Gray appreciated how the Cubists’ aim was to completely eschew time and space in favour of relative motion and how they created a sensory experience and the dynamics of the fourth dimension on a flat canvas. It was to become more relevant in her work as a designer and architect than in her gouaches and drawings which she produced during this period. From 1924-26 Gray did a series of pencil drawings. One abstract drawing completed in charcoal and pencil shows a number of geometrical motifs which she used in her carpet designs from this period. However, her rendition of the geometrical forms reflects the work of Albert Gleizes and Andre Lhote (1885-1962).58 This drawing also recalls motifs which Gray used on a lacquer door panel dated 1916, completed for the fashion designer Jacques Doucet (1853-1929).59 Gray’s treatment of these motifs and geometrical forms in this drawing look to the ideas of ‘Translation and Rotation’ as the forms appear in motion, creating space for the subject matter.
Apollinaire helped create the phrase ‘Orphic’ Cubism. After Gleizes and Lhote it was Robert Delauney who became its foremost practitioner. This philosophical notion about the passage of time, or simultaneity, was a concept which was also espoused by the Italian Futurists. The later phase of Cubism became thus more colourful and decorative and had many foreign adherents.
There was a remarkable link between the avant-garde artists, sculptors and writers of the pre-war period. Apollinaire created the literary and art review Les Soirées de Paris. Along with his contributors Apollinaire acted as impresario and publicist for the avant-garde movement by illustrating its principles in each issue. Gray owned a copy of Les Soirées de Paris, No.22, 15 March 1914.60 She was particularly interested in this issue which contained letters by the Symbolist writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and six colour illustrations by Francis Picabia. One illustration of Danseuse étoile sur un transatlantique, 1913 with its abstract planar composition inspired a later charcoal drawing by Gray.61 In this work she depicts an abstracted seascape of a life boat moored at docklands, with a pier receding into the background.62 Though completed many years later, the subject matter of this piece is possibly inspired by her close friend and architect Jean Badovici (1893-1956) who had patented the design for his E-7 lifeboat in 1934. Gray had kept Badovici’s notes on submarine and lifeboat design.63
3.16 Charcoal drawing, circa 1934, paper, pencil © NMI
Modernity became a central theme in Paris from 1880 through to the First World War. Avant-garde artists and writers were acutely aware of the developing modern landscape. They shared an interest in new technology, particularly in its relationship to speed. The Italian Futurists celebrated the railways, the motor car and the airplane. The Manifesto of Futurism, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) was published on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. The Futurists had an enormous impact on the work of Eileen Gray, especially after she visited an exhibition of their work at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune Paris from the 5-24 February, 1912. Gray kept the catalogue which contained a joint statement in French by the artists: Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Carlo Carrà (1881-1966), Luigi Russolo (1881-1947), Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) and Gino Severini (1883-1966).64 It also contained a copy of the Futurist manifesto. The group advocated modernism. Their ideas were controversial, extolling war as the only hygiene of the world. They revelled in technology, a similarity evident with Gray. Dynamism, motion, movement and speed were all an incantatory formula for the Futurists which led to Marinetti’s proverbial saying that a racing car was more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.
3.17 Charcoal drawing, circa 1920, paper, pencil © NMI
From the moment that Gray saw the exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune she adopted their ideas. A charcoal and pencil drawing which Gray did shows a Futurist-style landscape with roads and crossroads and abstract forms.65 In 1912 Gray had also visited America with her sister Thora, and two friends Gaby Bloch and Florence Gardiner (1878-1963). Gray was fascinated by New York, especially the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. The Futurists adored the industrial city with its skyscrapers and tunnels, advocating that new cities be built as the old were torn down. Gray was impressed with their ideas on modernity and machinery.
The success of the new art movements and the successful reign of internationalism in the Paris arts was also in part due to the powerful xenophilism of the upper middle classes and of the enlightened aristocracy. The presence of such large numbers of foreign artists transformed the art scene in Paris by serving to increase the gap between the official art and independent art (represented by the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants). These foreign artists were to contribute enormously to the emergence in France of the avant-garde art movement.
With the developments of Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism, abstraction became a prominent issue for many artists and theorists, who were influenced by the writings of Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866-1944) essay On the Spiritual in Art, 1910. Extracts were published in 1914 in Percy Wyndham Lewis’s periodical Blast of which Gray owned a copy.66 His writings and ideas spread rapidly throughout art circles promoting concepts of pure art, total abstraction and the rejection of subject matter. Gray’s development into pure abstraction began a move from figurative, seen in her early lacquer screens and panels which she produced for Jacques Doucet, to pure abstract, such as her interiors completed for Mme Mathieu-Lévy and her total abstract carpet designs of the early 1920s. All throughout linear graphics were a constant. Initially Gray began using large swirling lines, which gradually progressed into sweeping thin sharp lines, inspired by Futurism and the work of Giacomo Balla. Her work then displayed thin curling lines inspired by Paul Klee (1879-1940) which finally evolved into the use of more rigid geometric thin lines and forms. One gouache in black, grey and beige is a perfect example of these swirling geometric lines.67 Another black and white speckled gouache contains a sweeping lightning bolt motif