Jennifer Goff

Eileen Gray


Скачать книгу

Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, Stephen Haweis papers, Box 1 catalogued correspondence, letter from Eileen Gray to Stephen Haweis, 14 February 1963.

       3

       The Artist: Painting, Sculpture, Photography

      In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Paris was the artistic centre of the avant-garde. Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism,the Russian avant-garde, De Stijl and Surrealism coupled with a rejection of academic tradition made artists and designers question traditional picture-making and sculpture techniques through other media. Gray’s art student years at the Slade, the École Colarossi and then at the Académie Julien were pivotal to so many aspects of her future work – especially her lacquer work and her carpet designs. Both mediums continued to demonstrate her painterly skills. It was during these formative years that Gray met many of her artistic circles; artists, writers, sculptors, photographers, theorists and philosophers, who would have such a profound influence on her developing ideas.

image

      3.1 Drawing of a nude study, 1903, paper, pencil, charcoal © NMI

      Gray also owned a number of art books which pre-date her formal art training in both London and Paris. Three particular texts were of importance; The Renaissance, 1873 by Walter Pater, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1890 by James Abbott NcNeill Whistler and The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley, 1899 by John Lane. These three publications along with the writings of Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), in whom Gray also had a profound interest, reveal Gray’s interest in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements. These movements were also linked with the Symbolist movement in France which had its beginnings with Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) poem Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857 (Gray later used the title of Baudelaire’s poem Invitation au Voyage as a coded symbol and decorative feature on the wall of the living in the house E.1027 in 1929). The Symbolist movement’s ideas were anticipated in the work of the idealising neo-classicist Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), in whose work Gray also expressed an interest. The influence of the ideas expressed in these publications is revealed in Gray’s artistic development; especially in her figurative artwork, her use of symbolism and her ideas on decorative art. They are significant not only in her early artistic career but also in her later career as a designer and architect.

      James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) were two of the key artists associated with the Aesthetic movement. They became the main leaders of the movement along with Oscar Wilde. Rejecting John Ruskin’s (1819-1900) idea of art as something useful or moral they advocated that art did not have a didactic role – rather they emphasised its aesthetic