Search results for ""Author Peter Adam""

One of the most important designers and architects of the 20th century, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) wielded enormous influence – though often unacknowledged, especially in her lifetime – in a field largely dominated by men. Today, her original furniture sells for dizzying sums and her iconic designs, including the luxurious Bibendum chair and the refined yet functional E.1027 table, are renowned throughout the world. Resolutely independent and frequently underappreciated, Gray evolved from a creator of opulent lacquer furniture into a pioneer of the modernist principle of form following function. Remaining separate from major schools or movements such as Bauhaus and De Stijl, she developed her own distinctive take on the forms and materials favoured by fellow International Style designers such as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies van der Rohe. This definitive new edition of the biography by Peter Adam, the only surviving person to have been close to Gray during her reclusive later years, is a uniquely intimate survey of her life and work. Comprehensively updated and illustrated with material drawn from Gray’s personal archives – correspondence, journals, photographs and architectural sketchbooks – it tells the full story of her life from aristocratic beginnings in Ireland, through the extravagance of Art Deco-era Paris, relationships with lovers, male and female, and her productive years in southern France. It reveals fresh details about her elegant, largely overlooked paintings; tense exchanges with Le Corbusier; and the fate of E.1027, the home that she designed and furnished herself, and which set a new standard for radically modernist living.

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Irish-born designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) is widely known today as a pioneer of both Art Deco and Modernism. In a career spanning nearly 80 years she produced innovative designs for furniture, lighting, carpets, interiors and architecture. Much less well known is that throughout her life as a designer and an architect she never stopped producing small paintings and drawings. This book is the first to focus on Eileen Gray's important but essentially private work as a painter.Eileen Gray considered herself a designer and an architect, not a painter: she viewed her work as a painter with great modesty, treating it as a private occupation and a vehicle for artistic expression during periods when she could not design furniture. Much of her artwork has disappeared, either lost in the Second World War or destroyed by the artist herself. But a body of works on paper, produced between the 1920s and the 1950s, has survived: elegant, geometric drawings and gouaches of muted tonality and subtle power.This book, which reproduces unseen material from the Eileen Gray archive and draws on Gray's correspondence with her niece Prunella Clough on the nature of painting, will be a revelation to her many followers and admirers.

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