Further details
caption: Two brick screens in Eileen Gray's bedroom exhibited at the XIV. Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, Paris, 1923.
caption: Black and white lacquered brick screens in the salon in Eileen Gray's apartment on Rue Bonaparte, Paris.
The series of 'brick' screens made by Eileen Gray are foremost among the creations that have come to define her exceptional and highly individual vision as an artist. These screens, conceived to serve a function as dividing elements in interior spaces, elegantly transcend this practical dimension. They assume a timeless authority as sculptures, their construction - at once simple and sophisticated - constitutes an infinitely flexible play of solids and voids that change their proportions as one moves in relation to them. It is no exaggeration to see in this concept - as fresh and inspiring today as when first presented publicly in 1923 - a sublime precursor of the minimalist and kinetic or 'situation' art that came to the fore a half century later.
The idea of using articulated lacquered 'bricks' was developed by Miss Gray in her 1919-22 refurbishment project for the Paris apartment of Mme Mathieu Lévy. Here she lined the walls of a long hallway with rectangular panels, stepped like brickwork, and she cleverly broke the proportions of the space by pivoting stacked rows of panels away from each wall half-way down their length. The concept found its second iteration, and its first public exhibition, in the form of a pair of white-painted, free-standing screens that formed part of the installation of a 'Bedroom-boudoir for Monte Carlo' presented by Miss Gray in the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1923. One of these screens is in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin; the other was sold in these rooms in December 2010.
The white screens were followed by black screens. Two are listed in the stock of Miss Gray's Jean Désert gallery. One of these, featured in a 1920s photographs, was acquired by Jean Badovici; the other was presumably one of two that appear in a series of 1970 photographs of Miss Gray's rue Bonaparte apartment.
These screens were all lost from view until 1970, when Paris-based American collector Robert Walker started to reconstruct the story of Eileen Gray's work in lacquer, traced her, and acquired from her one of the surviving screens from the 20s. He then acquired another, the larger screen that had belonged to Jean Badovici. Walker inspired others to pay attention to these long-overlooked works, and this renewal of interest in turn encouraged Miss Gray to revisit her concept. She had kept back at least four screens - the two white ones and another black screen beyond the one sold to Walker - and there survive records of her refurbishing and reconstituting further screens, drawing from a stock of spare 'bricks' that she had preserved, and of building new screens, all this with the technical help of lacquer artist Pierre Bobot. These few reprises allowed her to see examples of her inspired idea enter significant collections - notably those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and, via British collector Charles and Lavinia Handley-Read, the Victoria & Albert Museum.
A census of documented, surviving screens establishes the existence of the two white examples cited above, six black examples, including those specifically cited above, and the present red-lacquered version. We note in addition an un-lacquered wood version in a private French collection, and a published record of a screen lent by Miss Gray to an exhibition in Zurich in 1975, whereabouts currently untraced.
This red-lacquered version - a one-of-a-kind variation on the theme - is documented in correspondence preserved in the Eileen Gray archive at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The first reference is in a letter from Pierre Bobot of September 20th 1973 in which he sets out the cost of a 'paravent rouge' and confirms that it will be finished on the 24th. Further correspondence dated January 14th 1974 invites settlement and anticipates an invoice that was sent on January 17th. This confirms the specific cost of 'laquage paravent panneaux rouge', and is countersigned in acknowledgement of payment made the following day.
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