Foreword

Lasvignes, Serge; Blistène, Bernard

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Foreword

Serge Lasvignes and Bernard Blistène

Eileen Gray

In the spring of 2013, the Centre Pompidou was the first French institution to organize a retrospective exhibition of the work of the prolific yet enigmatic Irish designer Eileen Gray...

Author

Cloé Pitiot (Editor), Nina Stritzler-Levine (Editor)

PublisherBard Graduate Center

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-100135

Foreword

In the spring of 2013, the Centre Pompidou was the first French institution to organize a retrospective exhibition of the work of the prolific yet enigmatic Irish designer Eileen Gray. The exhibition presented to our visitors the multifaceted work of this dazzlingly talented yet still under-recognized artist, who created a unique and fascinating universe that is so profoundly modern. The following autumn, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin chose to present this as its reopening exhibition after a two-year renovation. Eileen Gray thus returned to her homeland, where she had always maintained strong ties and where she sought to have her rugs reproduced toward the end of her life.

Seven years later, the Centre Pompidou is happy and proud to see this exhibition, enriched by new discoveries, opening at Bard Graduate Center in New York, the city the artist had visited in 1912 and again in the 1930s. The updated checklist in this catalogue highlights the extensive research carried out by the French director of the exhibition and its curator, Cloé Pitiot, in archives as well as in public and private collections. Works, documents, and other evidence still unknown to the general public (a recording of the artist in 1973, a lacquer panel from the early 1910s, a tea table made of laque arrachée, newly discovered photographs, unpublished notes on E 1027) provide even more details and information about the artist’s work and career.

The occasion of this exhibition places Eileen Gray in the context of her complex life as an Anglo-Saxon artist who chose to live in Paris, the lively literary and artistic capital that was so conducive to her creative process. The twentieth century owes to her visionary avant-gardism some extraordinarily beautiful works of furniture and to her genius a masterpiece of modern architecture, the house E 1027. Hailed by the critics of the time and then forgotten, Eileen Gray was rediscovered in 1968 by the historian Joseph Rykwert in the article he dedicated to her in Domus. The exhibition presented at Bard Graduate Center is a new milestone in the rediscovery of this artist.

This exhibition and its catalogue would not have been possible without the loyalty of all the lenders, without the kindness and generosity of the late Peter Adam, without the devoted collaboration of the gallery owners Cheska and Bob Vallois, Gilles Peyroulet and Dominique Chenivesse, Jacques De Vos, Julie Blum and Adriana Friedman, without all the museums and private collectors who agreed to part with these fragile jewels for several months. We thank them all very warmly.

Finally, the Centre Pompidou would like to thank the Bard Graduate Center’s founder and director, Susan Weber, and the director of the Gallery, Nina Stritzler-Levine, who for the past six years have been tirelessly working with Cloé Pitiot on the research and development of this new exhibition and the publication.

Serge Lasvignes
President
Centre Pompidou

Bernard Blistène
Director
Musée National d’Art Moderne

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