Eileen Gray

February 29–March 10, 2020, and October 13–28, 2020 Curated by Cloé Pitiot, Curator of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Contemporary Design at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Organized by Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with Bard Graduate Center Project Directors: Cloé Pitiot and Nina Stritzler-Levine Curatorial Assistant: Emma Cormack (MA ’18)

Support for Eileen Gray was generously provided by Phillips with additional support from the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, the Selz Foundation, Edward Lee Cave, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The exhibition was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The exhibition was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Support for the exhibition catalogue was provided by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown and Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Special thanks to the National Museum of Ireland.

The abrupt closing of the Eileen Gray exhibition due to the Covid-19 pandemic spurred Bard Graduate Center’s Nina Stritzler-Levine, Emma Cormack, and Jesse Merandy to quickly create an online exhibition that included a video tour of the galleries led by Rachael Schwabe (MA ’20), a flipbook of Eileen Gray’s portfolio, installation photography, texts from the exhibition catalogue and gallery

Eileen Gray installation. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

interpretation, in-gallery interactives, digital media, materials for educators including content developed by BGC MA and PhD students, and many other innovative features.

The site preserves and makes accessible the intellectual and creative labor of curators, researchers, educators, and designers. It constitutes a rich resource for scholars and visitors that will remain on BGC’s website indefinitely. Successfully capturing the essence of the exhibition, the online version also enabled the team to move beyond what was possible in BGC’s physical gallery space. It continues to serve as a hub and repository for institutional content, creating a vibrant and extended life for the exhibition.

The online exhibition won praise and extensive recognition in the press; attracted tens of thousands of visitors, including all of its overseas lenders; and demonstrated how BGC can serve a much larger audience, including people across the globe and local neighbors with limited mobility. Indeed, with periodic updates publicized through institutional mailings, newsletters, and events, the site has attracted more than seven thousand visitors from more than eighty countries.

Fortunately, lenders were willing to extend the loan period for the objects in the gallery exhibition, and it was able to reopen for a short time in October 2020 with strict measures in place to protect visitors and Bard Graduate Center faculty, students, and staff from Covid-19. Jason Farago lauded the online exhibition in the New York Times, writing, “I’m impressed with Bard’s conversion of this major show for the web; click on any of the chairs or credenzas in the installation shots, and you’ll discover higher-resolution photographs and thorough contextual materials about her work process and commercial ambitions.” And Martin Filler’s review in the New York Review of Books declared Eileen Gray “a ravishing installation of two hundred objects, many of them great rarities [that] will be long remembered because of its catalogue, admirably edited by Cloé Pitiot and Nina Stritzler-Levine in a tour-de-force of exhaustive research and insightful interpretation.” The publication recently received the Society of Architectural Historians’ 2022 Exhibition Catalogue Award.