In the 20s, she created the Galerie Jean Désert in Paris, probably named after souvenirs from her journeys to the Maghreb. She surrounded herself with the best artisans with the idea to touch on new knowledge that she would adopt. Abandoning lacquer, the artist decided to turn towards more innovative materials and would exclude adornments and rich materials from her field of action. Her work was relayed by artists, literary types, and great thinkers of the day like Boris Lacroix, Henry Pacon, Loïe Fuller, and Elsa Schiaparelli, and her direction that borrowed from functionality and an attention to the body is reminiscent of another designer of the era with similar prerogatives: Charlotte Perriand. With a number of excursions into Art Deco or modern movements in which she crossed paths with De Stijil or Gerrit Rietveld, Eileen Gray didn’t belong to any one current and spared herself the burden of rigid constraints while keeping with the modern approach that pulsated through the society of the day.
Hence there would arise from her simple but adept creations a major piece of composition: the Armchair. Conceived for the “E1027” villa, itself constructed by the Irish designer and her companion architect Jean Balducci, she sought appropriate furniture by imagining a fictive inhabitant: a lone man that liked to play sports and entertain friends. Conveyed in a simple and pure way associated with 20s-style design, the Armchair makes reference to transatlantic folding chairs, a legitimate reference since the house was conceived to recall a ship. And so, parallel to the research of Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand notably, she turned the rules of design upside down, composing this piece made of square, rectilinear wooden brackets mixed with a metallic aesthetic meant to support a leather seat with an articulated headrest to follow the movements and needs of the user’s body. Just like kindred spirit Charlotte Perriand, the prerogative for the importance that the body be cared for and enveloped in these scaled spaces can be found here. But in opposition to Perriand, she didn’t exclusively use rounded shapes and tended rather to oppose the body’s geometry with a supple and fluid seat.
During the recent Paris’ first homage to this total artist in a huge chronological retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, visitors were reminded of Eileen’s fleeing, thirsty from sobriety, when Le Corbusier painted a number of large colored frescos in the famous villa without the consent of the designer-architect. Sobriety that pleased the Maharajah of Indora, who installed the Armchair in his bedroom with a little help from German architect Eckart Muthesius. Gray gave a touch of modernity to even the furthest of countries.
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