Preparatory to my visit to Dublin, friends with whom I was to stay kept for me an article from the February 25 edition of Irish Times magazine. It was about Eileen Gray, the Irish avant-garde designer who spent most of her life in Paris, and one of whose chairs sold at auction for $27 million in 2009, thus giving a new meaning to the expression “sitting on a fortune.”

The article informed readers that a film was to be made about an episode in Gray’s life, in which she was to be the heroine and Le Corbusier the villain. It goes without saying that I have a prejudice in favor of any film in which Le Corbusier is cast as the villain, but—alas—I fear that this particular film will do more harm than good because its unspoken aesthetic premises are all wrong.

In 1929, Gray built a modernist villa in the South of France with her then-lover, the Romanian architect Jean Badovici. Not only did Le Corbusier subsequently imply that the villa was of his own design, but when he stayed there for a time he covered some of the bare white interior walls with his painting. (There is a photo of him doing so in the nude, in which he looks uncommonly—and appropriately—like kind of inflatable Rubberoid Martian from a children’s science-fiction television series of the Fifties.) The film will portray Le Corbusier as an unscrupulous plagiarist.

Le Corbusier was a talented artist, if of the second or third rank of followers of Picasso, Leger, and Braque, and it seems to me that his efforts gave at least some interest to the otherwise clinical walls of the villa, not so much a machine for living in as a laboratory, but Gray was furious at this act of lèse-majesté, this sullying of the purity of her conception.

The house was called E1027, an appropriately impersonal name in view of its frigid appearance, that could have come from Zamyatin’s futuristic dystopian novel, We; the E stand for Eileen, ten for Jean (J being the tenth letter of the alphabet), two for the B of Badovici and seven for the G of Gray. I think this coy little name adequately reflects the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic level of Gray, Badovici, and Le Corbusier alike.

The villa is very near the sea, and Gray wanted it to look and feel like a ship, adding that the maritime character “arose inevitably from the setting.” In the same way, I suppose, the aeroplane shape of a building that I once saw arose “inevitably” from the fact that the building was the headquarters of an airline; or the open-book shape of the four glass towers of the French Bibliothèque Nationale arose “inevitably” from the nature of the contents of a library. You might as well say that a morgue must be shaped like a coffin, or an abattoir like a side of beef.

The writer of the article in the Irish Times paid a visit to the villa, which is now undergoing restoration after years of neglect and vandalism by squatters (the last owner, Peter Kägi, an alcoholic and drug addict, was murdered there in 1996 by his gardener). Thus modern man pays tribute to a certain kind of modernism.

A few passages of author’s description of the villa are worth pondering:

E1027 is not a large house. Entered from the rear, it seems almost grim. The small hallway, with its stencilled advice to entrez lentement (enter slowly), opens indirectly into a long living-room with a continuous run of steel-framed windows facing the sea. The small stove-like fireplace at the end almost looks like an afterthought. . . . The concrete work is quite crude, as if seaside villas should be rough-and-ready. . . . A narrow spiral staircase leads down to the lower level, where there is another bedroom, a second bathroom and rather cramped maid’s room.

This all sounds sufficiently horrible (and the pictures certainly bear out the writer); no one would advertise a house for sale by means of such a description; but the writer cannot bring himself to conclude, dare not conclude, what is obvious from his own description, that the villa as architecture is no good, and is not saved by its supposed originality, which in the absence of other virtues is not itself a virtue. He does not ask by what logic seaside villas should be rough-and-ready. It is true that he says that the view from the roof is magnificent, but it was surely beyond the powers even of a Le Corbusier to ruin the Mediterranean (the coast, of course, was another matter entirely).

I went with one of my friends to the National Museum of Ireland in the Collins Barracks to see its permanent exhibition of the life and work of Eileen Gray. Among the exhibits was a maquette of E1027 that made perfectly clear what a horrible mess the building inevitably was, combining an inhuman baldness of material with an inelegant fussiness of design posing as simplicity, to be built such that it could not age, but only deteriorate. It was, indeed, a building that got what it deserved and “naturally” attracted, as being unfit for human habitation except in extremis, vandalism and squatting.

Gray’s furniture on display seemed to me to rise no higher than the garden or ocean-liner deck variety, or alternatively (in a different style that she embraced) that of the hospital clinic. That there has to be garden and hospital furniture I do not deny; that it can sometimes be shapely I also do not deny. But to live life solely among these objects would be aesthetically and emotionally stunting. It is to live not as an inhabitant of the world, but as an interloper, or as an intruder into it. And I could not help but notice that Gray herself spent most of the latter part of her long life (1878–1976) in the rue Bonaparte, not in the modernist cités by which Paris is now plentifully supplied. If it is possible to be an aesthetic hypocrite, she was clearly one.

The exhibit devoted to her in the National Museum provided what, for me, was a clue to what one might call her aesthetic pathology. She was born in Ireland of upper-class Scottish and English parents; they lived in an elegant and simple Georgian mansion. The photograph suggests that it was an earthly paradise.

Alas, her parents decided to improve it out of existence, and replaced it with a Victorian pile of extraordinary architectural incoherence, insensitivity, and sheer ugliness (though a more human ugliness than that which was to come to pass, with her assistance, in a comparatively few years). When I saw what her parents had done, I think I could understand her rage and her bitterness—and, of course, her resentment at her own impotence to prevent what was an obvious aesthetic sacrilege.

One of the hardest tasks for human beings is to get things into proportion: not to take their own frustrations for the problems of the whole world. Some people never achieve this sense of proportion; it is always tempting not to do so, and flattering to the sense of one’s own importance. There is no self-importance equal to that of supposing that one’s own problems are the only problems that there are.

If there is one word that comes to mind on looking at the Victorian house that replaced the Georgian one of Gray’s early childhood it is kitsch. Whatever the achievements of the Victorians, there can be little doubt that they were capable of kitsch on a very grand scale; and one dreads to think of what the furnishings of the new house must have been like, combining elaborate soft furnishings and excessive ornamentation with discomfort and the perfect environment for the house-dust mite.

How easy, then, it would be for an egotistical and mediocre mind to conclude from this that any form of ornamentation was henceforth to be eschewed, and to become in the process a Savonarola of minimalism, ascribing evil not to the sensuousness of art itself, as did Savonarola, but to ornamentation or representation of any description. Art itself could remain in existence, but it ought to become a form of totalitarianism, as is only too evident in E1027, shorn of any element of ornamentation. The necessary and sufficient condition of being a true artist was to be virulently oppositional to what had gone before (that is why Le Corbusier once described E1027 as “witty,” as if it were a commentary or satire on something). The false tenderness, the sentimentality, of Victorian art was to be combated by a denial that there could be true tenderness, true sentiment. It was out of the frying pan, as it were, not into the fire but into the refrigerator.

The sheer aesthetic tawdriness of Eileen Gray’s work (notwithstanding the astronomical price it now commands, itself an interesting commentary on the state of the world, or, at any rate, on the taste of its wealthy) is all too evident from the display in the Irish National Museum. The lack of any quality that might allow it to transcend its period, and that instead keeps it stuck forever in that dullest of all categories, remarkable for its time, is likewise obvious. Two questions remain: why the work of this designer should now be so revered, and why the author of the article in the Irish Times should not have drawn the obvious inference about E1027 from his own observations.

The answer to the first is that Eileen Gray’s neurotic fear of kitsch was far from being hers alone, though it had perhaps as understandable an origin in her case as can well be imagined. This fear is now a general one among metropolitan elites, who would rather live in a permanently sterile environment of cream and white than risk committing kitsch, the worst of all aesthetic crimes. Unsure of their own taste or powers of discrimination, their minimalism is in dialectical relationship with their fear of kitsch, or more precisely of being seen to like kitsch. And Eileen Gray, while she may be dated, is as antithetical to kitsch as one can get.

In not following his own aesthetic instinct, the writer of the article in the Irish Times demonstrated that he accepted, at least implicitly, the Whig interpretation of art history: though, if there is one field of human endeavour in which the Whig interpretation, that the past is an ascent to the glorious and enlightened present, is not valid, or even remotely plausible, it is art. For he accepts without demur that if Le Corbusier plagiarized Eileen Gray, and did not acknowledge his debt to her, some terrible injustice had been done to her memory: in the same way as, say, Ethel Douglas Hume claimed that Louis Pasteur committed a terrible injustice to the memory of Antoine Béchamp by plagiarizing him and claiming the glory that was properly his. But Le Corbusier’s modernism and the germ theory of disease are not in the same category at all. One made the world a far healthier place, the other uglified and possibly brutalized it. Not every fashion represents progress; and therefore not every forerunner is to be praised as such.

My Irish friend said that another reason for the journalist’s terror in the face of his own, obviously suppressed, aesthetic judgment had its origin in the still tender national pride of a small country. For this pride, it was sufficient that an Irish woman (albeit one who lived only her childhood and adolescence in Ireland) was in the avant garde of a vast international movement or tendency; for such a pride, the question of whether the movement or tendency was for good or ill was of little importance. On this view, the future was its own justification, irrespective of what it contained, and the question of demonstrable antecedence was of far more importance than that of the value of what was anteceded.

Those, said Tocqueville, who seek in freedom anything other than freedom itself are destined for slavery; to which we might add that those who seek in beauty anything other than beauty itself are destined for ugliness. And so it comes about that many ingenious lovely things are gone . . . in Ireland as elsewhere, certainly not least of all England, sacrificed to the great god Future.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 Number 1, on page 34
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