Eyre de Lanux

A cabinet attributed to Eyre de Lanux and Seizo Sugawara preserves an artistic partnership in its very description. Made around 1930 for Jan Heiliger’s Paris apartment, it combines lacquer, textured lacquer, and patinated bronze fittings. The object’s history makes de Lanux visible through work commissioned, fabricated, and used. Sugawara’s shared attribution also prevents the designer’s reputation from absorbing the labor of another artist.

Born Elizabeth Eyre in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1894, she studied at New York’s Art Students League. In 1918, while working in the Foreign Press Bureau of the Committee on Public Information, she met the French writer Pierre Combret de Lanux. They married that year. Her subsequent European life included artistic study and work in painting, decoration, and writing. The marriage gave her the surname under which much of that work is catalogued.

De Lanux developed an important design partnership with the English carpet designer Evelyn Wyld. Their work appeared in Parisian exhibitions associated with decorative arts and modern design. Sara Shields-Rivard’s scholarly study explicitly identifies them as romantic partners as well as collaborators, examining their interiors and furnishings within the opportunities and constraints faced by queer women between the wars. Its abstract locates their principal design production in 1928–1932. The relationship therefore has evidence beyond the fact of a shared commission. [2,3]

The cabinet belongs to this professional world, in which clients, craftspeople, materials, and exhibition societies mattered. An attribution and a commission do not establish a whole workshop’s organization, but they provide concrete questions for research: who designed, who executed, how an object was sold, and whose name survived in its provenance. De Lanux’s independent career requires those questions alongside the recovery of her intimate life. [1,3]

Natalie Clifford Barney was among her lovers in the 1920s, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s interpretation of Romaine Brooks’s Chasseresse. The museum proposes de Lanux as a possible sitter for that 1920 painting while explicitly leaving the identification unsettled. Those statements must remain separate: a supported relationship does not make an uncertain portrait certain. The image can accompany the biography only with that qualification.

Her papers widen the record considerably. The Archives of American Art describes correspondence with Pierre, Barney, and Paolo Casagrande, whom its finding aid identifies as her lover. It also preserves letters involving her daughter Anne Strong, known as Bikou. Sixty-four diaries extend from 1922 to 1988, but the catalogue specifies a substantial gap between 1927 and 1947, apart from certain notebooks. A long archival date range consequently does not promise an uninterrupted account of these relationships.

An additional Smithsonian correspondence description explicitly identifies Aragon and Drieu La Rochelle as lovers. That institutional identification strengthens the research lead, while dates and the underlying letters remain unexamined. No Brooks affair is established here.

Writing remained part of her practice. The collection includes manuscripts, research on Tobias Lear, and material for an autobiographical project. After her death in 1996, family donations helped preserve this heterogeneous record. De Lanux illuminates the Constellation through the connections between American education, Parisian design, craft collaboration, marriage, and women’s partnerships. Her life asks to be read through furniture and manuscripts as well as lovers’ letters. [2,5]