Eileen Gray’s underrated paintings

By Michael Watts

What a year this has been in the afterlife of Eileen Gray, the Anglo-Irish architect and designer. In October, during Frieze Week, the Mayfair gallery Osborne Samuel will launch London’s first commercial exhibition of her little-seen paintings, collages and photographs. It follows this summer’s public opening of her restored masterpiece, the house cryptically named E.1027, in the south of France, and also anticipates “The Price of Desire”, a long-awaited Irish film of Gray’s complicated relationship with Le Corbusier, whose vaguely lewd murals defaced (though some say enhanced) her famous villa. Factor in an engrossing documentary called “Gray Matters”, together with a huge, new scholarly appraisal by Jennifer Goff, and interest in Gray could scarcely be greater.

To all of this, Gray’s philosophical response would have been, “Mais, c’est absurde”. She was a woman of old-fashioned reticence, who prized whatever was chic and proportionate, and she would have been bemused by her sanctification, especially now in Ireland, where she grew up. In fact, she spent the majority of her life in France, and died in Paris in 1976, aged 98. By then, she had endured several decades of utter obscurity, and borne the heavy loss of works looted or destroyed under the German occupation. Yet in her frail, final years, when she was almost blind and trembling with Parkinson’s, she had once again become a fashionable cult, a name deeply associated with a pre-war era of exquisite rugs, avant-garde furniture and art-deco lacquering.