Although Ireland has belatedly made great efforts to reclaim Eileen Gray, it cannot be said that the designer ever showed much interest in the country of her birth.
Early last century, Gray moved to Paris, settling there permanently in 1906 and visiting the family home near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford for the last time in 1919, after the death of her mother. It was only in 1973, three years before her own demise, that Gray's origins were acknowledged with her election as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland.
Stressing her apparent indifference to this country is necessary because, as Caroline Constant repeatedly points out, Gray showed little interest in national concerns but drew her inspiration from a diverse variety of international sources: the brilliance of the ballets russes; the refinement of French luxury goods manufacturers; the social concerns of Germany's Werk bund movement; and particularly the design philosophy of the Romanian architect and critic Jean Badovici.
The last of these was, from Constant's perspective, the most important, since her book concentrates primarily on Gray as an architect rather than a designer and producer of furniture. However, despite the author's best efforts, two problems arise with this approach, the first being that Gray herself saw little difference between the interior and exterior of a building, between the minutiae of decoration and the overall structure. The essays and dialogues which she co-authored with Badovici for his periodical L'Architecture Vivante, repeatedly emphasise Gray's interest in paying attention to every part of the whole in good design. This is what always marked her own products: nothing about their production or finish was left to chance. Her very best pieces, such as an architect's cabinet in sycamore with chrome handles or an aluminium and cork dressing cupboard, show that Gray hated to waste space and showed an abiding preoccupation with discovering new storage possibilities.
A more fundamental difficulty in considering Gray the architect lies in the fact that she built very little and that among the handful of finished buildings with which she was associated, only two can be entirely ascribed to her. Even E.1027, the Roquebrune-Cap Martin house with which she is most famously associated, was the outcome of a collaboration with Badovici for whom it was built. Constant makes valiant claims for Gray being the predominant partner in this work, but the evidence for this remains insufficient for any final judgment on the two designers' respective contributions to be made. Hopelessly shy and self-effacing, Gray only began to stake her claim to E.1027 relatively late in life when Badovici, as well as Le Corbusier who "defaced" the interior with a series of murals, were dead.
Constant's arguments on behalf of her subject could be more clearly articulated and the text contains far too many absurd pontifications such as the statement that Gray's work "is consistently grounded in her conception of the modern individual as a sentient being", with its implication that non-moderns are non-sentient. But still more dissatisfying is the book itself; for a work on a central figure of 20thcentury design, it is a shocking example of poor design, with a thin mean typeface used throughout, muddy reproductions and scarcely legible captions. Readers seeking a clearer guide to the life and work of Gray would do better to acquire a copy of Peter Adam's 1987 biography of the designer. Originally published in 1987, an updated paperback edition of the book has just been issued by Thames & Hudson (£16.95 in the UK). It is, by the way, Adam's own collection of Gray memorabilia which the National Museum acquired last summer and which is due to go on show in the institution's Collins Barracks premises next autumn.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist and author. His book After a Fashion: a History of the Irish Fashion Industry, was published last year by Town House