Eileen Gray. Jennifer Goff

if she applied too much lacquer, it rippled or cracked and she began all over again. The art critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870-1943) observed Gray working and wrote, ‘The slightest error forces her to abandon her work and start anew. An assiduous labour. What a paradox in our frenetic times’.³⁴

      Many of the entries in Gray’s lacquer notebook are undated and read like recipes, making them difficult to read but it gives much insight into the laborious and admirable nature of her task and her technique. Gray was the first lacquer artist to successfully achieve the colour blue. Initially her experimentations produced a blue which when dried had a green hue which she disliked. When attempting to achieve this colour she contacted Charles’s workshop in London and was given clear directions. Gray later achieved a new and improved recipe. ‘For blue ground use common ultramarine, add a little chrome green or crimson lake according to the amount required’.³⁵ As Gray’s technique improved the use of other colours did not elude her and she explored the development of yellow, cinnabar and the colour white.

      While Gray’s innovativeness is for the large areas of undecorated lacquer, she also recorded in her notebook her achievements in metallic relief, inlaying mother of pearl, eggshell, gilding with both gold and silver and how to incise decoration onto panels. Her research would have been endless if it had not been for the regrettable difficulties in the length of time it took to import lacquer and the fact also that she had hoped to produce for a mass market. In his article in L’Amour de l’art Vauxcelles gave much insight into Gray’s methodology. ‘In the field of the applied arts talent is nothing without professionalism...Eileen Gray knows this. She works with a wise slow method for herself’. He continued, ‘She joins oils to the ordinary varnish, iron sulphate, rice vinegar, then the colours, black, yellow, aventurine, red. She then measures out carefully the gum, black animal dye, tea oil, pork bile, cinnabar, cochineal, coromandel, orpiment. This is the reason for her subdued tones, like the night covered in stars, and the lacquer work of our Irishwoman is encrusted with mother of pearl, coral, semi-precious stones, lapis lazuli, all in harmony with the material and the theme’.³⁶

      4.7 Hamanaka’s signature and ideogram signature in coral-red lacquer, detail on sofa, 1935, black lacquer, dyed black rubbed shagreen, wood, coral pigment © Galerie Dutko

      Her partnership with Sugawara expanded into a workshop in 1910 at the rue Guénégaud when Gray’s apartment became too cluttered with material. Sugawara also produced sculptural heads which Gray exhibited at Jean Désert. Their working relationship lasted from 1908-1930, after which Gray closed her shop in rue Faubourg St Honoré. Through Sugawara, Gray was introduced to other craftsmen, Ousouda, Kichizo Inagaki (1876-1951), who worked for Rodin, and Katsu Hamanaka (1895-1982), who was a pupil of Sugawara and became a famous lacquer craftsman in Europe from the beginning of the 1930s. Gray kept a Christmas card from Hamanaka after their initial meeting.³⁷

      In his own atelier Sugawara employed up to twenty artisans and married one of the polishing assistants.³⁸ When Gray closed her decorating shop Jean Désert, Sugawara took charge of the Rothschild Collection at Cernay-la-Ville. The Rothschilds were clients of Gray’s. He also did work for the artist, writer and Art Deco designer Eyre de Lanux (1894-1996) and Evelyn Wyld (1882-1973) when they opened a decorator’s shop in Cannes. Wyld and Gray had formed a very successful weaving workshop in the rue de Visconti and had remained friends for many years. Sugawara remained in France until his death on 12 April 1937.³⁹

      Gray worked with and depended on a number of these Japanese artisans and craftsmen for her commissions. Some were employed for particular tasks and Gray kept records of these.⁴⁰ The names which appeared frequently in her ledgers are Inagaki and Ousouda.⁴¹ Between 1912- 1921 Inagaki corresponded and invoiced Gray regarding various items of furniture, handles, Cubist-style lamps and lamp-shades and produced pieces for various commissions, notably some of the work for Mme Mathieu-Lévy’s Rue de Lota apartment. These notes, invoices and letters give much insight into the materials she used such as parchment, ostrich eggs and ivory and the techniques she employed such as scorching wood and then sanding it down to add to the textures and variety to her pieces. Gray also kept the business cards and details of various craftsmen, suppliers and workshops where she could purchase necessary items suitable to her trade.⁴² Any materials which weren’t used by these craftsmen Gray kept – often experimenting with them as sculpture – which is what she did in November 1916 with leftover ivory handles for a piece of furniture.⁴³

      4.8 A three-panelled black lacquered and gold leaf screen, black lacquered back, Katsu Hamanaka, 1930s, wood, black lacquer, gold leaf © Galerie Dutko

      From 1908 onwards Gray began to produce small lacquer pieces but she said that in 1910 she began to produce screens.⁴⁴ Indeed her first object she completed in lacquer was a screen.⁴⁵ This continued into lacquer panels and furniture ranging from chairs, tables, bureaus, beds and dressing tables. Soon she expanded into domestic pieces, bowls, plates, toiletries. Her first screen which she produced in blue lacquer inlaid with mother of pearl was a large four-panel screen produced for a friend Florence Gardiner in 1912 and was called La Voie Lactée (the Milky Way).⁴⁶

      4.9 La Voie Lactée (the Milky Way) four-panelled screen, 1912, wood, blue and natural lacquer, engraved, raised colours, mother of pearl inlay © NMI

      It was reproduced in Vogue magazine in 1917 illustrating an abstract nude figure running over a mountain, a trail of constellations of stars extends across the night’s sky, emitting from the figure’s head.⁴⁷ It was also illustrated in the Dutch magazine Wendigen in 1924.⁴⁸ The work has now disappeared but it was described in the French magazine Les Feuillets d’Art by the Duchess Clermont-Tonnerre saying it depicted ‘The dust haze of the Milky Way, made from mother of pearl thrown over the matt of the lacquered leaves of the screen’.⁴⁹ At the eighth Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1913 Gray exhibited two lacquer panels, a yellow and silver panel for a library, a door panel and a frieze. The first was a blue lacquer panel, Le Magician de la Nuit (The Magician of the Night), 1912-13, which attracted considerable attention.⁵⁰ The second panel was entitled Om Mani Padme Hum, 1912-13.⁵¹ A critic in Art et Décoration stated after seeing her display that, ‘Miss Gray uses that admirable material lacquer... Seeing her entries one regrets that this beautiful technique is not more favoured by our decorators’.⁵²

      As with many of her lacquer screens and panels the subject matter is compelling and mysterious. The author from Vogue magazine asked ‘What is the mystery which impels?’⁵³ There is a spiritual, enchanting quality to the stories Gray depicts in many of her lacquer panels and screens, evident in the names. Inspired by the contemporary art movements such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Cubism, the subject matter for these pieces is derived from books in her library on mythology (Greek, Persian, Indian and Irish Celtic), poetry, psychology and philosophy.