[The Centre Pompidou retrospective on Eileen Gray] begins with the exquisite lacquerwork Gray made in the early 1900s after discovering the craft as a painting student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She then studied art in Paris, and persuaded her wealthy mother to buy her an apartment there, which would be her home for the rest of her life. Having forged collaborations with a Japanese lacquer artist, Seizo Sugawara, and a Scottish weaver, Evelyn Wyld, she slowly began to exhibit her work, and to sell it to wealthy collectors. After seeking refuge in London during World War I, Gray returned to Paris, where she and Wyld mixed with a fashionable lesbian circle, including the French singer Marisa Damia, the American artist Romaine Brooks and her lover, the writer Natalie Barney. Many of their friends became clients of Galerie Jean Désert, which Gray opened in 1922 and named after an imaginary male owner “Jean” and her love of the North African desert.