Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In

Abstract

In spite of the extensive work undertaken on Eileen Gray she remains both a mystery and a misfit, refusing, however hard critics try to force her into a modernist mould, to fit the canon and to let the Modern Movement claim her, unproblematically, as its own.1 While some work to counter that reading of Gray had already been initiated by Lynne Walker and Caroline Constant, Jasmine Rault’s new study of this complex decorative artist, designer and architect has taken this further and, thankfully, abandoned the futile task of trying to fit her neatly into the context of architectural modernism. Instead, she proposes exactly the opposite and sets out confidently to demonstrate that Gray also belonged, indeed much more naturally so, to a group of wealthy, independent, homosexual women, based on Paris’ Left Bank, who were dedicated to the arenas of fine art and literature and who inhabited a world that owed as much to nineteenth-century decadence and sexual dissidence, as depicted by Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde, as to twentieth-century modernity.2 Straddling the complex, subjective, psychologically-oriented worlds of Art Nouveau and the more objective, technologically-focused new century and its modern preoccupations, Gray, it is claimed here, was a hybrid figure, a follower of both Le Corbusier’s five principles of architecture and of her homosexual peer group’s determination to create a new, modern homosexual female ‘subject’ that both embraced, and was defined by, domesticity, interiority and privacy.