Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé - Christie's

who commissioned several pieces. He in turn
introduced her to a friend, Mme Mathieu-Lévy,
known also by the professional name Suzanne
Talbot in the fashion business, who commissioned
Miss Gray to refurbish and furnish her rue de Lota
apartment. This project, executed around
1920–1922, provided considerable creative
freedom, and the end result – spaces lined with
lacquer panels as a setting for furniture forms of
extraordinary refinement and inventiveness – was
confident and magical and attracted attention as
one of the most notable Paris interiors of its day,
featuring in Feuillets d’Art in February-March 1922
and later in American Harper’s Bazaar. Two of the
pieces in the collection of Saint Laurent and Bergé,
the Dragons armchair and the enfilade, are from
this important provenance.
Miss Gray’s interests moved in fresh directions in
the early twenties. She became increasingly drawn
to emerging ideas in architecture that pursued a
new technical and stylistic language – the
Modernist architectural vision of utopian,
technologically progressive construction, and its
furniture counterpart of functionalist materials
and forms. Gray’s innate instinct for the expressive
gave great individuality to the experimental, overtly
functionalist pieces that she developed in this new
idiom. Her hanging light of diminishing discs and
cones is a perfect instance of this ability to infuse
everything she designed, however apparently
simple, with her unique visual eloquence.
P.G.
The Dragons armchair in situ in the apartment of Mme Mathieu-Lévy as redecorated by Paul Ruaud
Published in L’Illustration in 1933
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