Neglected for most of her career, Eileen Gray (1878-1976) is now regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early twentieth century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco.

Eileen Gray was to “stand alone” throughout her career, first as a lacquer artist, then a furniture designer, and finally as an architect. At a time when other leading designers were almost all male and mostly members of one movement or another—whether a loose grouping like De Stijl in the Netherlands, or a formal one such as the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne—she remained staunchly independent.

Her design style was as distinctive as her way of working, and Gray developed an opulent, luxuriant take on the geometric forms and industrially produced materials used by the International Style designers, such as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies van der Rohe, who shared many of her ideals. Her voluptuous leather and tubular steel Bibendum Chair and clinically chic E-1027 glass and tubular steel table are now icons of the International Style.

If we adapt for individual man with his desires, his passions and tastes, then we will adapt the best of social life and the collective order. Art is based on customs, but not on the fleeting or, better-said, artificial customs created by fashion. What is needed is to give the object the form that best suits the spontaneous gesture or instinctive reflex that corresponds to it in view of its destiny. EILEEN GRAY