Lot 39
EILEEN GRAY (IRISH 1878-1976) §
UNTITLED
Auction: 30 October from 10:00 GMT
Description
pencil, watercolour, gouache and pastel on wove paper
Dimensions
23.2cm x 21.2cm (9 1/8in x 8 3/8in)
Provenance
Gifted to art book publisher Andreas Landshoff (1930–2021) by his close friend, the filmmaker and author Peter Adam (1929–2019), and thence by direct descent.
Adam first met Eileen Gray in 1960 and remained a close friend and confidant until her death in 1976. He later authored Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work: The Biography (2009), an important account of Gray’s life and career.
Footnote
Gray trained as a painter before becoming one of the twentieth century’s most inventive designers and architects. She continued to draw and paint throughout her career, although this part of her practice was largely kept private. As Peter Adam recounts in Eileen Gray: The Private Painter, she discussed painting with her niece, the artist Prunella Clough, but regarded her own work in the medium with considerable modesty. Only later did exhibitions bring sustained attention to her drawings and gouaches.
The present work shows how readily Gray could move between the discipline of design and the freedom of painting. Its upright structure and crossing lines evoke the organisation of an interior or an architectural drawing. Yet the soft-edged colour and ambiguous forms resist any practical explanation. Gray’s interest in geometry did not require her to abandon suggestion: here, space seems to emerge from the relationships between marks rather than from conventional perspective.
Long overshadowed by her furniture and buildings, Gray’s works on paper offer a more intimate view of her imagination. This drawing is compelling for the balance it holds between measured construction and uncertainty, inviting the viewer to keep looking as its forms shift between image and abstraction.
see Peter Adam & Andrew Lambirth, Eileen Gray: The Private Painter, Lund Humphries & Osborne Samuel, London 2015.
