Introduction

Introduction This book examines the intersections between histories of communication, European architectural modernity and sapphic modernity to understand the role that mediations of domestic space played in the creation, circulation and contestation of sexuality during the early part of the twentieth century. Sapphic modernity studies have shown that the historical and conceptual achievement of a static and stubbornly persistent lesbian identity resulted from the wide circulation of photographs of Radclyffe Hall in the mass media coverage of the 1928 obscenity trials of her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).1 Architectural historians have shown that the apparently unified identity of modernist architecture resulted from a similar mass media reduction of several building styles and aesthetics into one highly circulated advertising image.2 Indeed, communication technologies have played central and similar roles in the creation of both a lasting modernist architectural canon and a pathologized mannish lesbian identity. It is with this centrality in mind that I analyse the private architectural and design works of Eileen Gray in relation to other sapphic modernist configurations of domestic space during the early part of the twentieth century. In the chapters that follow, I focus specifically on the points of overlap between Gray’s work and Romaine Brooks’ early paintings (1910–13), Radclyffe Hall’s novel and highly publicized trials and finally Djuna Barnes’ dense and non-communicative novel Nightwood (1937). I argue that a distinctive resistance to communication technologies, as well as to the publicity, clarity and immediate communicability that they promised at the time, was characteristic of non-heterosexual women’s visual, literary and architectural renderings of private space. Sapphic modernist designs on domestic space introduce us to a cultural history of female sexual dissidence that resisted the lesbian identity produced by modern media of communication. The ongoing story of Gray’s first built house provides a compelling introduction to Gray’s unusual work and its long history of neglect and abuse, 2 eileen gray and the design of sapphic modernity I.1 E.1027, view from the sea, 1928. Reproduced with the kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland. as well as its recent rediscovery and the increasing amount of critical interest it has been receiving. In 1928, after nearly 20 years of working on interior design in Paris and about four years informally studying architecture, at the age of 50 Gray completed her first intricately designed house, E.1027, on an isolated ocean-front plot of land in the south of France (Figure I.1). By 1938, Le Corbusier, perhaps the most influential figure in European modernist architecture, had painted a total of eight murals on the walls of E.1027. Gray’s biographer writes of the murals as an act of sexual violence: “It was a rape. A fellow architect, a man she admired, had without her consent defaced her design.”3 Le Corbusier’s uncanny interest in her house led him, in 1952, to build himself a small hut on E.1027’s property line, directly overlooking her space. He would eventually come to occupy the site, living out his last eight years there before drowning in the waters off its shore. Beatriz Colomina first told this story in 1993, when she suggested that Le Corbusier’s peculiar “war” on Gray’s architecture was related to both her gender and her non- heterosexuality.4 This one short article, republished at least three more times,5 has been extremely influential in the fields of feminist architectural and interior design history, and has prompted my own years of research on Gray introduction 3 and what relation her work may have had with female sexual dissidence in the early part of the twentieth century. This book was first motivated by the question of what there was in Gray’s architecture and design that provoked Le Corbusier’s obsessive, invasive and sexualized violence. Did Gray build some threatening non-heterosexuality into E.1027? How would a house communicate sexuality? And what would it mean to communicate female sexual dissidence at a time before the word “lesbian” had accrued a stable referent, when female masculinities and same-sex desire were not yet read as indications of identity? That is, how could architecture and design communicate something that was not really communicable? In order to answer these questions, I focus on Gray’s work in the context of not only the cultures and discourses of European architectural and design modernity with which she critically engaged, but also the cultures and discourses of sapphic modernity from which these criticisms emerged and the technologies and strategies of communication by which they were articulated. Up to the most recent publication of Colomina’s article, in 1996, she could write that “Gray’s name does not figure, even as a footnote, in most histories of modern architecture, including the most recent and ostensibly critical ones,”6 and E.1027 was still deteriorating through years of neglect and vandalism. Her contributions to modern architecture and design were quite literally buried beneath the famous male architects of her time.7 However, the status of Gray and her work has changed considerably. By 2001, E.1027 had been declared a monument historique, with efforts towards its restoration being supported by the French government as well as by a coalition of architectural historians, art historians and museum curators calling themselves “Friends of E.1027” (and counting Colomina herself among its influential advocates). By 2003, Lynne Walker could write that “Eileen Gray’s status has never been higher … she has achieved canonical status in architectural history.”8 As Walker points out, several reassessments of Gray’s work have been published since 1968, and her work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, catalogues and articles and two important books from Caroline Constant.9 The story of domestic violence at E.1027 “is a now well-known dominance gesture,” and Walker speculates that Gray may by now be the feminist “heroine.”10 But despite this recent resurgence of interest in her work, until 2007 E.1027 was still crumbling, and restoration efforts stalled over the question of what to do with Le Corbusier’s murals, which have remained eerily precise and intact (Figure I.2). As of 2008, work was finally underway to restore the house to its original 1928 condition, with the exception of the murals, which will be preserved (and the restorations are scheduled to be completed by 2011). In spite of the notoriety of this story, and the extent of feminist investment in it, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity is the first book to explore the insight it might give us into the gendered and sexual implications of 4 eileen gray and the design of sapphic modernity I.2 E.1027, living room with Le Corbusier mural (1938), 2004. Gray’s work, modern architecture or early twentieth-century configurations of domestic space more generally. Le Corbusier’s violence at E.1027 has functioned, Colomina argues, to efface not only Gray’s name and work but also her sexuality from the history of modern architecture,11 and continuing to ignore, dismiss or obscure her non-heterosexuality risks perpetuating this initial act of violence. This book, thus, sets out to account for Gray’s contributions to the European cultural history of sapphic modernity – constituted by a loose network of women, including Brooks, Hall and Barnes, whose creative works and communities cultivated the intimate connection between sexual dissidence and modernity itself. A growing field of research in the field of sapphic modernity has shown that for women, before the media advent and wide circulation of a stable and criminal lesbian identity, becoming non-heterosexual was synonymous with becoming modern.12 The idea of an alternate modernist movement and culture, organized primarily around early twentieth-century women writers, centred primarily on Gray’s Left Bank neighborhood in Paris and bound essentially by “all forms of lesbian experience,” was first theorized as “Sapphic modernism” by Shari Benstock.13 In the past 20 years, the theory has been challenged, expanded introduction 5 and revised perhaps most influentially by Doan as sapphic modernity – a framework through which to account for a variety of women’s experiences and expressions of modernity and same-sex desire. As Doan explains, Mellifluence aside, “Sapphic” efficaciously denotes same-sex desire between women and, at the same time, because it is less familiar to us today, reminds us that the “lesbian,” as a reified cultural concept or stereotype, as,w prior to the 1928 obscenity trials, as yet unformed in English culture beyond an intellectual elite.14 While Doan concentrates specifically on England, in the more recently published Sapphic Modernities, historians of modernism use this theoretical framework to explore a range of topics, from smoking to driving to portraiture to spirituality, in different contexts across England, France and Australia.15 While none of the authors included focuses on Gray or early twentieth- century architecture, Bridget Elliott’s essay on the art deco interior designs of two couples, Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, and Evelyn Wyld and Eyre de Lanux (with whom Wyld collaborated after working with Gray), points to exciting possibilities for scholarship on Gray.16 Elliott acknowledges that “despite the fact that one couple remained life-long partners, these women

Load more