Women on Walls: Projection, Anonymity, Envy, and Eileen Gray

This paper studies a little known, newly surfaced collage made by the early-twentieth-century architect and designer Eileen Gray. I am interested in Gray's references to racialized femininity in this work, especially its invocation of Josephine Baker, and what this might tell us about the collage as a form of citational “cutting” and its ethics. I bring to bear on Gray's collage two other, seemingly separate stories, each with its own secrets and surprising revelations—Melanie Klein's work on reparation and the creative impulse, on the one hand, and Le Corbusier's fraught relationship to Gray's architectural creation E-1027 on the other—and trace how the specters of female creativity, Baker, and racialized femininity haunt all three. By triangulating Gray, Le Corbusier, and Klein, we see not only the ghosts of women of color in the machines of modernist innovation but also how the tensions of fame, anonymity, envy, and projection (congealed through the figure of the Black woman) fuel the theorizations of the artist, the architect, and the analyst.