The armchair distills all that was so personal and so magical in the first, intimately expressive phase of Miss Gray's career — surprising, imaginative, subtly sculpted and crafted, it is a masterpiece of invention and execution.
In February 2009, the estate of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge came up for auction in Paris, achieving an astounding 373 million euros for their artworks, furniture, decorative objects and more. The top three most expensive items sold were a Matisse still life, a Brancusi sculpture and an Eileen Gray armchair. Though the first two are by artists that are practically household names, Eileen Gray, the Irish-born designer, is lesser-known except in niche circles. Here we look back on her phenomenal career and the record-breaking chair that encapsulates her legacy.
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Eileen Gray (1878-1976) grew up surrounded by art and culture, with a Scottish father who was a painter and a mother who was a baroness. She split her upbringing between London and her family's country home in Ireland, and in 1900, enrolled at the Slade School, the art school of University College London. While at Slade, she was first exposed to the art of lacquering furniture, an Asian art of applying a liquid sap to wood to create a glossy surface. After spending time in both Paris and London, Gray settled in Paris in 1910 and opened a lacquer workshop with Japanese lacquer specialist Seizo Sugawara. Though lacquer at this time was used primarily for restoring old works, Gray pioneered the use of it for new furniture design.
Her breakthrough commission came in 1917 when society hostess Madame Juliette Mathieu-Levy (milliner of hat brand Suzanne Talbot) hired her to decorate her 16th arrondissement apartment in Paris. The apartment was featured in the 1920 edition of Harper's Bazaar, who wrote that it was 'thoroughly modern although there is much feeling for the antique'. Gray re-imagined the apartment in Art Deco style, and it featured some of her best known furniture designs, such as the Bibendum chair, inspired by the Michelin Man, the Pirogue day bed and the Dragons armchair.
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Dragons is a summation of many of Gray's earliest inspirations. By the time she started working on the chair in 1917, she had been exposed to and working with lacquer for over 15 years. For this piece, she lacquered it by hand and later spent days polishing the piece. The dragon in Chinese culture is the highest-ranking creature, and is associated with the emperor and therefore, power and good fortune. The two arms of the chair are made of stylised dragons in wood lacquer, combining ancient Chinese principles with a modern vision.
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'The armchair distills all that was so personal and so magical in the first, intimately expressive phase of Miss Gray's career -surprising, imaginative, subtly sculpted and crafted, it is a masterpiece of invention and execution', wrote Christie's in the lot essay. 'The dragon has a history in Chinese iconography as a symbol of strength and goodness, with the power to protect and to guard.'
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The chair was part of the apartment until 1971 when it was purchased by Parisian art dealer Cheska Vallois, who then sold it to Yves Saint Laurent in 1973. Saint Laurent had already purchased Gray's Le Destin, a four-panel lacquered screen, the year prior, a sale that had revitalised interest in her work. This coincided with the first retrospective of her work Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design, that was held in London, followed by another exhibit in Dublin in 1973.
At this point, however, Eileen Gray was in her late 90s and she wasn't best known for her furniture. In the 1920s she had met and fallen in love with a Romanian architect named Jean Badovici and had dedicated herself to learning the tenets of architecture. In 1926, she bought land in the South of France, near Monaco, and started designing and building a home for the two of them that they named E-1027. It was built in the modernist open-floor style championed by Le Corbusier, who was also a frequent visitor to the home and even painted murals on the walls in the late 1930s, an act that Gray considered vandalism. Although Gray later designed other homes in the South of France, E-1027 is her most famous architectural accomplishment and today is open to the public.
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Today, her furniture has achieved multi-million dollar sale prices at auction houses and has brought the previously unknown designer back in the spotlight. When Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge's estate came up for auction in 2009, her Dragons armchair from her first major commission sold for €21.9 million (£19.5 million), almost ten times the pre-auction estimate of €2-3 million. It was sold back to Cheska Vallois, who bought it on behalf of the new owner.
See also: 8 Artists Inspired by the South of the France
Multiple other of Gray's designs have passed the million-dollar mark, including a sideboard also owned by YSL that sold for £3.5 million in 2009 and a suspension satellite chandelier that sold for £3.1 million.
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Considered a pioneer of the mid-century modern movement, Eileen Gray invented a new aesthetic language that paid homage to the past, as with her fascination with lacquer early on. Her later designs became far more industrial and utilitarian in design, but her early pieces featured opulent materials and ornate craftsmanship. Dragons, the world's most expensive chair, is a testament to her command of lacquerware and an exemplar of Art Deco design. Its high price at auction also shows a greater interest in the decorative arts at auction.
