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3.4 Le Batiscope for Ballet des Animaux, 1916-19, paper, pencil, ink © NMI
The characters for the ballet were given nonsensical names such as L’Inconnu, Le Cerf Vicieux, La Fau Freluche, Le Mandibus, Le Batiscope, Le Nincompoop - who walks backwards - and La Pravasse.23 The sketches for costumes and masks illustrate the human figures inside them and highlight how they would move. They are playful and ingenious in their concepts. Gray states in the sketches that it is ‘a ballet for animals, pardon, a ballet by animals for animals, or maybe a book’.24 However, the designs were never realised into an actual production.
3.5 Characters for Ballet des Animaux, 1916-19, paper, pencil, ink © NMI
3.6 Le Nincompoop for Ballet des Animaux, 1916-19, paper, pencil, ink © NMI
3.7 Man running in costume for Ballet des Animaux, 1916-19, paper, pencil, ink © NMI
3.8 Text for Ballet des Animaux, 1916-19, paper, ink © NMI
3.9 Figure for Ballet des Animaux, 1916-19, paper, pencil, ink © NMI
During the 1940s Gray revisited the characters which she had created for Ballet des Animaux and combined her artistic talents with her architecture when she completed a series of studies for murals. By this time Gray had purchased Les Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilew, Décors et costumes, 1930 by Michel Georges-Michel and Waldemar George which had illustrations of work by artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and André Derain (1880-1954).25
The first drawing was completed for her hypothetical Children’s Day Care Centre, a two-storey building which had a playroom area.26 This lyrical drawing was intended for the wall of the nursery and consists of abstract figurative forms and Gray has written in French that it is a mural for children.27 It was similar to another fresco drawing for a children’s bedroom which Gray did in the early 1940s.28 Gray also revisited these sketches for murals and developed them further when she designed the Worker’s Club project in 1947.29 The characters in this fresco appear simplified and more abstract than her previous mural designs. However, her emphasis on line in her rendition of the characters recalls the work of Beardsley, Ensor and de Chavannes.30 The drawings included dancers, which were cheerful and light-hearted, inspired by the characters created by Matisse and Laurencin, and the costumes of Goncharova illustrated in Michel Georges-Michel and Waldemar George’s publication. Gray also included a ferret, the Nincompoop again, a donkey and a dinosaur-type reptile with two legs and a long neck with a large head. Each of the characters is treated like a caricature. No sense of naturalism or space is suggested and there is a strong emphasis on line throughout.
3.10 Drawing for a mural for a nursery, 1940s, paper, pencil © NMI
Gray arrived in Paris just after the Fauves exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1905 causing a sensation through their use of virulent brushstrokes and violent colours. Though short lived, the movement of Fauvism was remarkably international in its range, attracting artists to Paris from different nationalities. Gray appreciated the verve with which they infused their forms with expressiveness but none of her art work displayed Fauvist tendencies. She was also friends with the Fauvist artist George Roualt (1871-1958).31 Then, with the completion of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, with its rich diversity of sources in Ancient Iberian art, African masks and stone carving, Pablo Picasso created a new language which sent ripples through the world of art for years to come.32 Soon followed by Georges Braque, they took simultaneous viewpoints and produced ‘high Analytic’ or ‘Hermetic’ compositions, using a muted palette. Their favourite motifs were still life with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards, figures or the human face. Landscapes were rare. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), the renowned writer and art critic, and an associate of Gray’s, became a chief protagonist for the Cubists. Gray purchased his publication Les Peintres Cubistes, (The Cubist Painters) in 1913.33 He believed that ‘Cubism can in no way be considered a systematic doctrine. It does, however constitute a school, and the painters who make up this school want to transform their art by returning to the original principles with regard to line and inspiration, just as the Fauves – and many of the Cubists were at one time Fauves – returned to original principles with regard to their colour and composition’. This publication explores the work of Cubist painters and their ideas. It was a collection of essays and reviews, written between 1905 and 1912. The text became the essential text in twentieth-century art and presented the poet and critic’s aesthetic meditations on nine painters: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), Marie Laurencin, Juan Gris (1887-1927), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Some of these painters later befriended Gray and with others she later worked on various projects. In the publication Apollinaire advocates a return to pure painting and strives to disentangle four distinct tendencies within Cubism. He speaks of an inner and essential reality whose dictates cubism obeys.
3.11 Abstract drawing, 1916-17, card, pencil, charcoal © NMI
Picasso and Braque’s earlier more austere form of Analytical Cubism was short lived, but it still had an effect on Gray’s development. Gray looked directly to Georges Braque and Analytical Cubism with an early charcoal drawing dated 1916-17 which became a study for a later lacquer door panel. She was more influenced not by his approach to monochromatic colour but by the patterns of faceted form.34
From 1911 the monochromatic colours of Analytical Cubism gave way to the use of bright, vivid colours where pictorial composition became more important than representation. With Synthetic Cubism, as it became known, Picasso and Braque, amongst others, enriched their pictures with references to the physical world, adding words or slogans to paintings. In 1912 Braque began using the technique of papier collé or collage. Newspaper was an early favourite ingredient.35 Realising the tactile qualities of collage Pablo Picasso added more provocative elements to his papier collé with the inclusion of razor blades and broken glass. These were combined with charcoal or pencil by Braque, while Picasso and Juan Gris combined them with oil. Painting now possessed the tactile qualities of