She worked alone – painting, interior design, the Japanese craft of lacquerwork, designing furniture, making rugs, and selling her
wares at her own gallery. It is a strange phenomenon – her talent went unquestioned, her pieces were popular, she had passionate love affairs
with both men and women, yet amid the clamour of her contemporaries, Gray is quiet, industrious. As art critic Brian Dillon writes, “the real
drama was in her work”.
There was also her passion for privacy. By 1926, Gray was searching for a refuge away from the noise of Paris, a place where a
person “can count on being alone”. Engaged in a love affair with the Romanian journalist and architect Jean Badovici who was 15 years her
junior, she bought a coastal plot in his name in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on which to build them a house. The result was E1027 – one of the
most exceptional expressions of modernist architecture ever created.
E1027
