(1890-1967), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Chana Orloff (1888-1968), Joseph Csáky (1888-1971) and Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). She also had a number of publications directly relating to their work notably ‘Lipchitz’ by Maurice Raynal, in Art d’Aujourd’hui, 1920 and an exhibition catalogue of Ossip Zadkine by André de Ridder from the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels in January 1933.108
Originally from Smolensk, Zadkine had come to Paris in 1909 after firstly studying at the London Polytechnic School of Arts and Crafts. Gray was introduced to Zadkine by Chana Orloff, another Russian, who later exhibited in Jean Désert. By nature he was not an Analytical Cubist but more a sculptor of elementary forms. He has been described as the ‘only genuine wood sculptor’ of the Classical Modernist period.109 From early in his career Zadkine’s approach was to animate and dominate his material, be it wood, stone or marble. During his ‘African’ phase the critic André de Ridder stated that it was as though Zadkine went directly into the forest and sculpted straight from a tree trunk. From this period his work evolved, rejecting popular, African and primitive art, and after a trip to Greece his work entered a long Cubist phase. Zadkine modelled his Cubist figures with short legs, long torsos and large heads according to African proportions. Though his work became monumental in size they maintained a simple and passionate sensibility, whilst demonstrating supple movement and harmony.110 Gesture was just as important as sentiment and movement.111 Zadkine emphasised the importance of light by manipulating his forms through the use of concave and convex lines, a regime of high and low reliefs, and through the many hollows and bumps that play with light and shade. Ridder writes that it is ‘the simultaneous disassociation of form and light which leads to a piece’s emancipation’.112 By the 1920s he moved from Cubist expressions to a more curvilinear, organic art, yet borrowed the Cubist freedom of combining viewpoints and off-setting convex forms with concave. During the 1930s his work entered an agile, Baroque phase where his sculptures were monumental in size.
Gray liked Zadkine’s work; however their rapport was distant and somewhat tentative, as Zadkine never mentions Gray in his autobiography, or the fact that he exhibited extensively at Gray’s gallery Jean Désert. His work frequently appears in the photographs of the furniture installations which Gray took at Jean Désert. She owned a still-life photograph taken by photographer Marc Vaux (1895-1971) in 1922 of one of Zadkine’s sculptural heads.113 In 1926 Gray also purchased a sculptural head with rouge painted lips for her collection. This head was lent to an exhibition in Brussels in 1933, and Zadkine sent Gray a catalogue with the inscription ‘To Miss E. Gray in remembrance, Jan 1933’, but he never signed it.114 Gray recommended Ossip Zadkine’s work to Albert Boeken (1891-1951), De Stijl writer and critic, when he came to visit her in Paris. During World War II Zadkine departed for America where he taught in New York, but returned to Paris in 1945. They remained in contact and he came and visited her in her house in the South of France. He died in 1967.
Gray also knew Amedeo Modigliani through Orloff. The Italian painter and sculptor, moved to Paris in 1906 where he attended the Académie Julian. After receiving critical acclaim early in his career, his dissolute lifestyle and consumption of alcohol and drugs took their toll on his health. What appealed to Modigliani in relation to African sculpture was its stylisation and sophistication. The Heads, made from limestone, which he created in 1909-1914, were directly inspired by African tribal masks with their extreme elongation, smooth roundness, graphic scoring, narrow bridged noses and isolated mouths. The masks are expressionless, reduced to symmetrical axiality, and strengthened by a vertical rhythm.
Chana Orloff and Gray had many friends in common. Orloff, born in the Ukraine, came to Paris via Palestine in 1910, intending to train as a dressmaker, but by 1913 was producing prints and sculpture and was exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne. She designed the letterhead for the notepaper for Gray’s gallery Jean Désert. In the 1920s, widowed and with a young son, she enjoyed immense critical success. She sculpted portraits of architects Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) and Le Corbusier’s (1887-1965) teacher Auguste Perret (1874-1954), who designed Orloff’s studio, and painters Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. Her work was imbued with a quiet grace and sensuality. Her early works retain their solid core, yet geometric angles and hollows begin to break the surface. Her elongated figures with their length distortion served to consolidate and heighten emotional expression.
Hungarian Joseph Csáky developed and perfected a streamlined Synthetic Cubism in his sculpture. Csáky’s figures contained rhythmic movements, combined in harmonic, organic, angular forms. The work of Jacques Lipchitz who came from Lithuania completely identifies with Cubism and his unruly figures have a taut angularity in their structure. Lipchitz interwove rhizomatic forms into the figures which drew the surrounding space into the figures themselves. With developments into a more planar, flatly composed Cubist sculpture developing from 1917, his style inherently changed. By 1925 Lipchitz turned away from Cubism, seeking more organic forms filled with concentrated energy. During and after the war Lipchitz’s style was affected by the Jewish persecution. However, unlike the other sculptors who influenced Gray, he revisited Cubism for a second time in his career, where he explored the flow of space into volume.
3.31 Drawing of an abstract sculpture, 1920s, paper, pencil © NMI
Gray did a series of three sketches for an abstract sculpture. Each drawing consists of these abstract Cubic block forms and each is a play on form and space. She has noted that it was to be made from metal wire and wood blocks.115 She never realised the sculpture. The sketches recall the work of Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) who arrived in Paris in 1908. From 1910 he developed his own style of simple, stereometrical, physical volumes in sculpture by creating upwardly spiralling figures. These were created through wedges, acute angles and breaks between form and space. Gray in her drawings addresses the same themes as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Csáky, Orloff and Zadkine, looking at the interaction between volume and space, creating juxtaposition between the two while still producing expressive, lyrical and dynamic forms. It is unknown if Gray ever realised sculptures from these drawings, but they confirm Gray’s interest in the rhythmic energies of volumetric masses and in expressive plastic art.
3.32 Sculptural head, 1920s, lava rock © NMI
3.33 Sculptural head, 1920s, cork © NMI
Of the three sculptural heads which remain from Gray’s oeuvre, two are made from cork and one from volcanic rock. Tête, circa 1929 is a facial sculpture made from a piece of volcanic rock which she found at Roquebrune on the seafront, on which Gray delicately marked the demarcations of facial features. Her choice of material gives the piece a very natural, organic feel.116 The two sculptural heads or masks are made from cork and directly relate to tribal art. Tête, 1920s is primitive, reflecting Gray’s interest, along with Modigliani, in African tribal masks from the West African Baule and Guro tribes and Picasso’s interest in Iberian sculpture. Eileen Gray created this tribal-like mask when she was in the South of France.117 It also coincides with the numerous African influences which were appearing in her lacquer work, especially in several furniture commissions completed for Jacques Doucet and Mme Mathieu-Lévy