48 The New York Review
best- selling items were hand- loomed
wool rugs in abstract geometric patterns
that reflected concurrent Russian
Constructivist and Dutch De Stijl con-
cepts but were woven using techniques
that she learned from Berber women,
famed for their durable carpets, during
a trip to North Africa in 1908–1909.2.
In contrast to her prolific interior design
output, Gray’s executed architecture
was limited to three houses, all built for
herself. The finest of them, an Interna-
tional Style villa at Roquebrune- Cap-
Martin on the Côte d’Azur between
Monaco and the Italian border (see
illustration on page 47), is now so es-
teemed that her proponents insist that
if Gerrit Rietveld, Giuseppe Terragni,
and several other highly regarded male
modernists are included in survey histo-
ries on the strength of a single surpass-
ing work, Eileen Gray ought to be too.
The building was erected between
1926 and 1929 on a breathtaking sea-
front site steps away from the Med-
iterranean, perched atop ancient
stone- walled terraced vineyards below
the Riviera corniche and the coastal
railway line. Known in early publi-
cations as Maison en bord de mer
(house on the edge of the sea), it was
named E.1027 by its makers in a cryp-
tic numero- anagram intended to be
as revolutionary as the scheme itself.
It combines Gray’s initials—“E” for
Eileen, and “G” signified by 7 for the
alphabet’s seventh letter, with 10 and 2
for the alphabetic order of J and B, for
Jean Badovici.
At some unknown point in the early
1920s, Gray, then in her mid- forties,
had begun a deep involvement with Ba-
dovici, a charismatic if caddish Roma-
nian architect fifteen years her junior.
He admired her artistry, encouraged
her architectural ambitions as no one
else had, and wrote enthusiastically
about her work for the first of many
times in 1924 in his influential avant-
garde design journal, L’Architecture
Vivante. Such rapturous praise could
have turned anyone’s head:In it there is an atmosphere of end-
less malleability, where different
spatial planes meld, where individ-
ual objects are fully grasped only
when they are perceived together
in a transcendent mysterious and
animated scheme. For Eileen
Gray, architectural space is a ma-
terial to sculpt, a material that can
be transformed and shaped ac-
cording to the needs of the decor.
Space provides Gray, the artist,
with infinite possibilities to create.She achieved that magnificently with
E.1027. Its simple, flat- roofed, white-
walled, rectangular format was based
on Le Corbusier’s Villa le Lac of 1923–
1924 in Corseaux, Switzerland, a small,
single- story structure he built for his
parents on the shore of Lake Geneva.
Badovici had told Gray of his desire to
have a quiet little retreat in the south
of France and suggested that she design
it (and pay for it, which she did in an-
ticipation of their sharing a happy life
there. However, Badovici bought the
land, despite the Bard catalog’s claim
that Gray financed that as well). Al-
though she initially demurred because
of her lack of architectural experience,he promised to lead her through the
design process, and his good friend Le
Corbusier offered the detailed plans
for Villa le Lac to serve as an easy tem-
plate for another waterfront setting, al-
beit quite different from Lake Geneva.
Gray, a quick study with heretofore
unfathomed depths of architectural
talent, used Le Corbusier’s scheme as
a jumping- off point but came up with
a solution far more subtle and nuanced
than his rather inert, earthbound lake
house. She lifted E.1027 up one story on
Corbusian piloti columns to take fur-
ther advantage of the panoramic Med-
iterranean vista, and in contrast to the
Swiss model devised layers of periph-eral screening, retractable windows,
and shading strategies that break down
barriers between indoors and outdoors
to mesmerizing sensual effect. Her
handling of the cool but seductively
arranged interiors, furnished with her
own designs, blurred the usual bound-
aries between architecture, built- ins,
and freestanding objects. Gray rejected
Le Corbusier’s oft- quoted definition
of the modern house—une machine à
habiter (a machine for dwelling in, not,
as it is usually mistranslated, a machine
for living)—and with her attentiveness
to the psychological aspects of space
proposed an alternative: the house as
“the shell of man, his extension, his re-
lease, his spiritual emanation.”
Le Corbusier was astonished and fu-
rious that a woman could beat him so
decisively at his own game, and E.1027
became a lifelong obsession for him
because, as he later complained to an
architectural apprentice, Gray “stole”
his design. After she and Badovici split
because of his compulsive womanizing,
she gave him sole ownership of E.1027
and moved to Tempe a Pailla (1933–
1936), another superbly considered but
more rustic house that she designed and
built in Castellar, northeast of Roque-
brune. (The last of Gray’s houses for
herself was Lou Pérou of 1954–1963 in
Saint- Tropez, a vernacular conversion
of a disused stone vineyard shelter.)
In 1938, Le Corbusier, who sought
acclaim not just as an architect but as
a fine artist, convinced Badovici that
E.1027 would be enormously improved
by the addition of murals and offered
to paint them himself. Without ei-
ther of them asking Gray’s opinion,
Le Corbusier imposed eight garish
Picassoid daubs on the walls of her
masterpiece. He thereby wrecked theserenity of its interiors and subverted
her architectural vision in a jealous fit
of artistic aggression. That there was a
subconscious sexual component to Le
Corbusier’s act is suggested by his hav-
ing painted the murals in the nude, as
photographs attest. Adding insult to in-
jury, after World War II the house was
standardly credited not to Gray but to
Badovici or Le Corbusier himself, mis-
attributions the men never bothered to
correct. During and after World War II
the structure endured countless depre-
dations, but a decades- long restoration
campaign has at last been completed
and, accurately decorated with Gray’s
furnishings, it is now open to the pub-
lic as a French national historical
monument.
E.1027 is the subject of a monograph
edited by the architect Wilfried Wang
and Peter Adam, with entries by sev-
eral other contributors. Although it
is agreed to be among the greatest
houses of the twentieth century, there
is less unanimity about its exact au-
thorship, which has often been jointly
assigned to Gray and Badovici. Yet in
Marco Orsini’s informative documen-
tary Gray Matters (2014), her sound-
est biographer, Jennifer Goff, states
unequivocally that “E.1027 is Eileen’s
complete, independent project from
start to finish.” And the eminent ar-
chitectural historian Joseph Rykwert,
whose 1968 appreciation of Gray in the
Italian design journal Domus launched
her critical resurrection, calls it “a very
odd collaboration, because [Badovici]
actually wasn’t a very good architect.
I’ve seen designs of his, and they were
pretty crummy.”
Gray Matters was co- produced by
the Irish film director Mary McGuck-
ian, whose historical drama The Price
of Desire (2015) depicts a Gray- and-
Badovici romance (as well as her rela-
tionship with the torch singer Damia,
played by Alanis Morissette). It is
pretty but stilted, with such leaden di-
alogue as Gray saying, “I gather there’s
been some dispute as to whether or
not I invented the first piece of tubular
steel furniture.”3.
Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith, the
last of her parents’ five children, was
born into high privilege in 1878 at
Brownswood, a hundred- and- fifty- acre
estate in Enniscorthy, County Wexford,
Ireland (not far from Dunganstown,
the ancestral village of America’s Ken-
nedy dynasty). The marriage of her
father, James Maclaren Smith, a medi-
ocre middle- class Scottish painter, and
her mother, Eveleen Pounden, a Scots-
Irish aristocrat whose father left her the
present- day equivalent of $70 million,
was a classic Victorian mésalliance.
Although Eileen cherished memories
of an idyllic Irish childhood, when she
was eleven her father left permanently
for Italy and the Smiths later divorced,
a much greater disgrace in those days
than it is now.
From her father she inherited more
artistic talent than he ever evidenced;
from her mother she received the money
that allowed her to pursue career goals
then rarely open to women of any class.
Yet that lifelong financial security cush-
ioned Gray from having to earn a liv-
ing through her art, which might have
been to her professional disadvantage.
In 1895 her mother became the nine-Eileen Gray, Paris, circa 1925Berenice Abbott /National Museum of IrelandA lifetime of poems from the author
of Otherwise Fables and Last Pages.Two Views
Place a cottage
in these Dolomites.
In this abominable beauty
place, brother,
a brotherly light.Thrust your elbows, ice,
between these cottages.
Push, colossals,
from too much brother
too much brother.
*
Do not place your trust in babies:
Himmler was one.
Remember he too took his first steps
on funny pudgy legs,
you should have seen him gurgle
and smile at the smiles he saw.
Ah what a happy family.Next time you bend over a cradle
tuck a hatchet in your thoughts.
*
Who’s Diphilos? His works are lost.
He was a poet time was when,
Won some prizes, made a dent
In Greece among the better men,And got tossed out one time
Because he wrote a stupid comedy.
Ten scholars now remember him.
That too is immortality.
*
When you bring flowers to my grave
it won’t occur to you, needless to say,
how degrading it is to be dead —
forced to accept “a loving tribute”
from my betters, you, mournful, erect.
You’ll think, no doubt, “how grateful
he would be
if he could speak,” and hell I retch
thinking of me down there
mouth shut and mousy meek
six feet under a stupid violet.
*
For three days, good-bye,
and in that thimble of time
oceans of apprehension lie.
*
Two Views
Sullen Myrmidons poison the weeds
Lest an enemy survive.
In a ruin two lovers huddle.
A booted lout guffaws.
In his low brain one atom shifts.
We must love on.Sullen Myrmidons poison the weeds
Lest an enemy survive.
In a ruin two lovers huddle.
A booted lout guffaws.
In his low brain no atom shifts.
We must love on.Prospect Park Books
137 pp. | $16.
prospectparkbooks.com