

All of this informed her,

gave her a sense of-- of the zeitgeist,

for want of a better word,

to which she responded.

She encountered the lacquer work

of this man named Sugawara,

who had come to, from Japan,

to repair or restore the Japanese lacquer work

that was shown at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

She did all the lacquer work initially.

You need high humidity,

and lacquer takes 20 coats on each side.

She began, under tutelage of Seizo Sugawara,

initially working out of her bathroom

and then setting up,

when she had acquired the apartment in Rue Bonaparte,

that she set up just nearby a workshop.

He taught her how to use this lacquer technique.

In her journals that are in the Victoria and Albert Museum

at the National Art Library,

there's a list of the materials she used.

There's a very detailed, point-by-point process

that she was taught by this man,

and so we know that she was making

and using this technique,

but later she employed him,

and actually we think she had him on a retainer,

and he was helping her make and to fabricate

the furniture of her designs.

She was fascinated by the material

and by the effects you could get with it.

So she moved from lacquer into a decorative repertory

of designs,

and she moved into furniture making.

She could make lacquer on a larger scale

than the Japanese who were doing bowls

and small pieces.

This was her innovation,

and of course, it was a time

of great excitement in Paris.

Gray literally single-handedly

reintroduced contemporary furniture design

to the ancient mystical technique of lacquer.

She was the first designer to start doing it,

and then others followed suit.

It was a time of great many rich patrons

wanting to invest in modern design,

and Eileen, in a way, came into that stream.

Now, she attracted bourgeoisie clientele,

but there are also wonderful, very simple, unadorned cups,

plates, trays,

that were more quickly produced

that also survive,

and I think many people look at Gray

and see the exuberant lacquer designer and creator

rather than also looking at what she was trying to do

for the average, everyday man.

She was patronized by aristocrats,

like the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre

and the Comtesse de Noailles

and the great couturier and collector Jacques Doucet.

Visiting Eileen Gray

at her apartment in Rue Bonaparte

where she was initially working out of her bathroom,

he had seen her working on a screen called Le Destin,

and he subsequently purchased that screen for his collection.

♪

One of the first screens that we know that she did

was The Milky Way from about 1911 to 1912.

It only now exists in photograph,

and it had a figure running across a dark mountain

with a deep blue sky at the back

with a trail on its hair covered in mother of pearl.

She also had produced The Magician of the Night

in 1912, and Gray was the first lacquer artist

who really successfully achieved the color blue.

It's a secret recipe.

She never revealed

the actual properties that it did.

The first Eileen Gray piece I bought

was the abstract screen,

and I didn't really know it was Eileen Gray.

There was no documentation,

but the work was...breathtaking,

it was phenomenal, and it had only gone

through Eileen Gray through my friend.

The Munich Werkstatten exhibition

at the Salon d'Automne in 1910,

it forcefully argued in favor of socially responsible design.

Gray was inspired by the simplicity of this work.

In the meantime, she made exquisite pieces.

We are very pleased to have a sort of unknown table.

It was sold at the '72 Jacques Doucet sale

as anonymous.

It's a small end table,

lacquer with a sort of marble top.

The lacquer work

is sort of fish scale,

so we now firmly attribute it to Eileen Gray.

I think, as an artist, it first really comes

to fruition with her lacquer work

when you have a combination of figurative work

as well as the influence of contemporary art movements.

While in Morocco in 1907,

with her childhood friend Evelyn Wyld,

Gray learned weaving and dyeing wool

from local Arab women.

Her carpets were produced with Evelyn Wyld,

and they opened up an incredible workshop

in the Rue de Visconti

just near her apartment in the Rue Bonaparte, Paris,

and many were produced in homage

to the movements that inspired her,

and the workshop in the Rue de Visconti

had 12 women working for them.

They had four large looms, three small rooms,

and it was a very, very productive workshop

and continued right up until 1929.

And so all of this involvement in the French decorative arts

came out of that early phase of her life.

♪

After the war,

Gray returned to Paris eager to resume her work,

shocked by the devastation

but also exhilarated by the possibilities

of a world transformed.

♪

As Parisian life resumed, Gray's lacquer work

was once again sought by the fashionable world.

She also found inspiration of a more personal nature.

Bobbing her hair, Gray began an affair

with the famous chanteuse Marisa Damia.

Eileen Gray created the Siren chair for Damia.

It was literally the play

on the idea of the mythological figure

of the Sirens in Greek mythology

that, with their illustrious voice,

that they would enrapture sailors and bring them to shore.

At this stage, she was lacquer designer,

but was looking to go beyond just doing

individual pieces of work.

Through Doucet,

Gray was introduced to other clients

for whom she was able to integrate furniture,

decorative objects, and living spaces.

Her first significant commission

was to renovate a suite of rooms

for the millinery couturier Madame Mathieu-Levy.

The first was the Rue de Lota here in 1922,

and it was a whole extensive arrange

of lacquer work.

It was the first time that Gray had the chance

to work as an interior designer.

Though few images remain of the Rue de Lota apartment design,

the pieces she made are among her most exquisite.

♪

One of our most iconic pieces

is, of course, Eileen Gray's

Chaise Longue, or as the French would say,

Pirogue Chaise.

It's a dugout canoe shape

based on Micronesia, Melanesia,

the South Pacific islands.

But it was in the entry hall

that Gray made a dramatic advance.

♪

Madame Levy had employed Eileen Gray

to design an entrance hallway,

and in this entrance hallway, Eileen Gray created this design

of brick lacquer square.

The bricks came out perpendicular to the wall

and would act as an actual partition,

creating a pause before you went

into the opulence of the salon area.

And it was the departure point

where she made a separate movable screen,

and this is really where the lacquer screen,

brick screen, becomes sort of a movable wall, as it were.

You know, this was something

that you could create as a divider,

but it actually stems from that hallway.

I saw that first piece of Eileen Gray,

the Black Brick Screen.

It left me speechless.

♪

It was a complete unexpected wildcard.

It was a staggering object.

In 2002, I started the research for a paper

on Eileen Gray's brick screens.

These screens were supposedly made in the 1920s,

and we wanted to sort of determine

what the provenance really was for these screens.

Were they all made in the 1920s?

Were they restored? Were they fabricated?

In the end, what we discovered was

that we could create three categories.

One category was that the screen was made prior to 1930;

the second was that the screens were made by old bricks,

before 1930, but fabricated or assembled

in the 1970s, and then some screens

that were actually fully fabricated in the 1970s.

There was a study some years ago

by the conservator at the Museum of Modern Art

testing the samples of the material.

Ours was part of that test,

and according to the conservator's article,

Roger Griffith,

he believes ours is actually '70s.

In this collection is also a red lacquer screen.

It's probably the only red lacquer screen

that we know of.

She conceived of it early on,

but it wasn't really made into this lacquer screen

as it is today until 1973, still during her lifetime.

And these were things clearly that if she knew of them,

and these things were sold to private collections and museums,

then therefore that's enough evidence for me to state

they're authentic Eileen Gray screens.

Well, you know, let's talk to me,

I'm a collector, okay?

Uh, I...

The modern pieces are, of course, not natural lacquer.

That is not what, in my mind, where the value is.

I mean...

the natural lacquer was--which--which--

which is carcinogenic and it's illegal

except maybe not in the Orient,

is what I think that the...non-duplication,

you can't duplicate it.

The singular most inspirational piece

that has, for me, that has appeared

either consciously or subconsciously

in architectural and both design repertoires

is the block screen.

To this day, Eileen Gray's block screens

are manufactured under strict license

and to the highest specifications.

The brick screen is one of these examples

where there were quite a few variations made,

originally by Eileen,

and I somehow thought maybe--

maybe it's--it's not quite right

to produce, but it's so modern.

It's so modern that it's so up to date

that if you look at the brick screen

with its modularity and flexibility, et cetera,

you cannot just ignore it.

After such a long time of product development,

I'm very, very happy that I finally have it

in our collection.

It's limited to 75 pieces,

it's numbered,

it's very expensive,

but I think you have to decide

whether we want to have a piece of art

or you take yourself a big panel wall

which is--which is, in my opinion, a piece of art.

She was very ahead of her time in her choice of materials,

and I think that includes the lacquer brick screens,

you know, that she was interested in a material

that really dates from a different era,

and yet she's using it in a modernist period

to make modern objects

or objects that are still contemporary today.

It was a completely architectonic form

and literally was a precursor to her architecture.

Le Corbusier had advocated movable partition or walls

by the time he published his Five Points of Architecture,

and if you look at it, Gray was already, by 1922,

looking at this movable partition or wall.

At the 1923 Salon des Artistes Decorateurs,

Gray exhibited the Monte Carlo bedroom boudoir suite.

This is the first time the white block screen debuted

as a separate standalone screen.

The varied space also contained

other richly designed futuristic pieces.

The ensemble, though, was harshly criticized

by the French press.

They abhorred it, they hated it.

It was described as Caligari's room of horrors.

It was not well received,

but in fact it was that salon

that the Dutch group, De Stijl, loved,

and in fact she had five or six pages published

in a Dutch magazine because the Dutch architects

were so impressed with her work.

And they said,

"Eileen Gray occupies a center of the modern movement.

In all her tendencies, visions, and expressions,

she is modern."

Several of the pieces originally exhibited

in the Monte Carlo room

can be found in museums around the world today.

One of the pieces we have is a lamp with a parchment shade.

It was exhibited at the 1923 Salon des Artists Decorateurs

in Paris, and the shade is new,

we had to recreate that with Ms. Gray's participation.

We have another very interesting piece.

It's a black and white De Stijl table,

I think it's unique,

with geometric forms almost like Mondrian

or others of that period.

The black and white De Stijl table

is very much an inspiration after Eileen Gray went to see

Gerrit Rietveld's Schroöder-Schraäder house in 1923.

From the moment that Eileen Gray

began to exhibit her lacquer work into screens,

she was featured in many leading publications

of the period, including Vogue magazine in 1917,

Les Feuillets d'Art in 1922,

Wendingen in 1924,

Les Arts de la Maison in 1924,

L'Architecture Vivante from 1924 through 1929,

the Baumeister in 1930,

and L'Illustration in 1930 and again in 1933.

In 1920,

possibly as early as 1919,

Eileen Gray was introduced to the Romanian architect,

Jean Badovici, who knew of her work.

That's what drew her work to the attention of Badovici

because she had this reputation for being avant-garde,

for using traditional lacquer techniques

toward more modern or abstract contemporary ends,

aesthetic ends.

Badovici encouraged Gray's decision to open a store.

He consulted on the facade of her obscurely-named boutique,

Jean Désert, which opened in 1922

on the ultra-fashionable Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

He helped her design her first shop

where she sold her furniture and carpets

that she made in her workshops.

The architectural cabinet is one of the transitional pieces

from her earlier to later work

and was created around 1922.

It comes in two pieces.

In a block form, it folds in and of itself,

but it also expands and elongates.

Eileen had specifically created the handles

to work in conformity with the human body.

The name of the chair is fauteuil transat

because the idea was to create this very light armchair

so you could easily move it,

and the idea comes from the transats on the boats,

so it is a very simple structured armchair

made of two frames.

The idea is just brilliant,

and you can sense the sensitivity of the artist.

You can really understand that she wanted to make

something practical and something beautiful.

When I look at the transat chair,

I realize it could've been done today

as much as it was when it was done

70, 80, 90-- 80 years ago.

That chair is not about only design;

that chair is about architecture,

and the juxtaposition between the leather and the wood

and the painting of the wood,

it's like a house.

♪

Eileen Gray created the curved divan in 1922.

It also had a small little table

that ran the length of the lower curve of the table,

and it stood in photographs that she took

in the Galerie Jean Désert in 1923.

♪

Several of Eileen Gray's iconic pieces

are in production today, including the Bibendum Chair,

originally designed in 1922.

She used to come over for about a month,

sometimes six weeks.

She would try to help me with various details,

we used to prepare the drawings.

We got two pictures, which are two different pictures

of the Bibendum Chair, for two different destinations,

and that's what she was doing-- that's what she did.

So we only could do it

simply by mocking it up and mocking it up

in cardboard and in canvas, et cetera,

until we got the volume right,

and then I knew that she was coming,

and she comes up and like...

...points to it,

and she stopped.

She looks at it, and then she said,

"Wonderful, wonderful.

It should be two centimeters wider."

Although designer Marcel Breuer is widely credited

with introducing chromed tubular steel

into the vernacular of modern design,

receipts and drawings from the Gray archive

suggest a different order of precedence.

I think we could challenge him

with Gray and some of her furniture.

If you look through the pieces that were being produced,

and on the invoices,

one of the satellite lamps we know to be--

and that was, again, made out of chrome,

and that dates from an earlier date.

And probably the most iconic piece,

the Adjustable Table.

The Adjustable Table, it is an iconic piece.

Everybody, once you see the table,

they will recognize the table,

maybe not necessarily knowing that it was made

by this extraordinary Irish woman.

It's then that Jean Badovici influences Eileen Gray's eye

to architecture.

It was Badovici who moved her into architecture.

He encouraged her to take up architecture,

which apparently she laughed in his face

the first time he said it, but more and more,

she did become involved in architecture

through that involvement with Badovici.

Without a shadow of a doubt, he was of seminal importance,

along with Le Corbusier,

in her development as an architect,

and both of them, Badovici initially,

really began to encourage her to subscribe

to many of the architectural publications of the time.

So you could say Le Corbusier's

Five Points of a New Architecture

or the De Stijl artists and architects

who were interested in sort of re-thinking

the value of art and architecture

in the material world.

So her link with Le Corbusier

also begins an awful lot earlier than people naturally assume.

I think many people kind of think it happened

1926 to '29, but it wasn't.

It was always part of the story

going from 1921, '22, and onwards.

Le Corbusier gave Gray

a series of his architectural projects

for her to sit, develop, and expand

her technical drawing.

She began to perfect her designs

and also her architectural thinking.

As an architect, Gray produced dozens

of ambitious visionary plans

and supervised significant renovations,

including several in Vézelay,

which she undertook in collaboration

with Badovici and Le Corbusier,

but her reputation is founded

on the three homes she completed for herself.

So there were three important houses, I think,

that Eileen Gray designed for herself and for Jean Badovici:

E-1027, which is directly on the Mediterranean Sea;

then Castellar, which is outside Menton

in the mountains on the Italian border;

and then the third house she designed for herself

at Lou Pérou which is outside Saint-Tropez.

Three completely different houses,

each with a completely different vocabulary.

E-1027 was specifically done in mind for the client,

who was Jean Badovici, for entertaining

because he was a formidable host.

Tempe à Pailla, if you look at it from the outside,

it is not a welcoming house.

It is much more minimal.

It's more stark.

Then what has now become

my favorite house is Lou Pérou.

Bear in mind, Gray began work

on her final house at the age of 78.

Lou Pérou was an old farm building,

kind of ruined farm building,

that she built on.

This old barn,

this wonderful old farm or barn house that she restored,

working with a local engineer at the time,

and though she adapted certain aspects of his plan,

it's coming off the barn into this little long corridor,

and on the perpendicular wing,

again, completely looking

at the way that sun and light worked,

she shifted it slightly, at a ten-degree angle,

just at the very end,

and it was the kitchen, a bathroom, her bedroom,

and this wonderful open loggia.

Again, getting air to come in,

and it's just a wonderful space.

Monsieur Ledoux was her next-door neighbor,

and when she died

and the house was sold to a new owner,

he was responsible for renovating the house,

and he made before-and-after drawings,

and so he actually had drawings of the original condition

of the house, and not only that,

he had a huge piece of the screen

that slid in front of the large glass window

which he just saved in his garden.

So somehow, even though he didn't know it was Eileen Gray,

he knew that this house was important enough

to kind of save that relic

and to make drawings of the original condition.

In furnishing Lou Pérou,

as with its design,

Gray recycled and updated earlier ideas and solutions.

I'll show you now a table which she designed

which she, again, it was all multifunctional,

and she uses...

...an extension top,

which is not hidden,

which is visible...

...and which you extend.

Voilà.

And you get a much bigger table

for a different function.

Prior to Lou Pérou,

Gray's villa named Tempe à Pailla

developed concepts from E-1027.

Situated on a mountain road

near the hilltop town of Castellar,

the house enjoyed a commanding view

of the Port of Menton and the Mediterranean beyond.

However, many people also don't realize

that Tempe à Pailla was very much informed

by another architect who she had met

and she knew, Erich Mendelsohn.

She's also incorporated ideas, again, from Le Corbusier.

At first, Gray accommodated herself

to the existing structures on the property.

At Castellar, for example, there was a cistern

that she built on top of.

Before long,

on that rustic foundation

of stone cisterns,

Gray would build, furnish, and landscape

what was perhaps her most personal

and uncompromising dwelling.

Her architectural thinking is very similar,

to a certain extent, to E-1027

in that she, again, does the whole idea

of the sun orientation

and the way, especially up at the house,

that air goes through this particular property,

but it's, um, much more of a Zen building,

if that makes sense.

She also, at that stage, really abhorred having

personal possessions out on display,

so everything, even the furniture,

had to fold in on itself, had to be compactable,

had to be not that her whole life story was on display.

All of the pieces that she had created

for Tempe à Pailla were to be easily stored

and could fold in on themselves.

This was the idea behind the S-bend chair

is that when it was disassembled

and fell into one simpler piece,

it formed a C shape.

♪

She liked to use one item

to do other things to,

to do other functions to.

And then she had got this table, which is the Menton,

she designed for her own terrace in Castellar.

She began to address how you could--

you used a particular space and used it more appropriately

with less amount of time.

A pioneer in the field of ergonomic design,

Gray studied how people interacted with objects

in the process of anticipating their needs.

An example of this would be the brown leather chairs

which were the original chairs created for Tempe à Pailla.

Originally, they would've had a blue upholstery cover,

and they were used for dining chairs

with a slant at the back

which conformed with the uniformity of the body

and aided digestion.

She designed this copper-top table,

and I know that there are a couple of other

similar tables that she did like that

with wooden tops,

but because this has this magnificent,

perfectly-designed copper top

on top of steel legs,

it's really quite spectacular.

It's a beautiful object.

It's like a sculpture.

It could sit in a room all by itself

and just command the room.

Sadly, Lou Pérou and Tempe à Pailla

are not preserved as Gray conceived them.

Nonetheless, it was her first house

that made and cemented her reputation as an architect

and a seminal theorist of modern design.

In 1925,

Gray stumbled across a waterfront parcel

on the Mediterranean coast

looking west towards Monte Carlo.

It was inaccessible, rocky, and undeveloped

apart from some crude terraces and lemon trees.

She purchased it and began to design and build

a vacation home for herself and Badovici.

♪

Badovici and Le Corbusier aided her

with her technical drawing.

Le Corbusier very much so.

He gave her architectural plans

of some of his most important works,

and Gray built on those details.

Only E-1027 was built solely from scratch.

There was a vineyard on the site,

and there were these terraces of lemon trees and a vineyard,

and that's all that existed on the site,

and Gray kept those terraces,

and she sort of inserted the building within them.

One of the plans was an incredibly personal project

to Le Corbusier, and it was the project

of a house that he built for his parents,

Maison Le Lac Léman in Corseaux in Switzerland.

When you take the plan of this house

and you apply it to the plan of E-1027,

the treatment is almost identical,

but Gray took this project, and it's the one project

that Le Corbusier ignores his manifestos

and all of the things that he had said.

She took the designs, and she perfected them.

For three years, from 1926 to 1929,

Gray worked on E-1027,

relocating to the adjacent village of Roquebrune,

and overseeing every aspect of the construction.

♪

With the furnishings,

E-1027 shows a decided departure

from what she had been creating only a few years before.

Her materials are inexpensive and commonly available,

but never before perhaps as ingeniously exploited.

There is a piece by Eileen Gray that I particularly love,

which is the coiffeuse-paravent, that was at Villa E-1027.

It is a piece of Eileen Gray furniture which speaks to me

about Eileen Gray herself, a modern piece,

cold on the exterior, all aluminum,

a little as I imagine Eileen Gray might have been

and when I began my research on her,

on opening the doors to this "coiffeuse-paravent,"

I discovered a world of precious warmth

with acute attention to detail.

Very much inspired by her nonconformist personality,

this particular chair did also come from E-1027.

It was the chair that Gray had originally designed for herself.

There's a slight difference

in the chair that she did for Jean Badovici.

The upholstered arm for Gray

is only running three quarters of the length,

whereas the upholstered arm for Badovici

around the full length of the chair.

And it's those subtle variances that just make

all the difference when it comes to Gray.

As usual, she specified and designed the lighting,

the electrical fixtures,

the doors, windows, shutters, and screens.

Gray's own treatment of windows at E-1027

were much more layered.

There was the glass panes themselves

which could open completely

and for which Badovici had a patent

in the United States and in Paris for the mechanism,

but there was also the shutters

that were on the outside that were a kind of variation

on a traditional Mediterranean shutter

where a portion could fold up

and the whole shutter mechanism could slide,

so again, the occupant can control

how much vision they had

or how much vision people had into the house

from the outside, but also admit the wind,

control the light, et cetera.

When completed, E-1027,

the first concrete modernist villa,

featured in a dedicated issue of L'Architecture Vivante.

♪

I first encountered Gray's work

in a copy of the edition of L'Architecture Vivante,

the magazine that Badovici edited,

on E-1027.

It wasn't just Badovici who was the editor

of that publication up until 1929.

Gray was very heavily involved

in those series of production of magazines.

♪

The issue on E-1027

featured an extended dialogue between Gray and Badovici

about modern architecture,

its meanings, objectives, and challenges.

Unlike Le Corbusier,

who saw a house as a machine for living,

Gray conceived of it

as a protective shell for the individual

confronting the ruthless conditions of modern life.

♪

The furnishing, the fixtures,

the location, the whole aspect,

and it was to elevate the senses of the person

who went through the house,

walked through the house, lived in the house,

sat, ate, slept, did whatever in the house,

and it was the creation of this whole other world.

The interest in the bodily experience of space,

and just the notion, for example,

that your bedroom has to face the rising sun

and that your living room needs to face the southern view

and the kind of sun moving through,

and that wonderful drawing where she shows the sun

with a kind of very abstracted plan of E-1027

with the sun getting up in the morning

and going to bed at night.

One of the points that she differed

from both Badovici and Le Corbusier

in relation to how a garden

was supposed to have had a very symbiotic union

with the actual house,

she saw the garden as an extension

of the architecture of the interior of the building,

which actually looked back to 18th century garden design.

I think it's just extraordinary

the way she manipulated the space, the surfaces,

and had a very, very elegant

and very spare use of color

on the furniture rather than--

not actually coloring walls as Le Corbusier would do.

Certain fundamental principals of Gray's architecture,

namely the notion of layering

where it's almost impossible to say

where the architecture ends and where the furniture begins.

In the living room at E-1027

where there's a map of the Caribbean

that she placed on the wall,

and superimposed on that, a vertical light fixture,

and then next to that a small kind of side table

that folds out from the wall,

and then next to that a kind of satin back rest

to the divan.

In this example, you can't really say

where the wall ends and where the art

or the furniture begins.

It was the idea of creating a third

to an ultimate fourth dimension,

not only just the house itself,

not just the architectural building,

but everything within it.

That contribution of Gray remains really important.

It might not be in the forefront

of what architectural theorists talk about today,

but I think it is very much

the kind of humanity,

the kind of qualities of daily life,

the rituals of daily life that her architecture draws upon

shows something to me about the kind of living

in the reality of the world, but elevating that living

to a kind of, almost a spiritual extent.

Despite, or perhaps because of its grand vision,

its architectural achievement, and its historical value,

E-1027 would play a central role

in the troubled relationships among the three persons

most closely identified with the villa.

It's a somewhat complex story,

some people find it difficult to understand.

Gray had left the house and Badovici.

By 1931, she'd moved on to a new project,

her own home, Tempe à Pailla.

He was a terrible womanizer,

and ultimately she sort of left him

and what she called all that silliness behind.

Despite the end of their intimate relationship,

Gray and Badovici remained close.

She designed an apartment for him in Paris in 1931.

He oversaw the renovation of Tempe à Pailla after the war.

She was at his death bed

and organized his funeral in 1954.

Yet a decision Badovici made about E-1027

in the years before World War II had dramatic and painful

though ultimately beneficial consequences.

♪

In 1938, Badovici invited Le Corbusier

to continue the ideas that they had begun developing

at Vézelay and to come to E-1027

and to paint the murals,

a series of murals, in the house.

And Le Corbusier came,

admired, greatly admired E-1027,

says it so in the letter that he wrote to Gray

when he visited the house,

and literally he took what Gray had said about E-1027,

that it was a statement, an example to improve upon,

to build upon.

So in his opinion,

painting the murals on the walls of E-1027,

he was adding to that statement.

Did his ego come into play?

Without a shadow of a doubt, absolutely.

He was putting his mark on this house.

So Le Corbusier says to Jean Badovici, before the war:

"I have a mad desire to stain your walls."

There is, I think, a pretty common misconception

about the complex interrelationship

between her and Le Corbusier.

I have no doubt

that she didn't particularly like Le Corbusier as a person,

and there's no question that she hated the murals

that he subsequently painted at E-1027,

but I think it's important to insert Badovici's role

in soliciting those murals,

and it's more complicated than that.

In Vézelay, Jean Badovici, Le Corbusier, and Fernand Léger

had worked together to create almost an artist's colony,

and they had explored the idea of mural painting on the walls

and how it could enhance and contribute

to modern architecture.

On the basis of those Vézelay murals,

Badovici published an essay

where he argued that he and Léger and Le Corbusier

discovered through those murals a new principal,

that of the destruction of walls by paint,

but I think it's very clear

that in asserting this idea,

the destruction of walls by paint,

that he really didn't understand a basic principal

of Gray's architecture, which is that

there's a kind of layering that exists in her architecture

where it's impossible to distinguish

the role of furniture from the role of architecture.

So, when Badovici invited Le Corbusier

to do the murals in E-1027 and they were published,

it was then that Le Corbusier's ego came into play,

especially when he made comments such as,

"They burst-- the murals burst forth

from dull, sad, lifeless little walls

where nothing is happening."

Just a little sense of the controversy

surrounding the drawings...

...at Eileen Gray's Villa E1027 which explains why...

he's accused of undermining and transforming

the impact of her vision...

...he knew well enough, what she wanted to express...

They say she was very angry.

Well, the problem with the mural is,

as she said, "If I wanted to have murals,

I would have painted it myself,

or I would have asked you,

Mr. Corbusier,

or somebody else to paint it."

I think that because she was very irritated,

she made Badovici write a letter to Le Corbusier

where he said, "You've destroyed my life

through your vanity over the years,"

and so forth, and I think that really led

to a kind of break between Le Corbusier and Badovici.

And yet, it's because of those murals

and Le Corbusier's unresolved, perhaps irresoluble relationship

to Gray's villa, that E-1027 exists to this day.

In 1949,

Le Corbusier left Badovici's house in anger

and installed himself at the cafe Etoile de Mer,

a small seaside inn

immediately adjacent to the villa.

In 1949, the restaurant opens... First client, July 1949...

Le Corbusier... With his team who were working at E1027...

...in Jean Badovici's Villa,

understood now to be Eileen Gray's Villa.

For various reasons,

Le Corbusier had a dispute with Jean Badovici...

...his team who were doing a study on designs for Bogota...

...he left E1027 and asked my Father

to find him somewhere to stay above...

...the railway track to finish his holidays

with his wife, Yvonne

before he set off for Bergamotte.

So he sets his sights on putting down roots here at Cafe...

...Etoile de Mer as a holiday home

and befriends the Rebutato family...

...as his own, he and his wife.

So in 1949 Le Corbusier told my father,

"I will come back in the winter, Christmas and January 1949-50...

...and I will come back again in the spring,

and in August 1950...

...and I yearn to create a little place

under the olive trees below the railway line,

a palace, a chateau as he called it

for his wife Yvonne Le Corbusier,

the shed that we have here out back.

Ultimately Rebutato gave Le Corbusier

a piece of land adjoining his property

on which to build his own summer cabin,

and so Le Corbusier designed this cabin,

which Gray never understood,

she said she couldn't understand why he designed a log cabin.

Le Corbusier had built his Cabanon

at the back of the house,

and again, almost in homage to E-1027,

it's a very simple structure.

It is not a bold statement in architecture,

and I think he was actually very respectful

of the building that was right next door,

and that the fact that he looked at this building,

it really became, you know, seminally important to him.

Indeed, E-1027 remained an obsession for Le Corbusier

for the remainder of his life.

After Badovici died,

it was illegal for anyone

to inherit property in France

unless they were a member of the immediate family.

The house was inherited by Badovici's sister,

who was a nun in Romania, and of course a nun,

she couldn't own property either,

so somehow the state of Romania took over the property,

and there was an attempt to sell it to Aristotle Onassis.

Le Corbusier intervened during this attempted sale

and had the property purchased by a woman

named Madame Schelbert, a Swiss woman,

and she didn't know who Eileen Gray was,

and to Le Corbusier's credit,

I guess she was starting to throw things out,

and Le Corbusier said, "No, no, no, save those!

They're important."

And so basically,

the house has been preserved at all--

if preserved at all, it's been preserved

by the actions of Le Corbusier.

A few days before Le Corbusier disappeared,

in the bay here where he had a heart-attack,

he asked me a question on the sea-shore...

..."What will become of Roquebrune?"

That meant several things for him.

What will become of the entire site which is such a paradise?

Secondly what will become of my Cabanon?

What will become of my murals on the walls

of the Cafe Etoile de Mer and my Cabanon?

The murals? There were 7 in Eileen Gray's house.

He was interested in preserving his murals,

the legacy of his murals.

Not so much in the architecture,

but still I think the murals

are part of the history of the house,

an important part of the history of the house,

and essentially they're the reason

that it exists at all.

As I said, that's the most...

...manifestation of his jealousy,

that he wanted to do something in that house

which will be his and not hers,

and that--that is-- that is very revealing,

I'm afraid.

Actually, Eileen Gray was angered,

saying to Jean Badovici,

"You should not have let him do that."

As the owner, Jean Badovici, gave Le Corbusier permission

even painting the walls white for him to draw on.

The murals, in a way, saved the building

because its--of its value, of its perceived value

vis-à-vis the artist and the architect

of Le Corbusier,

and the architecture of Le Corbusier,

but that was the only piece which was actually kept restored

and the rest of the building was falling to bits,

falling in ruins.

E-1027 had such a sad fate through the decades.

It was in the ownership of successive people

who had no real sympathy for its history,

had no understanding of Eileen Gray,

no sensitivity to the quality of--

and the magic of these furnishings.

It fell into virtual ruin.

The furniture was really abused.

It was carelessly repainted,

in some cases adapted, tinkered with.

While architects, scholars, and connoisseurs

are united in declaring E-1027 Gray's masterpiece,

its completion coincides with a rapid decline

in her public profile, leading to a three-decade period

of obscurity and marginalization

from the realms in which she had achieved

both popular and critical acclaim.

Joseph Rykwert, the architectural historian,

he's the one who first, in the late '60s, I believe,

started to publish articles about Gray's work

in architectural magazines, and so he was the beginning

of bringing her reputation back.

And I was an old friend of Prunella Clough,

uh, who was a painter I both liked and admired,

and she said to me one day quite casually,

"Do you know my aunt's work?"

So I said in a sort of offhand way,

"No, I didn't."

And she brought out the, uh, portfolio

of E-1027, and I said,

"My God, Maison en bord de mer!

Of course I know it!"

So she said, "Would you like to meet her?"

I said, "I had no idea she was still alive."

So of course, I was very excited by the idea

that I meet this person

who had a sort of heroic status.

It wasn't until 1968

when Joseph Rykwert rediscovered her

and published an article in Domus

that Eileen Gray's career was once again brought

to the attention of the world.

Of the many gray matters surrounding the artist

demanding inquiry, and they are legion,

is the question of how she had been forgotten,

rendered invisible, misunderstood,

and her creative authorship assigned to others.

So I asked to put me in touch with Eileen Gray.

And at first when she heard

of someone being interested in her work,

she was rather bemused and somewhat...

I think by that time, she was very bitter

to have been bypassed by so many people.

So, she said, "Okay,

that's just fine, if somebody's interested."

One plausible explanation

is that she withdrew from public life by choice,

independent of the need to find clients,

scornful of self-promotion,

and increasingly averse to social interaction.

She was working in the '20s and '30s.

The names which were surrounding her

were nowadays considered the pillars

of modern design architecture and so forth.

Just Le Corbusier,

Mies van der Rohe, J.J.P. Oud,

they're all people who we revere now,

and she was one of them.

They all became known,

admired...

♪

...glorified,

and she was completely forgotten.

I think, to be very honest with you,

I think she became more and more agoraphobic

as the years went by.

And of course the onset of the Great Depression

produced an enduring backlash against modernist aesthetics

and experimentation.

Other students of Gray and partisans of her work

point to professional resentment or even worse.

But I have the feeling,

and according to what Eileen Gray told me

and what I heard and what I see the work,

Le Corbusier admired her a great deal,

but he was jealous of her.

He--he couldn't get over the fact

that a woman can produce such a wonderful work

on her own without a man standing next to her

sort of guiding her.

And it had happened the whole way throughout her life,

that work that she had done,

she had not been attributed or accredited for,

and that was where the insult really lay.

♪

E-1027, for example,

is a case study in misattribution

starting with the still unresolved

and surprisingly nuanced question

of whether it was a collaborative or solo project.

In my professional and academic opinion,

E-1027 is Eileen's complete, independent project

from start to finish.

It was a very odd collaboration

because he was actually not a very good architect.

I've seen designs of his, and they were pretty crummy.

Corbu always spoke of the villa as Jean Badovici's,

which creates certain issues.

I was in Vézelay in the month of July,

where the archives clearly state

that Jean Badovici presents all the drawings...

...and is proud to show the plans as by Eileen Gray.

So was it both of their project?

Or is it that the project architecturally speaking

was by one person? Or do we credit Jean Badovici

for the architecture and Eileen Gray

for the furniture, installations and palette?

It is possible.

But the academics do not want to assert that

and it's not for me today

to answer that question.

And what had happened and where the insult really lay

was that when Le Corbusier published the murals,

they never accredited the house to Eileen Gray.

So the problem being,

in all of the literature that came after,

was that everybody had begun then to assume

that the house was either designed by Jean Badovici

or designed by Le Corbusier, and he never corrected that.

Le Corbusier's failure

to mention Gray's authorship of the house

played a critical role in muddying the waters

of attribution and creative authorship.

What the most famous architect in the world did say

in confidence to his young apprentice,

who'd grown up literally next door to E-1027,

speaks volumes.

He said he was not... criticising the architecture.

He seemed to appreciate the architecture.

Though he did say to me that all the ideas were mine,

were stolen from me. Though...

When I asked him who Eileen Gray was, he wouldn't respond.

Nobody else would answer the question

as to whether it might be Le Corbusier or

Charlotte Perriand, who I knew had known Eileen Gray.

There was total ignorance about Eileen Gray.

However, we now know that Le Corbusier

did correspond with Eileen Gray

at least up until 1952, according to the archives.

Badovici sadly died from cancer,

from liver cancer, in 1954.

From that moment on, Gray is completely written out

of the history in any relationship to the house.

Yet beneath Gray and Le Corbusier's

mutual resentments and estrangement,

there endured a powerful mutual connection and fascination.

Gray still watched and looked at articles

of the work that Le Corbusier produced,

and later in life, she also was able to stand back

and say that he was one of the great architects,

that he never got the complete acknowledgement

that he should have got during his lifetime.

So she actually defended him in her latter years of her life,

and also when Le Corbusier lost his wife Yvonne,

Eileen Gray was one of the few people

that he sent a card,

and it's a lovely sketch that he did

of Yvonne and himself holding hands,

and seemingly the sketch was done on the terrace of E-1027,

so that was a really personal sentiment

to have happened between the two of them.

In 1965,

Le Corbusier died of a massive heart attack

while swimming in the waters directly below E-1027.

Gray's villa was probably the last building he ever saw.

♪

I think it's important that Gray,

who threw out many personal things,

and so her archive is quite limited,

kept a postcard from Le Corbusier

about how much he enjoyed visiting the house

and how sorry he was to have missed her,

and I like to interpret that that if she knew he was coming,

she disappeared.

(laughing)

That's my own interpretation, of course,

and it may have no bearing on the truth,

but I think that she did really remain proud

of his admiration

for the work that she did there.

♪

Despite the indifferences of her peers,

and her own disdain for their rituals,

insularity, and careerism,

she continued to rework her own ideas and projects

which she considered provisional drafts

to be developed for the sake of art and humanity.

The celluloid screen is unique

primarily due to the use of celluloid.

It was one of the unusual materials

that Eileen Gray had begun to use

in and around the late 1930s

and continued using celluloid

right up until the year of her death.

She wanted to know about how people were using plastics

and how to use plastics in combination with wood

or with cork or with other materials.

Plastic, of course, wasn't available

when she started working,

nor indeed in the '30s.

We know that the last project that she was working on

furniture-wise was a three-paneled,

curved celluloid, shocking pink celluloid screen.

She's 98 years of age, you know, it's 1976,

the model is still-- it's in the V&A archives,

the drawings are here, and it's like already echoing

the punk furniture that was coming out in the 1980s.

She always experimented.

She never, never settled down.

She never said, "Okay,

I'm all right, that's all right."

She was always redoing and redoing.

She said, "Oh, yes, I did so many versions of that,

I didn't like any of them."

And that was-- but then she said,

"But then I did another version which was more successful."

♪

Given the length of her career

and the breadth of her interest and output,

whether innovations with lacquer,

avant-garde furniture interiors,

her design studio,

residential and mainly unrealized projects

for a host of civic and socially engaged projects,

one has to ask,

"Is there a persistent concern or discernible artistic legacy?"

♪

Well, she did open up a completely new way

of approaching the way we live in interiors.

She always managed to make her spaces...

I don't want to overstate the term,

but "comfortable" I think would be the operative word.

They were meant to be occupied by people and lived in.

Modern is of today, yes?

That's the definition of Oxford Dictionary "modern."

But she was not of today,

she was of tomorrow,

and that's the fascinating thing about that woman,

that she could anticipate what was going to be

in 70, 80 years' time nowadays.

Gray was operating

contrary to the way I had been taught about her.

She was operating in a kind of cultural milieu

of where the avant-garde was interested,

A, in the reintegration of art and life

with a more, let's say, German approach

to dealing with architecture as an aspect of daily life

and more for kind of a broader middle class

or working class audience.

Those are the kind of aspirations

she had for her architecture,

but she also was working in a milieu

of different avant-gardes where each of them

seemed to view the world in discrete and total terms,

and I would say she was working within their ideas

in a critical way,

again, looking at the nuances of their ideas

rather than the kind of absolutism

that was associated with the kind of manifestos

that they were writing.

I see this as a kind of a dialogic approach,

let's say, to architecture

where it's not about absolutes,

but much more about all the nuances of meaning

that are accessible within certain modern movement ideas,

therefore not at all derivative, but something quite original.

We discovered a letter

in the National Museum of Ireland archives

back in 1975, the year before Gray had died,

and in the letter in the archives,

she has written,

"I long to have something in Ireland now,

but I suppose it is too late."

Today, Eileen Gray can be found

in a choice of private collections,

top auction houses,

select galleries, fine design stores,

and in over half a dozen major museums around the world.

A permanent exhibition is displayed

in the National Museum of Ireland,

home to the largest archive of Gray materials.

The curious thing about Eileen's place in the world

when she was alive is that she had no idea

of the value of her work,

and when a piece came up

and she asked me what she should charge for it,

um, I suggested what I thought was

about right price, which was very modest

compared with what it got,

and she said it was far too expensive,

that nobody would pay such price for her work.

So, until the end of her life, she couldn't really get the idea

that her work was becoming so valuable.

It came as a great surprise.

I think it's also true,

and we see this from the popularity

of certain key designs by Eileen Gray,

that her work maintains a relevance,

it maintains a freshness, it maintains a modernity.

She managed to transcend every era and genre,

changing materials...

...as influenced by the times

but always with acute sensibility."

She was an accomplished painter,

architect, designer and photographer,

yet managed to reflect and above all influence

all the style periods and at Jean Désert,

clearly, she was ahead of her time.

I truly believe she absolutely represented,

over her entire 80 years of creativity,

the times in which lived,

always a little ahead of the "avant-garde,"

makes her a manifest phenomenon.

For me,

going on this journey with Eileen Gray

over the last 12 years of my life

researching this incredible woman,

I thought, yeah, I thought E-1027

was the definitive statement in modernism.

Also that I loved that she was so humble.

Every single project was a stepping stone,

constantly questioning,

constantly trying experimenting,

constantly trying new media.

I'm not sure that Eileen Gray would be very pleased with us

and how we live today.

I don't think that we take the time

to think about how we live today,

and I think that's-- that's a problem

of our era right now.

I think everything happens so quickly

that we don't dwell much on, you know,

is this the right chair for me to sit in or not?

Is it ergonomically correct?

We don't sit in a chair long enough for it to matter.

Initially I thought it would take about three years,

this work, and it actually took twelve,

and I can remember saying to Prunella Clough

at the exhibition in Frankfurt

that I was divorcing Eileen Gray.

Obsessing about whether this is...

this little piece of metal is original,

whether there's been a restoration or whatever,

and if you step back for a second

and try and visualize Eileen Gray

observing this dialogue, she'd be laughing

at your debate over a matter

of supreme, um, indifference to her.

I think she was way more pragmatic

than some of the people who've become so fixated with her.

♪