Art Déco desk lamp by Eileen Gray

Desk Lamp by Eileen Gray

Designer, artist and architect Eileen Gray was one of the most fascinating creative figures of the 20th century. Her work includes glossy lacquered pieces – her Dragons chair set an auction record for modern furniture at the 2009 sale of Yves Saint Laurent’s estate ($28 million) – and sleek chrome furniture that rivalled the work of Le Corbusier and members of the Bauhaus as examples of pure, modernist design. The independent and unconventional daughter of Irish landed gentry, Gray studied painting at London’s Slade School of Fine Art in her early twenties before moving to Paris in 1906 to pursue her artistic dreams. Gray became fascinated with lacquer work after seeing an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and in Paris persuaded an expatriate Japanese master of the painstaking process, Seizo Sugawara, to teach her. Within a few years, Gray became known in professional circles for her sculptural lacquer furniture, which she installed in her clients’ homes.

Gray has constantly evolved as a designer. In the early 1920s, she created geometric works that embodied the essence of Art Deco and the emerging modernist design movement. Some works – such as her Bricks Screen, a collection of pivoting rectangular panels – echo the two-dimensional forms favoured by Gerrit Rietveld and other De Stijl architects of the Netherlands. Others feature the tubular chrome frames favoured by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. These include the Bibendum chair – named after the resemblance of its semi-circular backrest and armrests to the figure of the Michelin man – and the adjustable E 1027 side table, which she designed in 1927 for the interior of a gleaming white villa in the south of France that she designed herself.

Gray was never a self-promoter and withdrew from the limelight in the 1930s. However, interest in her work was revived in the early 1970s when the estates of her early clients came up for auction. Her original lacquer works are the most sought-after but, as the sale of the Dragons chair shows, rare and extremely expensive.

None of Gray’s designs were produced in large numbers until she granted a production licence a few years before her death. The price of these pieces is between 1,000 and 2,500 dollars, depending on the type and condition of the furniture. Gray’s work has become an icon of practical and elegant modernist design.

Lamps at RSA Wiesbaden

You will find more lamps and Art Déco lamps as well as other artefacts in my shop in Wiesbaden. Regine Schmitz-Avila – your specialist for artistic lamps.