50 The New York Review
a depiction of a freewheeling soirée at
the American novelist and saloniste
Natalie Barney’s Temple d’Amitié, her
Neoclassical garden folly on the Left
Bank, a short walk from Gray’s flat.
In Conversation with Eileen Gray—a
short documentary film by the French
director Michael Pitiot, Cloé Pitiot’s
husband—gives us a tantalizing first-
person sense of this shadowy creature
as well as a delightful sampling of her
hesitant, plummy, patrician voice, truly
of another age. Based on a previously
unreleased 1973 audio interview with
Gray by the British architect Andrew
Hodgkinson, its hushed reverence
brings to mind a David Attenborough
program about some furtive endan-
gered species. Their dialogue was
recorded while she leafed through
a portfolio of her designs and com-mented briefly on each, to which Pitiot
has added images of the works they dis-
cuss. Gray was never given to theoreti-
cal statements, so the gold nugget here
is her explanation of the dramatic sty-
listic shift she made around 1920 from
traditional figurative motifs to the ab-
stract modernist forms that typified her
oeuvre from then on:I think one changes. You see, at
that time I really didn’t appreciate
modern art. Now, of course, one
would want to do anything in dec-
oration perfectly different.... I’ve
always liked abstract things.... I
don’t like things so delimitated,
you know? I think that when you
see figures, well there it is, you see
it, and you take it in, or you ab-
sorb it, and then it’s done, really.
Whereas an abstract, sometimes it
can look so entirely different, don’t
you think?Paradoxically, Gray was too proud
to pursue the critical recognition she
deserved, but resented that her lesser
male contemporaries were lionized
while she languished in oblivion. Going
through Gray’s papers, Peter Adam
found her handwritten transcriptions
from the American self- help writer
Dorothea Brande’s 1936 best seller
Wake Up and Live! (which is still in
print). These improving tips urged “the
removal of shyness,” instructing the
reader to “act as if it was impossible to
fail” and to “recollect past failures and
set free whatever group of aptitudes
is for the moment required.” But by
her own admission Gray was achinglylonely and grew more agoraphobic as
she got older.
She was constitutionally unable to
fully savor her astonishing comeback
when it came at last, part of a com-
prehensive reappreciation of the Art
Deco style in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Soon a steady stream of perspicacious
design curators, eager dealers, canny
collectors, and starstruck culturati (in-
cluding Bruce Chatwin, who became a
friend) arrived at her door on the rue
Bonaparte in hopes of seeing and in
many cases acquiring objects known
only through dim period illustrations
and almost impossible to find in the an-
tiques trade.
High- style furniture entrepreneurs
such as Andrée Putman in Paris and
Zeev Aram in London shrewdly dis-
cerned that well- made replicas ofGray’s designs would appeal to aficio-
nados bored with overly familiar mod-
ernist classics by Le Corbusier, Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer.
Both Aram and Putman bought rights
to reproduce a number of her chairs,
tables, mirrors, lighting fixtures, and
rugs, and their “re- editions” (which
sounded less fake than “reproduc-
tions”) became a commercial success.
All the while Gray continued to
produce strong new designs, such as a
four- panel notched screen of natural
cork (1960 –1973) so elegantly formed
and proportioned that this humble,
lightweight material looks as noble as
burnished travertine. As she once told
Badovici, “The choice of a material
that is beautiful in its own right, worked
with a sincere simplicity, is sometimes
sufficient.” Yet her new plutocratic fans
preferred her luxurious early output,
and with few takers she wound up off-
loading the cork screens at cost.
She kept working right up until her
death at age ninety- eight. Her final
completed design was a hinged screen
with three alternating concave/convex
curved panels of shocking- pink cellu-
loid, an uncharacteristic color choice
but typical of her striking out in unex-
pected directions. In the fall of 1976
she asked her devoted housekeeper of
half a century to buy wood for a new
tabletop she was eager to make, but
suddenly slipped into unconsciousness
and died six days later. Eileen Gray’s
most famous aphorism—“To create,
one must first question everything”—
speaks to this consummate contrari-
an’s restless and unrequited quests in
life and art. QSuzanne Talbot’s apartment on the rue de Lota, Paris, with a Lota sofa, Dragon armchair,
and two Bibendum chairs, all designed by Eileen Gray, 1933L’ I l l u s t r a t i o nPHILIP
ROTH
LECTURE
THE WAVE AFTER WAVE
IS ONE WAVE NEVER TIRING
Tracy K. Smith, was appointed United States Poet
Laureate in 2017 and is the author of Ordinary Light
and Wade in the Water. Her poetry collection Life on
Mars was the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize
and Duende won the 2006 James Laughlin Award.
She is the Roger Berlind ’52 Professor in the
Humanities, and Chair of the Lewis Center for the
Arts at Princeton University.DRAWING: BURT SILVERMAN; PHOTO: JASON DECROW / APSeptember 30
2020
6:00 TO
8:00 PM
THE NEWARK
PUBLIC LIBRARY
This will be a
free virtual event
hosted on Zoom.
For more information
and to register,
visit npl.org or call
973.424.1832.TRACY K.
SMITH
SPEAKING ON THE ROLE OF ART
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