University of Virginia Library

The Art Deco Book in France

1. The Livre d'Art OF THE 1920S

I should begin by explaining my choice of topic. Three years ago I wrote a two-volume survey called The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914, which was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library drawn largely from my own collection. In my Introduction I noted that the terminal date had prevented me from dealing with my Art Deco books, which I hoped one day to make "the basis for a small sequel to this history" (1: xxxi). These lectures form the promised sequel.

Once I set to work, however, I discovered the drastic inadequacy of what I had collected. Now, notable Art Deco books, especially in decorated bindings of the period, have never been readily available for examination even in France. Since the dispersal of the late Francis Kettaneh's collection, which provided the backbone of the Grolier Club's exhibition of French Art Deco illustration in 1968, they are still less accessible in the United States. But I persisted, and with the assistance of various institutions and private collectors, I have managed to cover the field. My particular indebtedness is to the Spencer Collection in the New York Public Library, the Frank Altschul Collection at Yale, the Morgan Gunst Collection at Stanford, and the remarkable assemblage of books illustrated by the pochoir process still in the process of formation by Charles Rahn Fry of New York City. These holdings will allow me to display and comment on much unique material in the form of drawings, proofs, and especially bindings.

I can at least claim that my subject is a timely one. The rediscovery of Art Deco in general, which has been proceeding with increasing fervor

for at least 15 years, has gradually made its impression on book collecting. For some time past collectors and institutions concerned with French illustrated books and fine bindings of the 1920s and to a lesser extent the 1930s have found themselves in competition with enthusiasts from the art world who seek these volumes as examples of the Art Deco style. A book created by Schmied in a binding by Cretté with a lacquered panel by Dunand or Jean Toulet's Contre rimes illustrated by Laboureur in a binding by Rose Adler now seems as worthy of a place in their collections as does a cabinet by Ruhlmann or a glass figurine by Lalique. When enterprising auction houses recognized this development by including illustrated books and bindings in their Art Deco catalogues, collectors of Art Deco objects pushed prices to a level that was often several times as high as that to which bibliophiles were accustomed. Soit has come about that notable Art Deco books are now vying with the most esteemed livres de peintre at the top of the international auction market.

These developments have had their impact on rare book sales generally. Parisian dealers, while setting their prices as usual at a point just below that at which no customer would consider buying, remain unexcited. Having dealt continuously with illustrated books of the 1920s since these volumes began to appear, they have their considered views regarding such wares. Moreover, they know how extensive the reserve supply of them must be. Among dealers elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, however, there has been a disposition to move these books up to the level established at Art Deco auctions.

This practice would be legitimate enough, given the importance of Art Deco in the evolution of styles, if the material so offered in fact represented it. But most French illustrated books of the 1920s were largely untouched by Art Deco, just as many decorated morocco bindings of the period were executed by craftsmen who continued to work in an earlier tradition. Moreover, a considerable proportion of the abundant productions of the time, including some of the most elaborate and pretentious, were ill-conceived and poorly carried out. Deprived of the sheltering cloak of Art Deco, most illustrated books of the 1920s require to be appraised individually, with drastically lowered expectations. In view of these conditions, a survey of the field, however tentative and incomplete, would appear to have some practical usefulness.

My perspective is that of a collector who for many years has endeavored to find out as much as he could about French illustrated books of the last three centuries. Concerning the volumes of the 1920s the sources of information for the most part are contemporary with the period itself, since these books haven't as yet attracted much attention from modern

students. The only general survey remains Raymond Hesse's Le livre d'après guerre et les sociétés de bibliophiles, 1918-1928 (1928). Also helpful is volume 7 (1929), devoted to the book, of the Rapport général de l'exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, Paris, 1925. For illustration the standard work is Léopold Carteret's Letrésor du bibliophile: livres illustrés modernes, 1875 à 1945, 5 volumes (1946-48), though Clément-Janin's Essai sur la bibliophilie contemporaine de 1900 à 1928, 2 volumes (1931-32) is more enlightening from a critical standpoint. On fine binding during the 1920s there has been modern work of importance, but the only comprehensive treatment is still E. de Crauzat's La reliure française de 1900 à 1925 (1932). Then there are the several periodicals of the period devoted to books and bookcollecting, particularly Le bibliophile, Byblis, and Plaisir de bibliophile,and more marginally magazines of broader scope like Art et décorationand Arts et métiers graphiques. All of these have proved useful, but of course my main source has been the illustrated books themselves.

I propose to limit my account of the Art Deco book in France to the 1920s, or at least to the years 1919 to 1930. This decade was its heyday, the years which saw the appearance of most of the best work of its representative masters. Moreover, the period saw the reemergence of the livre d'art, as the fine illustrated book for collectors was then called, on a quite unprecedented scale. This crescendo of production led to notable achievements as well as deplorable follies and concluded with a catastrophic debacle. I shall thus be dealing with a self-contained episode in the history of book collecting, an episode which embodies some of the elements of high drama.

The world of fine illustrated books before the first World War was flourishing but limited. Its requirements were met by perhaps 15 publishers, and its clientele hardly extended beyond a few hundred collectors, most of them well-to-do men of affairs. Prominent on the scene were the Societies of Bibliophiles, under whose aegis were published many of the best books of the time in editions of from 75 to 150 copies. A relatively small number of illustrators, printers, and binders served the needs of what in the perspective of later developments came to seem almost a closed circle. Nonetheless, superb books appeared, though it is true that a few of the most outstanding were published by outsiders such as Ambroise Vollard.[1]

The conditions imposed by the first World War laid a virtual embargo on the publication of livres d'art. The apparatus that produced them fell apart, the collectors who acquired them had other preoccupations,

and even the materials necessary to their making, like fine paper, were not available. Nonetheless, people went on reading, and by Armistice Day four years of scrubby volumes on bad paper had built up a powerful longing for decently produced books of any sort. Looking back in 1929 Georges Grappe remembered how "a sort of mysterious enthusiasm seized upon the elect and made them cherish the Book with an almost ferocious tenderness, that symbol of `values' which, more than all others, were at risk during the bitter conflict."[2] Among bibliophiles this passion took the form of a hunger for livres d'art, which the small available reserve of pre-War volumes could not begin to assuage. So it happened that there poured into this once restricted preserve what Clément Janin described as "a torrent of books under which the largest private libraries are being submerged."[3]

The hectic aspects of Paris during the 1920s which caused the decade to be called les années folles will figure in my chronicle chiefly as they are reflected in the work of George Barbier. Yet the temper of the age does much to explain the conditions which governed the publication of livres d'art. If rampant prosperity combined with a post-War release from inhibitions to encourage the pursuit of pleasure, these factors stimulated as well an eager desire for luxurious possessions, among them fine books. Nor did bourgeois prudence provide an effective check, since the soundness of the franc was an open question. One observer estimated, indeed, that the public for livres d'art grew ten-fold after the War.[4] Clément-Janin discerned three kinds of enthusiasts in this "prodigious development" of book collecting: (1) major collectors prepared to spend 1000 to 5000 francs on a livre d'art limited to 150 copies or fewer, (2) middle-range collectors who would pay up to 500 francs for a book limited to not more than 500 or 600 copies, and (3) lesser collectors able to spend 40 to 100 francs for mass-produced illustrated books in editions of not more than 3000 copies (2: 152-153). Not only were these new collectors numerous and diverse, for the most part they were also undemanding. As long as the mandatory features of the livre d'art were present—special paper, illustrations, and a limited edition—they were easily satisfied.

Attracted by this large and ready market, publishers multiplied apace, and so did the books they published. Among those protesting against this incontinence was the art critic Jacques Deville, who permitted himself the following tirade:

New publishers are springing up like mushrooms. So much for the time in which they formed a closed corporation of learned men. Publishing has opened itself up to some 50 bold apprentices who throw themselves into the career without the faintest notion of the difficulties which must be surmounted to achieve success: seeking out the illustrators among artists, finding texts which suit them; ensuring that they realize the value in these texts while respecting their own originality; laying out the plan of the book, its architecture, and its decoration; locating suitable materials—paper, inks, colors—and checking prices the while; choosing the printers and craftsmen who will put these materials to use and supervising their work in detail. . . .[Before the War Edouard Pelletan had claimed that a notable publisher could leave behind him "a renown equal to that of great artists."] No such ambition stirs many of these new publishers who dream of money, not reputation. Unrestrained by modesty—or by taste, knowledge, and conscience—they abandon themselves to a flood of publications which swamp the market. Their only preoccupation is to sell.[5]

With the field of book illustration so vastly enlarged, many new artists were drawn into it. These recruits were of uneven quality, as Raymond Hesse demonstrates from the example of books with original wood engravings, for some years after the War the kind of illustration most in favor with collectors. Though illustrators like Louis Jou, Carlègle, and Hermann-Paul produced work of distinction, wood engravings, which can be printed conjointly with text, were also the least expensive adornment that was acceptable in collectors' books, and when publishers avid for profit employed journeymen artists, untrained in the craft, the results were usually lamentable (pp. 150-151).

In his book of 1927 on 19th and 20th century livres d'art, Hesse drew a devastating picture of the contemporary publishing scene. A year later, when he wrote a volume entirely concerned with the post-War book, he had been led by further study to this more balanced comparison of the pre-War and post-War book:

One final element in the collecting scene of the 1920s needs to be considered, the extent to which it was affected by speculation. Like other valuable objects, livres d'art could be seen as a hedge against inflation. As in our own time, a collector who bought on publication a book which

subsequently became rare and valuable could sell it for a profit. But a dealer writing in 1927 explains why such transactions were rarely carried out systematically. Collectors soon discovered that the price at which a dealer would buy a book from them was only a fraction of the price at which he would offer it for sale. Unless they could afford the time and money required to build a library worthy of dispersal at auction, where prices approximated the market level, the apparent appreciation of their collection was hard to realize. Again, dealers themselves rarely purchased livres d'art in quantity. They were expensive, and they could not be returned for refunds like ordinary editions. Without a large capital, stockpiling was not feasible.[7] It seems likely that the effect of actual speculation on the rare book market of the period has been exaggerated.

Yet this is not the whole story. Even if the possessors of livres d'artwere not conscious speculators, they went on collecting in part because they had more faith in their books than in a declining franc. This judgment seemed to be confirmed in 1928 when the franc was devalued by 4/5ths (from 19.3 to 3.92 cents) yet the value of livres d'art did not diminish. So it was that, despite uncertainties and reverses, the growth of book production and collecting continued unabated. As late as 1928 Clément-Janin expressed "an absolute faith in the persistence of the movement which has carried book collecting to its current flourishing state." To his mind its soundness had been demonstrated during the great monetary crisis wherein was achieved "that profound transformation, that union of the aesthetic and the financial, . . . [which] makes contemporary book collecting durable" (2: 197, 199).

By the winter of 1930-31, before these words were published, the world-wide depression heralded by the Wall Street crash of 1929 had struck France as well. In the first issue of Le bibliophile for February 1931, Marcel Valotaire wrote despairingly of "this crisis of the livre d'art,the very idea of which weighs heavily on the mind as much of collectors as of printers, publishers, and book-sellers" (p. 31). It had been discovered that in these desperate times the world of rare books was doubly vulnerable. If automobiles ceased to sell, it was because the market was saturated, not because the product was unsatisfactory. The years since The War, however, had seen an absurd multiplication of alleged livres d'art,the work of untrained publishers, designers, and illustrators. While money was plentiful, undiscriminating collectors had freely bought these regrettable productions. But now the book trade was faced with a comprehensive failure of confidence, with an accompanying "disgust, disdain, repudiation by purchasers in the face of the poor, or at least doubtful

EN ÉCOUTANT SATIE

1920

MODES ET MANIÈRES D'AUJOURD'HUI

Pl. XI

PLATE 1. Robert Bonfils, plate from Modes et manières d'aujourd'hui, 9e anné, 1920,[1922] (1.18). Reproduced from Charles Rahn Fry's copy, now in the Charles Rahn Fry Pochoir Collection, Princeton University Library.

PLATE 2. George Barbier, plate from Albert Flament's Personnages de comédie, 1922 (2.16). Reproduced from the original in the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

PLATE 3. François-Louis Schmied, text and vignette from Histoire de la princesse Boudour, translated by J.-C. Mardrus, 1926 (3.24). Reproduced from the original in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

PLATE 4. François-Louis Schmied, plate from La création, translated by J.-C. Mardrus, 1928 (3.30). Reproduced by permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.

PLATE 5. Jean-Émile Laboureur, plate from Jean Valmy-Baysse's Tableau des grands magasins, 1925 (4.27). Reproduced by permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.

PLATE 6. Pierre Begrain, lower doublure in his album of maquettes, 1929 (5.26). Reproduced by permission from the original in the Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

PLATE 7. Rose Adler, upper cover and spine of binding (1931) on Tristan Bernard's Tableau de la boxe, 1922 (5.37). Reproduced by permission from the original in the Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

PLATE 8. François-Louis Schmied, upper cover of binding on Le cantique des cantiques,translated by Ernest Renan, 1925 (5.45). Reproduced from the original in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

quality of the merchandise offered" (pp. 13-32).[8] During the early 1930s, as publishers and book dealers failed, illustrators and printers went without work, and collectors saw the value of their holdings reduced to a fraction of their cost, these recriminations became commonplace. Despite a substantial improvement in the conditions of rare book production and collecting in the years before the second World War, the reputation of the illustrated books of the 1920s never entirely recovered from the debacle of 1930-31.

The history just rehearsed makes it evident that any survey of the livres d'art of the 1920s must begin with the question: what proportion of these hundreds of titles (well over a thousand, indeed, if demi-luxevolumes are included) deserves attention today? The answer is, a considerable number, for if the period produced many bad books, it also produced many good ones. At the risk of seeming arbitrary, I propose several categories of worthy survivors.

Pride of place must be accorded to livres de peintre, though in fact the decade saw the appearance chiefly of lesser works of this kind. Only in 1929 and 1930 did the splendid series of major books with original graphics by great painters, the glory of 20th century French book production, really get under way. Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu de Montparnassewith etchings by Dunoyer de Segonzac was published in the former year, Apollinaire's Calligrammes with lithographs by de Chirico and Eugène Montfort's La belle enfant with etchings by Dufy in the latter.[9] It should be noted that collectors in general were hardly more welcoming to the livre de peintre in the 1920s than they had been before the War. The set of their minds on this topic is exampled in some remarks of Marcel Valotaire, then one of the most knowledgeable and influential of writers on the livre d'art. He wrote of the designs of Laboureur that they are

Then there were the established illustrators who resumed their careers after the War. The most distinguished was Maurice Denis, who

pursued his serene course with a series of books in which his enchanting drawings were engraved and printed in color with perfect fidelity by the Beltrands. Also notable were Edgar Chahine, Paul-Émile Colin, Georges Jeanniot, Charles Jouas, Auguste Leroux, and Bernard Naudin. To these may be added Charles Guérin, a master of lithographic illustration who came into prominence just after the War.

Chahine and Jouas also played important roles in the revival of etching. Notable among the colleagues who joined them in displaying the scenery, the architecture, and to a lesser extent the people of France, sometimes working alone, sometimes banded together in the publications of the Société de Saint Eloi, were Auguste Brouet, P.-A. Bouroux, André Dauchez, Pierre Gusman, and towards the end of the decade, Albert Decaris.

Original wood engraving was even more central than etching to the livre d'art, not only in the illustrations of such men as Carlègle and Hermann-Paul, but also in the more comprehensive contributions of three artist-craftsmen who had been trained as wood engravers, François Louis Schmied, Louis Jou, and Jean-Gabriel Daragnès. The three latter were the leading architectes du livre of the time, that is to say workers capable by themselves of creating all the components of a livre d'art.

As colored illustrations came gradually to predominate over those in black and white in the middle and later 1920s, the ascendancy of Schmied and George Barbier was confirmed, the former as the master craftsman of wood engravings printed in color, and the latter as the supreme color stylist, whether his designs were rendered by engraving or by pochoir.Guy Arnoux, Pierre Brissaud, Umberto Brunelleschi, Pierre Falké, Paul Jouve, Georges Lepape, Charles Martin, André-Édouard Marty, and Sylvain Sauvage also stand out for their work in this line.

A number of artists took as their starting point the rejection of the literal detail favored by most pre-War illustrators. Instead they turned to quick, vivid sketches of contemporary life, often accompanying texts by such new novelists as Francis Carco, Jean Giraudoux, Pierre MacOrlan, and Paul Morand. In this group were Gus Bofa, Chas Laborde, Dignimont, and Vertès. Literal realism was equally repugnant to the artists who imposed individual styles of calculated distortion on their subjects. Laboureur was preeminent here, though he had found a formidable rival in Alexeieff by the end of the decade.

Though the best work of all of these artists still deserves the collector's attention, my consideration must be limited to those among them in whose books the Art Deco style is most pronounced. The three lectures following will accordingly center on Barbier, Schmied, and Laboureur, with a final discourse concerned chiefly with Pierre Begrain, the master

of Art Deco binding. Along the way there will be some discussion of related figures of lesser importance.

Since the incontestable mark of Art Deco in the livre d'art was its emphasis on decoration as opposed to illustration, Schmied's early work, in which the representational element is minimal, offers its purest exemplification. In his later books Schmied supplements decoration with illustration, though he rarely allows the latter to predominate. Abstract decoration was not to Barbier's taste, but throughout his work representational subjects are subordinated to decorative treatment. No doubt his designs are sufficiently striking in conception, but they make their impression above all by their decorative values.

The connection with Art Deco of a third kind of livre d'art, which I shall represent through Laboureur, cannot be made so directly. The book had an important place in the great Exhibition of Decorative and industrial Art held in Paris during 1925. The criterion that dictated the choice of examples to be shown, however, was not so much their decorative qualities as their modernity. Article IV in the general rules of the Exhibition provided that only works of "novel inspiration and real originality"[11] were to be admitted. The French illustrated books displayed had been chosen primarily to demonstrate the variety of techniques and talents of the day. In reviewing these selections the anonymous author of volume 7 of the Rapport général of the Exhibition, that devoted to the book, offers some enlightening comments. While according Schmied more space than any other book-artist, he is at pains to point out at length the surprising ways in which the decorative spirit had affected the vision of other illustrators. "This influence has its part in the tendencies [of the time] towards distortion, in all the liberties that an artist takes with his subject, in the increasingly symbolic character of the design." Moreover, as the pace of modern life grows increasingly rapid, it has to be set down with the briefest of notations. "Accessories are suppressed, the design is reduced to the minimum of lines needed to render it visible at a glance."[12] Laboureur, better than any other book artist of the 1920s, exemplifies these characteristics.

With decorated bookbinding we are back on firmer ground. The work of Pierre Begrain, like that of his numerous imitators, was assertively decorative in nature. Indeed, fine binding during this period was dominated by the growing ascendancy of the Art Deco style after its appeal was demonstrated in the Exhibition of 1925.

With these generalities out of the way, I can turn at last to the books

themselves. My concern during the balance of this lecture will be the steps by which Art Deco book illustration emerged during the years before 1920. If the War had not intervened in 1914, it seems likely that Art Deco would have made its impression on book illustration without further delay. All the elements necessary to its development were in place when the guns of August imposed a five year intermission on this kind of artistic activity, as on nearly all others. The groundwork had been laid by three kinds of publications: design portfolios, magazines and albums devoted to high fashion, and albums about the Ballets Russes or otherwise concerned with dance and the theatre. Finally a few illustrated books had been published in which the main features of Art Deco were already to be found. It will be noted that the names of certain artists recur again and again in the account which follows of these varied productions.

Perhaps Art Deco is displayed in its purest form in the design portfolios of the 1920s. Their plates were executed by pochoir, that is to say, they were illuminated—to use the word favored by Jean Saudé, the master of pochoir—by water color or gouache through the use of stencils. In conception and layout these portfolios can be traced back to the celebrated Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, which appeared in 1856. An important intermediate work was Eugène Grasset's La plante et ses applications ornementales, published in two series in 1896 and 1898. Where Jones had endeavored to classify and illustrate every type of ornament, Grasset turned from man-made inventions to natural forms. His plates, which were drawn by his students, continue Jones's arrangement of several patterns to the page, and they are sometimes varied by the superimposition of objects decorated with these patterns (a vase, a [1.1] pitcher) or shaped in their image (a candlestick, a chair). In the plate shown (first series, plate 66) the object is a mosaic bookbinding.

Grasset's portfolios are a monument to Art Nouveau, exhibiting the various possibilities of flore ornementale. E. A. Séguy's Floréal of 1914 [1.2] also takes its departure from the plant, but as may be seen from plate 17 its designs are adapted with such verve and freedom that the Art Nouveau element has virtually disappeared. Moreover, its pochoir plates, with their subtle gradation of color, exist in a different world from the process reproductions of Grasset's book. A plate (plate 19) from a representative Art Deco portfolio of the 1920s affords a suitable conclusion to this topic. [1.3] Natural objects are still the basis for the drawings in Edouard Bénédictus' Variations of 1923, yet they tend increasingly towards abstract forms, and Saudé's pochoir work, which makes use of a wide gamut of colors including silver, is even richer than that in Floréal. I shall not be returning to

design portfolios, for they can hardly be regarded as illustrated books. It should be stated, nonetheless, that they are both numerous and dazzling. In comparison with their variety and brilliance, indeed, much Art Deco illustration seems pallid and constrained. And of course their large format makes them particularly attractive for exhibition purposes.

The first landmark in the high fashion tradition which led to Art Deco illustration was Les robes de Paul Poiret of 1908. The great couturier, who had left Worth's in 1904 to establish his own firm, was already famous for the uncorsetted freedom of his novel creations, which women everywhere found distinctive and flattering. In commemoration of his success Poiret commissioned Paul Iribe, one of his many artist friends, to prepare a luxurious album devoted to his work. Iribe focussed [1.4] attention on Poiret's gowns by rendering them in pochoir against rudimentary backgrounds of black and white. There is no pretence on the part of the artist that the figures presented are anything but models.

Three years later appeared a still more sumptuous sequel called Les choses de Paul Poiret vues par Georges Lepape. When Poiret asked Lepape to undertake the volume, the young painter brought him four designs, charming in their simplicity, but also intended to depict models. These are reproduced at the end of the album. After he was shown Poiret's creations, however, he was asked to give his fancy free rein, with varied and engaging results that go far beyond a fashion parade. None of his drawings is like any other in conception, but all are linked in style. Lepape renders even better than Iribe the supple elegance that was Poiret's trademark, yet his most striking design is devoted to another [1.5] house specialty, the turban. As Poiret had predicted, the album made Lepape's reputation.

These two albums had been devoted to a single couturier, if admittedly the best known. La gazette du bon ton, which began to appear in 1912 and continued until 1926, though with an intermission of nearly six years following the outbreak of the War, took the whole world of fashion as its province: Doucet, Paquin, Worth, and the rest, as well as Poiret. At the heart of each issue were 10 pochoir plates, but there were also essays, intended to amuse rather than to inform, on various articles of apparel, on the accoutrements of high life, indeed on choses d'élégance in general. There was a monthly review of theatrical costumes and settings, as well as a column of gossip devoted to fashion and good taste. The text of these pieces was made attractive by pochoir vignettes executed as carefully as the plates. In sum, the magazine represented a way of life, however rarefied and specialized.

Lucien Vogel was already known as the editor of Art et décoration

when he decided to launch a magazine which would accomplish for his epoch what the Journal des dames et des modes had done over the years 1797 to 1839, also with colored plates as its chief attraction. Seeking bold and daring collaborators who would see the world with fresh eyes, he looked especially to young painters, and he found the nucleus of his staff in Pierre Brissaud, Georges Lepape, and André-Édouard Marty, who had studied together at the Atelier of Fern and Cormon. Their characteristic note of neo-dandyism was caught many years later by a fellow student, Jean Dulac. Remarking that "their personal elegance, like that of their designs, drew willingly on the past, while not taking it very seriously," he went on to recall that "it was a time when there was a growing preoccupation with putting into all the details of life a note of curious research, when the word amusing tended to replace the word pretty. . . .A cult of literature of the past, a decorative sense, a half-joking wish to imbue everything with an artistic intention, [and] a sometimes ironic taste for the portrayal of polite society made up the program of these young artists."[13] There were other collaborators, among them Barbier, Brunelleschi, Arnoux, and Martin, to whom Dulac's words apply with equal force.

La gazette du bon ton from its origin was one of the most sought after of fashion publications. Its success, of course, was owing principally to its plates, which are not only records of the dress of the time but also fresh and attractive compositions in themselves. Sometimes they have a [1.6] dramatic element as well. In Lepape's design, "Le jaloux: robe du soir de Paul Poiret" (April 1913), a pretty girl is wooed by an admirer while her elderly protector clenches his fist in rage. The vignettes in the text [1.7] are often true illustrations, as is the case with the scenes from Boris Gudonovwith which Marty illustrates an article on the Ballets Russes of June 1913 (pp. 246-247). Altogether, the style and format of La gazette du bon ton presage what the Art Deco book would become when freed from the fashion straight-jacket.

A second significant fashion publication of the period was the almanac Modes et manières d'aujourd'hui, a slim annual with 12 pochoirplates. Each of its three pre-War volumes had a different illustrator:Lepape in 1912, Martin in 1913, and Barbier in 1914. Their drawings are more ingeniously elaborated than those for La gazette du bon ton. [1.8] Indeed, "L'Ilot" (plate 7) in Barbier's volume may more properly be compared with his depiction of the ballet, "Le spectre de la rose," of the same year, so little is his focus on the bathing dress displayed and so much on the scene of impending seduction. The essentially literary nature of

Barbier's talent is witnessed by the ease with which Henri de Régnier invented an accompanying narrative for each of his designs.

The imposing pre-War albums devoted to dance and the theatre were inspired for the most part by the Ballets Russes, whose Parisian triumphs had begun in 1909. George Barbier haunted these performances, to which in 1913 and 1914 he devoted collections of drawings, the first concerned with Nijinsky, the second with Tamara Karsavina. These albums have a prominent place in ballet history, but their strongest interest lies elsewhere. Subordinating the opulence of the ballets' productions, but conveying their strangeness and mystery, he concentrated his attention on the principal dancers. As his fellow spectator and devotee Paul Droutot observed, he showed, not gods in their accustomed mythological roles, but "young men and women raised to divine status by their ravishing beauty. You can feel them live, that is to say, love, desire, leap; they are nothing but muscles, supple exertions, nerves, moments of rest between violent gratifications."[14]

Nijinsky was the particular object of Barbier's admiration. Like Francis de Miomandre, who wrote the introduction to his Dessins sur les danses de Vaslav Nijinsky, Barbier saw him as unique among artists, "of another essence from ourselves." In his 12 pochoir plates he showed Nijinsky to be as much a mime as a dancer, adapting himself even in physical appearance to each new role. So the stalwart Ethiopian slave of [1.9] "Sheherazade" became the elusive boy of "Le spectre de la rose."[15]

Album dédié à Tamar Karsavina is Barbier's early masterpiece. Its cover design pays homage to Beardsley, another master of decorative art, and its 12 pochoir plates depict Karsavina in her principal parts. That their purpose is again to stir the emotion and delight the eye of the [1.10] viewer, not to document the performance, is demonstrated by "Le spectre de la rose," glimpsed at the moment when the phantom lover, of whom the young girl has dreamed after the ball, is about to disappear as the rose drops from her hand.

Even more lavish are two further albums, Les masques et les personnages de la comédie italienne, which was published in 1914, with 12 pochoir plates by Brunelleschi, and Sports et Divertissements, in which the score by Erik Satie and 20 pochoir plates by Charles Martin are dated 1914, though the album seems to have appeared at a later date. In his masked figures from an imaginary commedia dell'arte troupe Brunelle- [1.11] Schi emphasizes costume and setting. As "Arlequin" reveals, they are

highly decorative. Much more idiosyncratic is Sports et divertissements.Satie invites the reader to approach the fantasies of music and design which make up this work in a smiling mood. To discourage pedants who decline to do so, he begins with an "unappetizing choral," into which he has put "all that he knows about tedium." Martin's elegant, mannered drawings for the scenes of sport and pleasure suggested by Satie's compo- [1.12] sitions are in the same mocking, light-hearted vein. Witness "La balançoire." The result is a creation which both in spirit and in style might date from 1924 instead of 1914.

Finally, there were a few significant illustrated books in which the Art Deco style already predominates published in 1914 or earlier. Francis Jammes' Clara d'Ellebeuse, illustrated by Robert Bonfils, appeared in 1912; Balzac's Le père Goriot, illustrated by Pierre Brissaud, in 1913;and Le cantique des cantiques and Makéda, reine de Saba, chroniqueéthiopienne, both illustrated by Barbier, in 1914. Bonfils, Barbier, and Scmied also had major books in progress on which they were able to work intermittently during the War. Otherwise nothing significant was to come of the preparations that have been described until the end of the decade.

Indeed, the production of collectors' books of any kind over the next four years was minimal. For the soldier-artist, even one who found inspiration in war-time conditions, only the simplest means were available. Yet Laboureur, for example, worked out his cubist style in makeshift albums of wood engravings like Types de l'armée américaine en France (1918) and Images de l'arrière (1919), where he found satisfaction in glimpses of characters from the A.E.F. and the behind-the-lines activities [1.13] of Allied soldiers. Witness a scene of black dock-workers in the former album. Meanwhile, the publisher Meynial had revived the almanac with the publication on Christmas day 1916 of the first volume of La guirlande des mois. This small book is better described as a war-time keepsake thana publication of high fashion, since soldiers back from the front share [1.14] Barbier's five pochoir plates with elegant ladies. There is even an Art Deco battle scene (p. 40). In its miniature way La guirlande des mois is a livre de luxe, but when Meynial replaced it with Falbalas et Fanfreluchesin 1922, it was not without a deprecatory allusion in the final volume to "the artistic character of a publication produced during the War."[16]

If a World War had been the least propitious of all settings for illustrated books, peace-time, when it came, promised to be the most propitious. For Art Deco books Robert Bonfils was the artist who led the way

out of this prolonged period of arrested development. Some notice of his early work will thus form a fitting conclusion to this account of the anticipations of Art Deco illustration during the 1910s. Though unconnected with the Gazette du bon ton—he had, however, studied at the Atelier Cormon —Bonfils provided between 1912 and 1919 in five graceful and unpretentious volumes a model for the kind of elegant and colorful illustration that the artists of that journal were to achieve in their books of the 1920s. Perhaps because of its seeming slightness, Bonfils' work as an illustrator, in contrast to his work as a designer of bindings, has not yet received its due.

After his apprentice years in Paris, Bonfils occupied himself with painting, sculpture, and especially the decorative arts. A friend of those days described him as "a tall young man, naturally affable, restrained in gesture, with a grave and musical voice." He passed his days "looking about him, plucking the flower from everything, with an elegant nonchalance. He did not think it frivolous to paint his reveries on the leaf of a fan."[17] From these casual beginnings he went on to a notable career in the decorative arts which extended to designs for porcelain, clothes, fabrics, even tapestries. But the principal focus of his activities was book illustration and binding design.

A man of broad culture, he fell into the habit of drawing in the margins of his favorite poems and stories, and when he turned to book illustration, he thought of his designs as a continuation of this practice. His first book of importance was Francis Jammes' Clara d'Ellebeuse of 1912. Its success led in 1913 to commissions for Henri de Régnier's Les rencontres de monsieur de Bréot and Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie, the latter from the distinguished publisher François Bernouard, hailed by Raymond Hesse as "one of the inspirers of the great `decorative arts effort of 1925' " (p. 146). The war deferred the appearance of these books until 1919. Verlaine's Fêtes galantes with Bonfils' designs appeared in 1915, and "Lover's" Au moins soyez discret in 1919. Sylvie had engravings printed in three colors; the other four volumes were illustrated by pochoir over wood engravings printed in a single color.

Having selected slight but agreeable texts, often with 18th century settings, Bonfils was under no obligation to individualize the figures in them or to present these figures in scenes of dramatic conflict. Instead he could use their activities as occasions for the sympathetic decoration of his pages. He did this for the most part through vignettes, sometimes serving as simple ornaments, sometimes of ampler proportions. Effortless improvisations in appearance, they represent in fact the nicest calculations

regarding the best means to achieve his ends. Moreover, he delighted in subtle combinations of color, which are bright and lively, but [1.15] never garish. For such an approach pochoir was the ideal process. Witness the washes by which Clara d'Ellebeuse is portrayed in her big sun-hat as she looks out into the morning light (p. 11). Bonfils' mastery of decora- [1.16] tive patterns is exampled in his headpiece to the first chapter of Les rencontres de monsieur de Bréot (p. 1), preparing the way for Régnier's account of a private theatrical performance.

Two albums of the period are of particular interest because they show Bonfils working through plates rather than vignettes and as an inventor rather than a commentator. The seven pochoir plates of Divertissements des princesses qui s'ennuient are perhaps his most ambitious drawings, on a scale and accorded a fullness of treatment unmatched elsewhere in his work as an illustrator. Their subject is the amusements of three young ladies at a country house. In keeping with his epigraph from Mallarmé, "Princesse, nommez-nous berger de vos souris," Bonfils treats them with indulgence, but does not disguise the languor of their luxurious lives. Still, it is the opportunity for piquant yet harmonious Art Deco com- [1.17] positions, such as "La promenade" (plate 1), which chiefly interests him.

The volume allotted to Bonfils in Modes et manières d'aujourd'huiis dated 1920 on the title page, though it did not appear until 1922. Its 12 pochoir plates are more fully developed than is usual with the artist. They have no theme, but their emphasis is rather on manners than on fashion, almost leading one to question Robert Burnand's insistence that "no designer is less documentary than Bonfils."[18] Among the aspects of post-War French life presented are the singing of the "Marseillaise" at a theatre, bargain day in a department store, and a family in mourning which watches a military parade from a balcony. Like the other plates, [1.18] the evening party of "En écoutant Satie" (plate 11) is an exercise in perspective.

After 1928 Bonfils illustrated few books. His time was given over to his students at the École Estienne, where he was Professeur de Composition Décorative, and to the writing of a learned manual on La gravure et le livre, which was published in 1938. One may regret that this book is devoted almost exclusively to technical matters, though the author's predilections emerge when he praises original graphics, with their life and spontaneity, as a quick way "for the artist to fix his emotions" (p. 102). Bonfils is one of the most innovative and delightful of Art Deco illustrators. Appreciation of his slim, elegant quartos is bound to increase.

2. George Barbier

My subject today is George Barbier, the direct inheritor of the tradition of pre-1920 illustration traced in my first lecture. By epitomizing the more refined fantasies of the Parisian world of pleasure during the following decade, he became the most haunting of Art Deco book artists. From a consideration of Barbier's career I'll proceed to a discussion of pochoir, the stencil process which he supported by employing it, despite the prevailing disapproval of bibliophiles, in several of his major works.

Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, the most reliable source for what little information is available about Barbier's early years,[19] relates that he was born in Nantes on 10 October 1882 of a good bourgeois family. After leaving school, where he took the drawing prize year after year, he studied design with local artists. Vaudoyer speculates that the old buildings of the city to which Auguste Lepère was to pay tribute in Nantes en dix-neuf cent, must have awakened in him a sense of the past, just as the paintings of its well-stocked museum, where Watteau and Ingres were represented, must have nourished his artistic vocation. He found a patron in A. Lotz-Brissonneau, a leading industrialist of Nantes who was later to compile the standard catalogue of Lepère's etchings and wood-engravings.

By 1908 Barbier was in Paris, working with Jean-Paul Laurens at the École des Beaux-Arts.[20] He haunted the Louvre, applying himself particularly to the collections of Greek antiquities. When Vaudoyer met [2.1] Barbier in 1910, he found him to be "a tall, elegant blond young man quiet and reserved" (p. 8). Indeed, Vaudoyer took him for an English man especially since he then signed his drawings "E.-W. Larry." At his first exhibition at the Boutet de Monvel gallery during the following year his water colors were grouped by categories which matched his predominant interests: Greek dancers, dancers from the Ballets Russes, and "Belles du Moment." Pierre Louÿs, who wrote the preface to the exhibition's catalogue, praised Barbier for having captured the Hellenic spirit with no taint of Roman influence. "Not one of his figures could appear on an authentic Greek vase. But they are part of the same line. It is not imitation, it is continuation."[21]

Barbier was now fairly launched on his career. We have already seen how his Ballets Russes albums, his depictions of "Belles du Moment"

in the Gazette du bon ton, and his earliest illustrated books had brought him recognition. If the War delayed for some years his wider success, he was at least able to add to his already extensive knowledge of the dress of past eras and to work on the illustration of further volumes which were eventually to achieve publication. Indeed, it is unnecessary to carry this biographical summary further, for Barbier's pattern of life was permanently established. Recognized as one of the master decorators of the time, he found his services in demand in many fields, but his specialties remained theatrical costumes and settings and above all book decoration. Three years before his death Clément-Janin wrote: "It is by the book that George Barbier has succeeded with the great public. The book is the most powerful transmitter of fame. The most warmly welcomed exhibitions don't attract the attention accorded to a successful book" (p. 146).

Of the many titles in Barbier's bibliography it will be necessary to restrict discussion to the most considerable. Those published during the decade of the War have been cited in the previous lecture. Beginning in 1920 his major books were:

Mention will also be made of the albums in which his work for the theatre is reproduced and of representative titles among the several demi-luxe volumes, typically issued in editions of 1000 copies, to which he turned his hand.

The 16 engraved plates of Le bonheur du jour, ou les grâces à la mode,which were colored by pochoir, are among the largest and most carefully meditated of Barbier's designs. So ambitious was this album, indeed, that it took him from 1920 to 1924 to complete it to his satisfaction.[22] A study both of fashion and of manners, it was offered to those who like to link the present with the past by comparing them even in so frivolous a matter as costume as well as to inquiring observers of the current scene. Barbier begins his introduction with a selective summary of fashion illustration from the 16th century on, finding a specific predecessor for his own work

in Horace Vernet's well-known record of first Empire costume, Incroyables et merveilleuses, published about 1814:

By showing the dress, the accoutrements, the interiors of his age, Barbier expected to catch its spirit as well:

On the title page one of Barbier's distinctive cupids holds a cornucopia from which pour such trifles as powder puffs, gloves, fans, and masks. The early plates emphasize fashion on the pattern of Incroyables et merveilleuses, though the manners of the day are not neglected. Theartist's mention of a "hermaphrodite couple" is borne out by the contours and coiffures of the figures in plates 1 and 5, "Les alliés à Versailles" [2.2] and "L'Amour est aveugle." Plates 6 to 9 offer stunning "interiors in the taste of the day, walls lit-up, shadowed mirrors, irresistible divans, veiled lights, rooms invented for idleness and pleasure by a decorator-poet, [2.3] charming and uninhabitable." In "Minuit! . . ou l'appartement à la mode" (plate 7), one should not fail to notice that it is a book by DeQuincey which has brought the young lady to her state of comic alarm. [2.4] The design is thus the natural prelude to "Chez la marchande des pavots" (plate 8), in which androgynous opium-smokers of 1920 offer a languorous contrast to the robust dandies of 1814 evoked by Barbier in his Intro- [2.5] duction. The magnificent lacquer screen of "Le goût des laques" (plate 9) distracts attention even from the plate's silver and golden gowns and jade and pearl ornaments. In his final designs, composed in 1924, Barbier goes well beyond the plan with which he began his series. No longer content with intimate interiors, he now shows the spectacle which society [2.6] provides for the public, at the beach in "Au lido" (plate 14) and at the [2.7] break-up of an evening party in "Au revoir" (plate 16). Put on their implications, these panoramas epitomize the ambiguities of a little world whose arrogance matches its elegance.

Closely associated with Le bonheur du jour, both in date and in conception, is Falbalas et fanfreluches, almanach des modes présentes, passées et futures. These five volumes, which appeared between 1922 and 1926, were the publisher Meynial's lavish peacetime sequel to La guirlande des mois. They contain 60 pochoir plates, as well as a decorative cover design and an amusing title-page vignette for each volume. [2.8] Seeking to preserve for himself complete freedom of choice, Barbier [2.9] took all costume for his province. No doubt contemporary France would most often claim his attention, but he was at liberty to "ransack the ages and spoil the climes." The Comtesse de Noailles, who introduced the first volume, told the artist: "You want us to travel together, you, your readers, and I, into the hidden and always changing land of dress, and I gladly admit that fashion, with its audacities, its fantasies, its reticences, has the same possibilities as a voyage around the world, that it teaches like history, sets us dreaming like the seasons, softens, delights, saddens through love like poetry" (1: 4).

This is surely the perspective from which to appreciate Falbalas et fanfreluches, despite the assertive frivolity of its title, for the designs go far beyond its promised ripper and frills. Each plate is a carefully developed tableau, though on a scale much less ambitious than in Le bonheur du jour, which has points of interest beyond its brilliant depiction of costume and setting. Barbier's usual subject is a love scene, some piquant situation which he can enliven with the freshness and sensual appeal of youth. Indeed, in his historical plates, which range throughout Europe and North America, he rarely chooses any other. Typical is [2.10] "Gentils propos" from the volume for 1922, placed in 19th century Czechoslovakia.

The majority of Barbier's drawings are devoted to the France of his own day, and among them are to be found some memorable inventions. [2.11] Consider "Le soir" in the volume for 1926. The subject is a jazz-age couple before a lacquer screen, but the viewer's attention is fixed on the nearby statuette of a naked dwarf, dissipated yet vestigially fashionable, rendered in the manner of the African sculpture which was then at the height of its vogue. The plate has a broader humor than Barbier usually allows himself. The best known plates of Falbalas et fanfreluches are those depicting the seven deadly sins in the volume for 1925. Here one finds a great theme of western iconographical tradition made at home in Barbier's special world. "Anger" shows a modish couple quarrelling in a formal garden, "Envy" is displayed by a maid regarding her mistress as [2.12] she steps from a Rolls Royce, and "Gluttony" is etherealized into "Lagourmandise."

Falbalas et fanfreluches was the last of Barbier's books to reflect

contemporary life directly. This part of his work will always have a special value for the unique way in which it catches the tone and mood of les années vingt. Yet one understands why he ceased to follow this path. Vaudoyer said of Barbier as an artist that he was not "interested in human beings as they are, but as they were, as they might be, if not as they ought to be" (p. 11). Selective as his view of the present had been—only the most seductive figures, only the most elegant dress and decor—the modern world still imposed a constraint upon him. "In the dark backward and abysm of time," his choices were limitless. No doubt it was a relief to him to forsake observation for revery.

Certainly his mind was filled with available images. All his life he had frequented museums, antique shops, and bookstores. He had the history of costume at his finger tips. The two volume catalogue of the sale of his library offers striking testimony to his inexhaustible curiosity and wide-ranging connoisseurship.[23] Most of its 1093 lots are made up of illustrated books, chosen with extraordinary discrimination. The 18th century is well represented. The 19th century is there in abundance, both with regard to books, where Gustave Doré was a special favorite, and albums of lithographs, where Gavarni stands out. As one would expect, there are substantial sections on the dance and on costume. When Barbier applied himself to brief surveys of the history of costume illustration or of the pochoir process, he had no need to go beyond his own shelves to write them.

Most illuminating for the student of Barbier's work, however, are the parts of the catalogue, by far the largest, devoted to 20th century illustrated books and literary first editions. In his introduction Jean Giraudoux speaks warmly of Barbier's quick eye and generous admiration for talent among the workers of his own time. So one finds most of the outstanding illustrated books of the Belle Époque, with particular attention being paid to Maurice Denis, Auguste Lepère, Louis Legrand, and Luc-Olivier Merson. Across the Channel Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, and Lucien Pissarro are fully represented. Among Barbier's favored illustrators of the 1920s were such early associates as Guy Arnoux, Pierre Brissaud, Charles Martin, and André-Édouard Marty, as well as Alexeieff, Chas Laborde, Daragnès, Pierre Falké, Laboureur, and Schmied. The literary first editions include substantial runs of Gide, Giraudoux, Louÿs, Henri de Régnier, and Valéry.

Throughout, the books are in collectors' condition. Indeed, Barbier's copies of those in which he himself was concerned are often in decorated

morocco bindings by Canape, Cretté, or Marius Michel, with much added material in the form of water colors, proofs, and manuscripts. A motivating force behind Barbier's habit of taking pains with all aspects of the books which he illustrated was his comprehension from his own experience of what collectors value.

Of course Barbier drew on these extensive materials as an artist rather than as a scholar. Carteret argued that his retrospective designs appealed to "a public fond of reconstructions which captured the tone of fashion in different epochs."[24] Yet it seems absurd to regard plates such as those in Falbalas et fanfreluches with headings like "Switzerland, 18th century" or "Antilles, 19th century" as so many contributions to the understanding of past modes of dress. The artist used his time-travelling as a means of confining his imagination to particular circumstances which would yield a satisfactory drawing. The resulting compositions belong to Barbier-land rather than to history.

The year 1922 saw the appearance of two books illustrated by Barbier which had their origin before the War. Of all literary texts Les chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs enjoyed his most persistent devotion. These prose poems, which purported to be translations from the Greek of songs composed by a poetess of Sappho's time, were published in 1894. In 1910 Barbier adorned Lotz-Brissonneau's copy of the 1898 edition with 65 water-colors, 26 of them full page, signed "E.-W. Larry." In a letter to his patron, after affirming his devotion to ancient Greece, he remarked of Louÿs' work: "It is all licentiousness and beauty and I would have wished in my drawings to convey something of the sensuality and color with which he animates these perfect poems."[25] Commissioned by Pierre Corrard to provide illustrations for a major edition of Les chansons de Bilitis,Barbier immediately set about further drawings, but Corrard died in 1914, and his widow finally published the book in an edition of 125 copies in only 1922. A handsome quarto, remarkable for its layout and typography as well as for its illustrations, which were engraved by Schmied and printed in color, it might have vied with Schmied's Le livre de la jungle as an example of the sumptuous realizations which lay within the grasp of post-War bookmakers if it had appeared three years earlier. Certainly it contains Barbier's most varied studies of the female form. [2.13] Two examples must suffice: "Les trois beautés de Mnasidika," in which a nymph tells of the sacrifices she has made to Aphrodite for her lover

[2.14] (opposite p. 72), and the dance of the flowers (opposite p. 148). It is interesting to compare with the latter Barbier's original drawing, dated [2.15] 1914, one of many mounted in an album which accompanies the Altschul copy of the book at Yale. Still a third series of illustrations by Barbier for Les chansons de Bilitis appeared in 1929. Featuring an extended text, acquired at the auction sale of Louÿs' manuscripts, it has 54 engravings on wood printed in color by Pierre Bouchet.[26] Since only 25 copies were printed, it has remained virtually unknown to collectors.

Personnages de comédie of 1922 is a still more considerable accomplishment than the edition of Les chansons de Bilitis of the same year. [2.16] Indeed, its 12 large plates, engraved by Schmied and printed in color by Pierre Bouchet, are rivalled in Barbier's work only by those in Le bonheur du jour. Albert Flament's text of 1914 is a diffuse meditation, half-waking and half-dreaming, which takes as its point of departure the great roles of the world theatre. Barbier's vignettes have a general relevance to the theme of acting, but most of his plates, at least one of which dates from 1916, are simply magnificent decorative compositions. Thus [2.17] Phaedra is mentioned by Flament, but not the equally evocative Greek sorceress who receives homage from her creatures in an earlier design. Perhaps Personnages de comédie is best regarded as a demonstration of the cumulative richness which could be achieved by the combined talents of Barbier, Schmied, and Bouchet.

If six years passed before the appearance of Barbier's next major book, this does not mean that he had forsaken illustration in the interval. His practice was to spend years over each project, returning to it from time to time as the spirit moved him. It is true, however, that between the end of the War and the later 1920s much of his time was claimed by theatrical design. This new career began with Rostand's Casanova, performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1919. Barbier's costumes and scenery are recorded in an album of 1921 called Panorama dramatique: Casanova,illustrated with 24 pochoir plates executed by Jacomet. Other successes followed, and for a time he was the most sought-after costume designer in Paris, recognized as the theatrical artist who better than any other had captured the mood of the age. His work through 1922 may be seen in an elegant album called Vingt-cinq costumes pour le théâtre which appeared in 1927. Edmond Jaloux's discerning introduction suggests how Barbier helped to transform the mundane atmosphere of the pre-War Paris theatre, with its bourgeois settings for well-made plays, into "a kind of many-colored dream" (p. 14). Jaloux found that Barbier's extraordinary costumes—which were more than costumes, indeed, since they seemed to

have the power of imposing on the actors who wore them a state of mind suitable to the roles they were playing—had been perfectly described nearly a century before in Gautier's Mlle. de Maupin:

[2.18] Typical of Barbier's creations are Don Juan in Rostand's La dernière [2.19] nuit de Don Juan and Paulette Duval in the sumptuous ballet Le tapis persan. From the theatre Barbier proceeded to the music hall, the vastly larger resources of which enabled him to achieve effects "of unbridled fantasy and opulence" in such works as "Le légende du Nil" and "L'Eventailde diamant" at the Folies Bergères.[27]

The year 1928 saw the appearance of books illustrated by Barbier set in the two periods where his imagination moved most freely, ancient Greece and 18th century France. In Maurice de Guérin's Poèmes en [2.20] prose he returned to mythological themes, specifically to the story of the centaur and the bacchant (p. v), in an elegant volume for which Pierre Bouchet engraved his drawings on wood and saw to their printing in color and Schmied provided the "maquette typographique." Verlaine's Fêtes galantes was a more important undertaking. Some of Barbier's drawings for this collection of poems, including that for the frontispiece, go back to 1920, and a number of others are dated between 1923 and 1925. In their large scale and ornate elaboration, indeed, they bring to mind his plates for Le bonheur du jour. To study them is to be reminded that Verlaine's poems for this volume, the second which he published, are said to have been inspired by his reading of the Goncourts' L'Art au dixhuitièmesiècle with its celebration of the pastoral paintings of Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard. For the most part Barbier's depictions of the gallant life of the time have an open-air setting. Perhaps the characters [2.21] Barbier assembles in his plate for "Clair de lune" (p. 3), the first poem in the collection, best epitomize the "chosen landscapes" by which he tried to realize Verlaine's dream-like visions. Barbier's designs are full of [2.22] fantastic touches without warrant in the poet's text. In "Les ingénus" (p. 27), for example, the lovers amusing themselves in a park on an autumn evening do not include the fawn receiving the attentions of the lady by the pool. Fêtes galantes is the most frequently encountered of Barbier's major books. Strictly speaking, indeed, it has to be regarded as a demi-luxe edition since Piazza published 1200 copies. Some 225, however,

were issued on special paper with one or two suites of the plates, thus raising them to collector's status, and the 25 of these with original drawings are of course in a class by themselves.

Marcel Schwob's Vies imaginaires of 1929 might have been written on purpose for Barbier to illustrate, so directly was it calculated to appeal to his temperament and his way of proceeding. The author selected from history 22 figures whose personalities and stories he found piquant, most of dubious, some of criminal, reputation. Among them were Petronius, Paolo Uccello, Captain Kidd, and Burke and Hare. Barbier's drawings, engraved on wood and printed in color by Bouchet, show how taken he was by Schwob's subjects. They include headpieces, initial letters, and tailpieces, as well as plates devoted to the 12 figures who interested him most. While preserving the settings and costumes of their times, he makes [2.23] them all inhabitants of an elegant, ambiguous country in which conventional expectations are invariably disappointed. In a frontispiece the muse of intimate history gazes into a globe and dictates what she sees to a cupid. Passing by the heretical brother Dolcino, who can be taken as a [2.24] mocking commentary on the saints depicted by Maurice Denis, Clodia [2.25] accompanying her brother to a Roman brothel (p. 44) and Pocahontas meeting Captain John Smith (p. 126) may be singled out among the book's Art Deco tableaux.

This concludes the roll-call of Barbier's substantial books, except for Les liaisons dangereuses, reserved for discussion in another context, but something must also be said of the demi-luxe volumes which he illustrated. The most interesting of these is René Boylesve's Le carrosse aux deux lézards verts of 1921. Here one admires not so much the eight plates as the scores of smaller designs with which the text is decorated, thus following the pattern for demi-luxe books recently established by Robert Bonfils. His vignettes provide a sprightly commentary on this 18th century fairy tale, enhanced as they are by Saudé's brilliant demon- [2.26] stration of the possibilities of pochoir. The beginning of chapter 4 provides a typical opening.

Four of the five titles which Barbier undertook between 1924 and 1931 for Mornay's series, Les Beaux Livres, are tales by Henri de Régnier, also with 18th century settings. They hardly require comment, since their sparse pochoir illustrations are overshadowed by his drawings for Les [2.27] liaisons dangereuses. More attractive is Gautier's Le roman de la momieof 1929, thanks in large part to the harmonious engravings printed in color by which Gasperini rendered the artist's designs. Barbier seems to have welcomed the opportunity offered by Gautier's Egyptian setting to rival the middle eastern subjects which preoccupied Schmied at this time.

My account of Barbier the book-artist has emphasized the extent to

which he was a decorator rather than an illustrator. He did not see his work as an interpretation of the successive phases of the text before him. Instead he found in each subject which he isolated from the text an opportunity for creating a single perfect design. Paul Valéry's quatrain has often been quoted:

In seizing this image, no labor was too arduous for him. Indeed, Clément-Janin relates how "he delighted in minute details, hardly to be suspected, which yet had their place in the impression made by the whole. `Why,' asked one of his students, `do you put into your water colors those touches which no one sees?'—`But I,' he answered, `I know that they are there' " (p. 136).

To this search for perfection Barbier brought formidable resources of knowledge as well as talent. Yet no artist was ever less of a pedant. In describing a visit to his atelier, Vaudoyer found a symbol for the relation between his learning and his art. Three of its walls were given over to precious objects of all sorts, Barbier's choice among the creations with which earlier craftsmen had served beauty, and the world of art had celebrated luxury and fantasy. The fourth wall was curtained beneath a skylight. Barbier sat facing it, behind a table holding his brushes and paints," forgetful of the concerns of sedentary life. He no longer sees anything in front of him but his own dreams. Before catching them in flight for perpetuation on Whatman or Canson, for a moment he watches them pass on the great screen of the sky among clouds and sunbeams" (p. 48).

Nor did his labors end with his drawings. He saw each of his books through to its completion, supervising all aspects of its planning and production. Clément-Janin wrote near the end of Barbier's career:

What this absorption in the details of production added to Barbier's work can be shown from his last major book, Les liaisons dangereuses.That he would turn his attention to Choderlos de Laclos' great novel of sexual intrigue was inevitable. Eighteenth century France, particularly during the decades before the Revolution, had become his favorite country of the mind. In this instance, moreover, he was prepared to illustrate his text rather than to use it as a point of departure for decorative compositions. His imaginative involvement with the novel's subject can be traced back at least to 1920, when he contributed to La guirlande des moiscertain "fragments found in the papers of the late Marquis de la Caille" (4: 33-45). Entitled "L'Amour de plaisir ou le plaisir d'amour," these are the mordant reflections of a cynical libertine who might have been Laclos' Vicomte de Valmont. In 1929 and 1930 he made 20 large drawings for the novel, as well as a number of smaller drawings for vignettes and decorations. Though Barbier did not neglect the opportunities for decorative treatment of setting and costume which the novel provided, he for once submitted willingly to the straight-jacket of the illustrator, maintaining the major characters in keeping and presenting all the big scenes in its intricate plot, even when, as in the duel between Valmont and the Chevalier Danceny (2: 192), they were well outside his usual range. The resulting drawings were as comprehensive and effective as any conceived for the novel since Charles Monnet and Mlle. Gérard collaborated in their classic illustrations of 1796.

Unfortunately, there was the usual delay between the completion of Barbier's designs and their appearance in book form. Barbier died in 1932, and when they were published two years later, the absence of his guiding hand was everywhere apparent. The publisher, Le Vasseur, declared that the dead artist had put into the book "the best of his talent, of his personality: all his art, all his knowledge."[29] Nonetheless, he allowed himself to print 720 copies, an edition so large as to necessitate the use of mechanical process to reproduce the artist's designs, the colors apparently being added by pochoir. They were also reduced in size. The damage can be assessed by a comparison of the original drawings[30] with [2.28] their reproductions. Consider the vignette facing the title page of volume [2.29] 2. Barbier's line is so distorted as to impair its firmness. The harmony of his color scheme is disturbed; there is no hint of red in the mermaid's hair, and her scales are blue instead of green. Even more injurious are the

changes wrought in Barbier's larger compositions. As reproduced, Barbier's conception of an early and relatively innocent visit by the Marquise [2.30] de Merteuil to the bedchamber of Cécile Volanges (1: 136) is deprived of its sensuous grace. Throughout these two volumes, even where there is no actual misrepresentation, the bloom is gone. In consequence this edition of Les liaisons dangereuses has never enjoyed the favor that its drawings merit.

Barbier was a supreme decorative designer, whose art centered on the human figure, displayed in a thousand different settings and costumes. He had the faculty, as Valéry wrote, of embodying myth through images in such a way that workers in mere words could only look on in awe. These images are beautiful, but their beauty is of an enigmatic kind. In Barbier's library were 12 volumes illustrated by Edmund Dulac and 10 by Arthur Rackham between 1906 and 1918 (lots 223-224). Yet, despite their common preoccupation with color, to describe Barbier as a Rackham, even if not for the nursery, would be utterly misleading. In fact, he embodied the temper of the 1920s in much the same way that Beardsley did that of the 1890s. He was drawn to erotic themes, particularly of an ambiguous nature, and his sensibility enabled him to present them, through both male and female figures, in a powerful and haunting way. These figures make an impression beyond their sensual appeal. In an essay on Casanova's memoirs Barbier described "the soul of Venice" in the great adventurer's time as "at once avid and exhausted, raging and desperate, and, under the rouge already putrefying."[31] The equivocal nature of the sophisticated society of Barbier's time is similarly conveyed by his compositions. Indeed, this is perhaps his truly original note.

No account of the French Art Deco book can afford to pass by pochoirillustrations, which surely constitute the field of liveliest activity among today's Art Deco book collectors. Consideration of this process may appropriately be associated with George Barbier, even though the drawings for most of his major books were rendered by wood engravings printed in color. Pochoir was used in much of his early work, as well as for Fêtes galantes and Les liaisons dangereuses, and in the 1920s such former colleagues of his on the Gazette du bon ton as Arnoux, Brissaud, Brunelleschi, Lepape, Martin, and André-Édouard Marty were among the illustrators with whom that magazine was most prominently identified. Moreover, Barbier became a champion of pochoir in its struggle for acceptance among publishers and collectors of livres d'art. In assuming this role, he wrote, he was settling

We may open the topic with Jean Saudé's Traité d'enluminure d'artau pochoir, published during 1925 in an edition of 500 copies. Now itself a major collector's book, it is no mere technical treatise. Instead it is at once a manifesto asserting the claims of pochoir and a demonstration through its own illustrations of the appropriateness of pochoir for the livre d'art. Saudé's text is prefaced by tributes from several admirers. Particularly to our purpose are the remarks of Édouard Bénédictus, several of whose design albums had been colored by Saudé. He claimed that it was Saudé's accomplishment "to make known certain new artistic forms, such as the highly sensitive works of modern artists, which without his methods, might have remained unfamiliar to us because they could not be reproduced, or indeed might have come to us radically changed in photomechanical copies" (p. 2). He also emphasized Saudé's extensive range. In his hands pochoir "encompasses all forms of art, old and new, in all areas of artistic and industrial activity, prints, miniatures, documentary works, catalogues, postcards, wall decorations, fabrics, and so many other things" (p. 4).

In his own part of the book Saudé first concerns himself with the history of coloring by stencil, a subject which had become familiar to him during 30 years of craftsmanship, tracing it from the Middle Ages to the present. He then offers his social credo: that the decorative arts combined with technology can promote humanity's well-being by bringing beauty within the grasp of the multitude (pp. 26-27). Finally, he describes in detail, with due attention to the refinements which a master of the craft can introduce, how pochoir work is accomplished (pp. 35-64).

First, the water color to be reproduced is photographed. After the colors in the original are analyzed, proofs of the photograph are lightly printed in a neutral tone, and each color is transferred to its individual proof. Cut-outs from very thin sheets of zinc or copper are made from these proofs. They are placed successively on the page to be colored, and the color is added through the cut-out by brush or other means. Saudé's example of this crucial step is "Les roses" by Mme. Beauzée-Reynaud, in reproducing which he employed 32 pochoirs. He shows the resulting plate as it appeared after 5, after 10, after 25, and after 32 of these stencils. For more complex water colors the number required could be much

larger. Given the strict control which Saudé exercised over his workers, one understands why he could claim for pochoir that it is "the only process which, from the first impression to the last, best interprets the artist's original style." This is true of both large and small editions, he maintains," though this kind of work is seen at its best in ouvrages de luxe" (p. 36). In his concluding pages Saudé lists some of the books containing his work with which he is best satisfied.

The year 1925 was a turning point in the fortunes of pochoir as a process for illustrating livres d'art. Taken together, Saudé's Traité and his display at the great Art Deco exhibition caused influential voices to be raised in its behalf. The writer of the section on books in the Rapportgénéral of the exhibition was impressed not only by the "rich polychromes" which he showed, but also by the "limited stock of tools" which had produced them.

In an article for The Studio of 1926, which for the most part was a summary of Saudé's treatise, Marcel Valotaire stressed "the important place which [pochoir] has come to occupy in the illustration of the French artistic book" and remarked that "This victory over the conservatism of the bibliophiles as to processes of reproduction is fully justified by the qualities themselves of the plates thus obtained."[33] Barbier was equally decisive in an article entitled "Pochoirs" which appeared in 1928: "Certain critics profess to disdain pochoir as unworthy of the livre de luxe.For my part I think unjustified this exclusion of a technique which maintains a work of art in all its freshness, avoiding the often rather chilling transposition resulting from mechanical processes" (p. 163).

Pochoir, or enluminure as Saudé preferred to call it, was practiced by other notable craftsmen, three of whom should be specifically mentioned. André Marty (not to be confused with the illustrator, André-Édouard Marty, who often employed pochoir for his designs) had been responsible for its renaissance at the turn of the century. He was succeeded by Daniel Jacomet, the master of facsimile reproduction of drawings by artists from Fragonard to Toulouse-Lautrec. Even the great lacquerist Jean Dunand attempted illumination, as we shall see in connection with Schmied. At the height of its employment, indeed, pochoir coloring became a considerable

industry, just as the coloring of aquatints had been in early 19th century England.

Though Valotaire celebrated the victory of pochoir over "the conservatism of the bibliophiles" and claimed that artists were turning to it from wood engravings or etchings printed in color, there remained a hard core of opposition to its use in the livre d'art. This may be exampled from the writings of three of the leading authorities of the time: Hesse, Clément-Janin, and Carteret, who typically made their distaste known by implication or omission rather than direct statement. This is true, for example, of Hesse's Le livre d'art du XIXe siècle à nos jours, in which books illustrated by pochoir are not discussed on the ground that they belong to the commercial rather than the bibliophilic realm.[34] In his later Le livre d'art d'après-guerre he followed the same rule. Encountering Maeterlinck's L'Oiseau bleu, a book with pochoir illustrations by Lepape, he pulls himself up short: "but here we leave the livre d'art for the colored image" (p. 86). Clément-Janin ignores pochoir in his Essaisur la bibliophilie contemporaine de 1900 à 1928, even in chapter 11 devoted specifically to colored illustration. Carteret included few pochoirbooks in his detailed listing of outstanding titles in volume 3 of Le trésordu bibliophile. His judgment on the technique is implied when he writes that Barbier's work arouses enthusiasm "above all when the colors are rendered by engravings on wood by masters like Schmied, the Beltrand brothers or by Pierre Bouchet, capable of attaining perfection by the closest attention to the minutiae of the printing" (3: 178).

The employment of pochoir in the livre d'art reached its apogee in the later 1920s, and it continued to be used with some frequency during the 1930s. When Le portique conducted a survey of the condition and prospects of the livre d'art after the second World War, the editors' conclusion was that, though the process had "already won the freedom of the city, being admitted under certain conditions," some influential publishers were inclined to insist on these conditions.[35] An account of pochoirin 1975, describing the ateliers in which it was still practiced, tells how

it had come to be restricted to a few specialties, "le fac-similé de grande qualité, le tirage restreint, l'oeuvre de précision scientifique, la bibliophilie," with the result that it was reduced to the position of a "poor relation among present-day graphic arts."[36] The reason for its lack of employment, however, was no longer skepticism about the process, but the excessive cost of hand-work of any kind.

Particularly during the last ten years collectors have become increasingly interested in examples of pochoir coloring in all of its varied applications. There is also a lively demand for pochoir fashion plates, with their fresh and sparkling colors, among those seeking decorative prints to adorn their walls. In comparison with these markets, that offered by amateurs of livres d'art may be minor, but it is not inconsequential. Long since deflected from Barbier and Schmied, whose books illustrated with wood engravings printed in color have soared beyond their means, they can still pursue other notable colorists of the 1920s whose work was rendered in pochoir. Often published in demi-luxe editions of considerable size, these books have remained available as well as relatively inexpensive.

The most attractive of such productions are the volumes of decorative illustrators like Arnoux, Brissaud, Brunelleschi, Lepape, Martin, and A.-É. Marty, who had collaborated before the War in La gazette du bonton, and of later recruits who worked in a similar style like Pierre Falkéand Edy Legrand. Since each had a substantial and distinctive career, they cannot be considered one by one. It must suffice to offer a few examples from their productions, chosen to reveal the variety of subjects which they attempted, the gamut of effects which coloring by pochoircould achieve, and the wide range of markets at which the resulting volumes were aimed, from popular works to livres de grande luxe.

One of the handsomest of all pochoir books is Edy Legrand's Voyages et glorieuses découvertes des grands navigateurs et explorateurs françaisof 1921. This slim folio, which is fairly ablaze with illustrations on every page, bears no notice of limitation and was evidently published in considerable numbers. For that reason it was not regarded even as an édition de demi-luxe. Yet its bold designs and brilliant coloring make the free and unstudied handling of its pochoir work seem entirely fitting, remote as it is from Saudé's ideal. A representative page shows Jacques Cartier [2.31] relating his discoveries to Francis I. Legrand's most ambitious composition, a double page opening, depicts Lasalle taking possession of Louisiana, with the Indian tribes making their submissions. Much more restrained is Guy Arnoux's Les caractères of 1922, an album of 500 copies

for which he provided both text and illustrations. As the title-page shows, the coloring is very much of the pre-War order, almost poster-like in [2.32] style. Pierre Falké's wood engravings colored by pochoir make his Robinson Crusoe, 3 volumes, 1926, one of the great books of the decade. Though they are dotted sparingly through the more than 900 pages of text, they give it a richness that could not have been attained by black and white illustration. This was a livre de grand luxe, published in an [2.33] edition of 151 copies. As the crucifixion scene (p. 230) shows, AndréÉdouard Marty's illustrations for Pierre Louÿs' Aphrodite of 1936 stand in complete contrast. Their purity and restraint make this book, of which there were 340 copies, a model of cool elegance.

In the 1920s pochoir was often disdained by collectors swayed by accepted bibliophilic orthodoxy. In consequence publishers of livres d'arttended to prefer wood engravings or even etchings printed in color, particularly for éditions de grand luxe. This a priori prejudice has long since been dissipated, just as there is now general agreement that pochoirillustration is far more appealing than any form of mechanical process, with which it used to be lumped. But the question remains: what are the merits of pochoir as compared with wood engravings printed in color? We know that Barbier used the latter for most of his important books, Schmied for nearly all of his. One of the interests in the review of Schmied's work, the subject of the next lecture, will be the resources that he commanded in comparison to those available to the users of pochoir.

3. François-Louis Schmied

The work of few book-artists has undergone such reversals of fortune as that of François-Louis Schmied. A Swiss who migrated to Paris as a young man, he had first to overcome the distrust with which the French tend to regard foreigners working among them. During the World War he enlisted in the army as a volunteer, where the grave injuries which he sustained caused a French critic to concede that he had "earned the right to be called one of us."[37] Even so success came to him only as he approached 50. A "decorator-born," as his friend Dr. Mardrus called him,[38] he then benefitted more than any other book-artist from the boom in livres d'art. Not only did he attract wealthy and distinguished patrons, but collectors generally joined with them in raising his numerous productions to the peak of contemporary esteem. Yet a residue of bitterness

among rivals who had begrudged him his prosperity helped to make his fall from grace after the economic crisis of 1930-31 all the more complete. For decades his books, even in the most splendid copies, remained in disfavor, until the Art Deco revival of the past 15 years caused them to regain and perhaps surpass the position which they enjoyed in the 1920s.

Since Schmied did not achieve fame until the early 1920s, relatively little is known of his early life.[39] The Genevan family into which he was born in 1873 intended him for a career in business, and it was only through application to artistic studies outside working hours that he found his first patron, the painter Barthélemy Menn. In 1890 his parents allowed Schmied to devote himself to original wood engraving under the tutelage of the Swiss master, Alfred Martin, who also trained Carlègle. From Martin he learned much about design as well, and in the Bibliothèque Municipale of Geneva he had made a profound study of typography and the layout of the page before he departed for Paris in 1895.

Though he was employed in that city primarily as a reproductive engraver, he continued to draw and to experiment with original engraving printed in color. His innovations during the first decade of the new century included the printing of engravings in the manner of paintings with no separation of the colors by black lines and the extensive use of gold and silver in their backgrounds. Among those impressed by his work was Auguste Lepère, who had raised color printing to its seeming apogee in his editions of À rebours in 1903 and L'Éloge de la folie in 1906. "You are going to create truly rich engraving [la gravure riche]," he told Schmied. "I had a presentiment, while printing À rebours, of what infinite resources might offer themselves to the painter-artist who would have the courage to assimilate the craft of the printer-engraver."[40]

It was a good many years before Schmied bore out this prediction. In 1911 one of the leading societies of bibliophiles, Le Livre Contemporain, commissioned a luxurious edition of Kipling's The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book. The animal painter Paul Jouve was selected as its illustrator, and Jouve turned to Schmied for engravings printed in color of his designs.[41] As their collaboration developed, Schmied had a hand in drawing the illustrations as well as in their engraving. Both artists went off to the War, Jouve being mobilized, and Schmied enlisting in the foreign legion. Severely wounded in action at Capy on the Somme,

Schmied lost his right eye and was invalided home with the military medal.[42] He was joined in Paris by Jouve who had been serving in Eastern Europe. The two resumed work on Le livre de la jungle, the printing of which was at last completed in November of 1918, though not without further vicissitudes during the bombardment of that city.

As the first major livre d'art to appear after the War, Le livre de la jungle is a landmark book. Its layout and typography, though sober and dignified, are undistinguished, and its more than 400 large quarto pages seem under-illustrated when compared with Schmied's later profusion in this respect. Nonetheless, Jouve's drawings, as completed and engraved on wood by Schmied and printed in color on hand presses by Pierre Bouchet, are sumptuous indeed. It cannot be determined exactly what part Schmied had in the drawing of the illustrations. Hesse states that Jouve "furnished only 15 finished drawings out of 90. For the rest he provided only preliminary studies" (p. 178). The book in fact has 122 designs: 17 plates, 15 initial letters, and the rest vignettes in the text. No doubt the initial letters, which are often abstract, were largely Schmied's work. It would seem that he must also have been responsible for bringing to completion a number of Jouve's sketches.

The plates, one for each of Kipling's 15 stories and two frontispieces, are printed on heavy paper in the manner of individual prints. For the most part these are large-scale studies of the principal characters in Kip- [3.1] ling's stories: Mowgli himself; Kaa, the rock-python; Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the mongoose; Toomai, the elephant; and the rest. Schmied rendered Jouve's designs with the same sort of attentive care that he had devoted to his own pre-War engravings such as "Le chateau d'Estaing" and "Le chataignier" which had so impressed Lepère.[43]

The vignettes of Le livre de la jungle are as interesting as the plates. Perhaps because he engraved Jouve's designs in diverse styles over several years, Schmied anticipated not a few of the effects which he was later to develop for his own work. For each story there is a headpiece, an initial letter, and usually a tailpiece, together with four or five further vignettes. In the initial letters he made extensive use of gold in developing his Art [3.2] Deco patterns. We also find him using a gold background to silhouette Toomai the elephant against the sunrise (p. 133) and transforming a [3.3] landscape into an abstract pattern by reducing it to contrasting masses (p. 75). The illustrations to each of the stories have a dominant recurring figure and a consistent color scheme, thus providing for unity as well as variety.

If it was Schmied's engravings which caused Le livre de la jungle to rank with Lepère's À rebours and the Fioretti of Maurice Denis and the Beltrand brothers in the annals of early 20th century book decoration, the success of its images as illustrations was owing to Jouve.[44] He had been devoted to Kipling's Jungle Books from the time of their appearance in 1894 and 1895. Throughout his youth he had applied himself to the study of art and of animals. Though he had visited North Africa, his knowledge of the creatures he depicted in Le livre de la jungle was derived chiefly from European zoos and museums, and of course he had no first-hand familiarity with Kipling's Indian setting. Inevitably his conceptions for this early book, impressive as they are, seem relatively static. During the 1920s he was able to travel extensively in the Orient, and India, observing the wild animals that obsessed him in their native haunts, and in 1930 he illustrated for a second time La chasse de Kaa,one of the longer stories in Le livre de la jungle, as well as Pierre Loti's Un pèlerin d'Angkor.

These two books may be considered out of chronological sequence, since there will be no opportunity to return to Jouve. The first offers an enlightening contrast with Le livre de la jungle and the second saw Schmied again engaged in rendering the artist's designs by engravings printed in color. Indeed, though Jouve's wider fame is as an animal painter, these volumes, together with several others which he illustrated between 1929 and 1937, give him an honorable place in the history of the Art Deco book.

Of course, La chasse de Kaa is only one of the 15 stories in Le livre de la jungle. Yet it must be granted that Jouve's second presentation of the tale surpasses his earlier version in both vitality and sumptuousness. This time his drawings were engraved by Camille Beltrand and printed in color by Pierre Bouchet, who was also responsible for the volume's typography and layout. Jouve treats the creatures of Kipling's story with far more freedom than before. His designs impart a feeling of movement which testifies to the artist's liberating familiarity with their behavior in [3.4] their habitat. Compare what he makes of Kaa's defiance of the monkeys (pp. 98-99) with his conception of the same subject in Le livre de la jungle. Jouve provides each page of the text with a wide decorative band, in which astonishingly varied patterns deriving from python's skin alternate with friezes of stylized jungle animals. For his part Bouchet shows [3.5] what he has learned from his years as Schmied's master-printer. Witness the opening page of the text with its vast initial letter and lavish use of gold. Altogether, the book has a richness that rivals Schmied's early work.

Un pèlerin d'Angkor was Jouve's final collaboration with Schmied.[45] On this occasion the painter's explorations of Indo-China led to his choice of a text. It is a quiet book, without the action or drama of La chasse de Kaa, nor is its decoration from the images and motifs of the country nearly so elaborate. Nonetheless, it has its own kind of charm, established in the opening double-page design of the ruins of Angkor in the twilight.

When Le livre de la jungle was finally published in 1919, it brought Schmied wide recognition. During the previous year Léon Carteret had issued Léandre Vaillat's L'Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, a small book illustrated with wood engravings printed in color from Schmied's own drawings. As he approached 50, he felt able at last to embark on a career as an architècte du livre, that is to say as an artist-craftsman who would undertake by himself to illustrate, to engrave, and to print livres d'art. Indeed, he entered into a contract with Carteret to assist in the marketing of his productions. This came to nothing when Schmied could not avoid incurring expenses which greatly exceeded the terms on which the two had agreed (p. 192).

Nonetheless, Schmied had established himself in a modest atelier at 12, rue Friant, with Pierre Bouchet as his pressman and his son Théo, soon to become his leading workman. There he had the guiding hand in all operations from the planning of each new book to its printing on his single hand press. Ward Ritchie, who was his apprentice in 1930-31, has described the process by which a design became a page in one of his books. It was first "photographically reproduced upon the end-grain surface of a piece of boxwood. " From this the engraver made the basic woodblock, proofs of which were placed on as many further pieces of boxwood

Schmied's exclusive reliance on hand work of the highest quality made inevitable a prolonged period of gestation for each of his books. In the elaborate catalogue for an exhibition of his books held in New York during

1927, eight titles are listed as "in preparation," seven of which in fact appeared over the ensuing four years (pp. 97-98). His entire operation, indeed, was based on the attainment of perfection. Unless every detail represented his best effort, he could not justify the small editions (from 20 to 200 copies) at very high prices in which his books typically appeared.

The earliest volumes to achieve publication from Schmied's atelier were three for 1922 for which he had engraved the designs of other artists and printed them in color. We have already encountered two of these, Les chansons de Bilitis and Personnages de comédie, with illustrations by Barbier. The third was Jean Goulden's Salonique, le Macédoine, l'Athos. Two further works with designs by other artists, Marrakech by Jérome and Jean Tharaud illustrated by Suréda and Rabindrinath Tagore's L'Offrande lyrique illustrated by Jean Berque, were published in 1924 and 1925 respectively. It will suffice to glance at the last three books before proceeding to a closer examination of the volumes of the same period which were entirely Schmied's work. There is no difference in the standards of craftsmanship between the two categories, but otherwise they are quite distinct. In the former Schmied was content to establish a pattern and carry it out consistently; in the latter the variety of detailed inventiveness which made him a master of book decoration raises them to an altogether different plane.

Jean Goulden was a respected friend. He, Schmied, Jouve, and Jean Dunand joined together each year beginning in 1921 to exhibit their work in progress at the Galérie George Petit. This painter and enamelist had brought back from his wanderings in Greece after the War an impressive portfolio of drawings of landscape and old buildings, such as [3.6] "Athos: le monastère de Valopédie," which Schmied rendered so perfectly in his 45 large engravings printed in color as to persuade the viewer that he has the paintings themselves before him. Jean Guiffrey has described the procedure which allowed the engraver-printer to achieve the subtle variations by which he conveyed his sensibility: "On a flat tint, of soft coloration, the various tones come to merge in such a way as to produce the most varied and delicate harmonies. For the first time, in this book, Schmied printed on a metallic background, on gold or on silver, allowing it to show through in many places, thus imparting a dominant note to the general harmony of the image" (p. 96). The Tharauds' Marrakechheld a special interest for Schmied since his father had lived for a time in Algeria, returning to Switzerland only after the revolt, and he engraved Suréda's drawings of North African scenery, people, and way of life with his usual care and elegance. Yet the book had been commissioned by the Cercle Lyonnais du Livre, whose members would not have appreciated any radical divergence from the conventional. Schmied was

[3.7] able to present Jean Berque's highly mannered designs for L'Offrande lyrique in a livelier style. Here he had a free hand, since he was his own publisher, and both Tagore's mystical text, as translated by André Gide, and Berque's drawings made their appeal to him. While not among his most ambitious books, it is an engaging one.

We may turn now to the volumes which made Schmied known throughout the western world, those in which he emerged as an artist aswell as a craftsman. Flaubert's Salammbô of 1923 does not figure significantly in this category, since it is a small octavo, published in an edition of 1000 copies by Le Livre, for which Schmied merely made six drawings, engraved them, and printed them in color. Still, it offers a fine Art Deco [3.8] frontispiece. The Comtesse de Noailles' Les climats of 1924, on the other hand, is a major work. The subjects it set for Schmied were largely of Mediterranean scenery, and they had to be presented, as with Marrakech,in such a way as to satisfy the members of a society of bibliophiles, this [3.9] time Le Livre Contemporain. Within these limits, as "La messe del'aurore à Venise" (p. 66) bears witness, Schmied succeeded splendidly. Indeed, one may regard Les climats as the book in which Schmied most appropriately invites comparison with Maurice Denis as interpreted by [3.10] the Beltrand brothers. Here is the opening plate from Denis' Carnets de voyage en Italie of 1925, a Sicilian scene engraved on wood and printed in color. It would be invidious to choose between it and the plate from Les climats, but it may be noted that in contrast to Denis' pastels, Schmied's more complex engravings are characterized by deeper colors [3.11] and much use of printed backgrounds of gold. In the copy at Yale Uni- [3.12] versity there is a special printing of part of a plate depicting ponds at evening (p. 6), pulled by Schmied for Frank Altschul, which demonstrates how the full resources of his artistry could produce something unique.

If Schmied's distinctive contribution to Art Deco is hardly to besought in Les climats, he made Alfred de Vigny's Daphné of the same year the Art Deco book par excellence. In an essay on fine printing for The Fleuron of 1924, P. J. Angoulvent found the best hope for the future in "the decorated book," and more specifically in the "abstractive power" to which Daphné bears witness. "Modern man," he argued, no longer seeks "descriptive painting or illustration," but instead "an intervention of the artist . . . to help him in bringing his feelings into harmony with those of the creator of the work."[46] This short novel concerns Julian the Apostate in Daphne, the grove and sanctuary near Antioch, during the period just before his death. Though the struggle between on-rushing Christianity and dying paganism is presented with vividness, Vigny's primary concern is the metaphysical speculations which filled the Emperor's

mind. Confronted by such a subject, Schmied in effect abandoned representational illustration except for three plates: a panorama of the starry sky above the columns and laurel trees of Daphne, an emblematic sun, and a single human figure—Julian himself in profile. The final exception is logical, for Vigny's book exists through the thoughts of this haunted ascetic intellectual. Otherwise Schmied suggests the content and spirit of Daphné entirely by abstract decorations.

The volume was intended at first for still another group of collectors, this time the Société des Médecins Bibliophiles, but its costs were finally assumed by a single member,[47] perhaps because the society felt that they were being offered something approaching a design portfolio when they wanted an illustrated book. Yet if Schmied's plan for Daphné was uncompromising, the volume as it emerged from his hand is anything but austere. Full of typographical audacities, it is also remarkable for the ingenuity of design and the dark, rich colors of its ornamentation. What first leaps to notice is its profusion of monumental initial letters. The most striking of these, indeed, turns out not to be an initial letter at all. Commenting on Julian's celebration of mind as symbolized by "the Word," the artist made use of a daring device, beginning his page with [3.13] the gigantic "V" of verbe, even though it occurs in the middle of a sen- [3.14] tence. In other ornaments, of varying shapes and sizes, Schmied offers a wide range of geometric inventions. Even the bands at the tops and bottoms of the early pages, which at first appear identical, are found upon examination to embody differing shot-silk effects. The brilliance and precision with which Schmied engraved and printed his designs are beyond praise. Silver is abundantly employed, as is a rich, glossy black. This last component, however, was to take its toll, for the special ink, mixed with linseed oil, which Schmied used to achieve it, eventually left brown offsets on the facing pages in most copies both of Daphné and of Le cantique des cantiques. [48]

In Le cantique des cantiques, completed for Christmas of 1925 as Daphné had been for Christmas of the previous year, Schmied carried la gravure riche to its furthest reach. Since each of its 80 pages is different from every other, his compulsion to "load every rift . . . with ore" made this "precious casket" of a book, as Schmied's friend Dr. Mardrus called it (p. 33), as susceptible to detailed study as the most sumptuous illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. The text of [3.15] Le cantique des cantiques is as concrete as Daphné's is abstract, both in the objects it describes and the images it employs—gardens and palaces, lilies and apples, doves and sheep. Reflecting Old Testament life at its

most alluring, it offered a cornucopia of subjects for illustration. Schmied drew back only from the depiction of the human figure, limiting himself [3.16] to King Solomon and the maiden who describes herself as "black, but comely." If this meant that he hardly touched on the erotic potential of The Song of Solomon, he would shortly make good this deficiency in his Arabian stories. Nor is there any lack of purely decorative compositions [3.17] of a fresh and ethereal kind, often in vertical panels which look forward to Deux contes.

Schmied seems to have organized Le cantique des cantiques with the opening as his unit, balancing blocks of type, designs, and the unprinted whites of the page in ever changing combinations. In comparison with Daphné his typographical experiments were minor. If initial letters are more numerous, they are also smaller, and hence no longer dominant. The suave color harmonies which hold the book together are lighter and warmer than any Schmied had previously employed. Indeed, they rival Saudé's pochoir work in their sparkling brilliance, without sacrificing the precision and authority which mark the best wood engraving printed in color. The book is as joyful as it is gorgeous.

That Le cantique des cantiques represented a peak of accomplishment even for Schmied was recognized from its first appearance. Since only 110 copies were printed, it has always been in demand, particularly in decorated bindings designed by the artist, and the six copies with suitesof the engravings in black and white and in color are now beyond anyone's aspirations. With the progress of the Art Deco revival, a market has developed even for individual leaves, much as in the case of illuminated manuscripts, as institutions and collectors had to recognize that the book itself may never come their way.

By the end of 1925 Schmied had attained a commanding position among creators of the livre d'art. At the Art Deco exhibit of that year his display had included not only Les climats and Daphné but also elements of the as yet unpublished Cantique des cantiques. The writer who surveyed the book section for the Rapport général was impelled thereby to pay "special homage to the originality, the virtuosity, and the skill" which Schmied had shown in his wood engravings printed in color, "the most delicate adornment of the modern book," and to agree with Louis Barthou that "from one volume to the next, his art becomes . . . more intelligent and more profound, more vibrant with life and movement, more ingenious, more subtle, and fuller of color" (7: 55-56). There were similar tributes outside of France. A year later Henry L. Bullen described Schmied as "the greatest living master of the art of the book."[49] His maquettes for bindings, particularly those embodying lacquer panels by

his friend Jean Dunand, were soon in demand, and as the years passed "he designed sets for the Théâtre Pigalle, tapestries for Gobelins, decorations for the liner Normandie."[50]

Schmied's success made necessary a more ample locale for his work, and he accordingly removed to 74 bis, rue Halle, in a retired part of Paris towards the Porte d'Orléans. These premises have been described by Ward Ritchie as he found them in 1930:

This detailed account may be supplemented by the more general impressions of P.-R. Roland-Marcel, a journalist who had visited the rue Halle two years earlier: "Order reigned. . . . The furniture and decoration of the rooms conformed to a certain discipline unspoiled by stiffness. All was plain and solid, with a simple charm. It was a dwelling in keeping with the tradition of ancestors who had held firm beliefs, cut across by the taste for renewals favored by contemporary art" (p. 150).

Befriended by Théo Schmied, described by Roland-Marcel as "a tall quiet young man in whom both the sturdy artisan and the humorist brimming with concentrated mischief was visible," Ritchie soon found himself a member of the extended family which Schmied made of his workers. "Schmied loved people," he relates, "and enveloped them in his great enthusiasm for living" (p. 15). There was much entertaining, not only in Paris but also at Schmied's house in the country. In return the staff made a hero of their master, with his imposing stature, his calm manner, his unfailing enthusiasm, and his legendary achievements. Ritchie quotes a tribute from Taskin, Schmied's chief assistant, which for all its Gallic floridity bears witness to the sincerity of their admiration and devotion. In fact the way of life of Schmied and his entourage, if one transposes it from France to England, brings to mind nothing so

much as that of Mr. Wardle and his family at Dingley Dell in The Pickwick Papers. If George Barbier's sometimes bizarre visions derived from solitary meditation, Schmied's equally startling decorative innovations were composed in a setting of hard-working bourgeois contentment.

Of course Schmied also led a public life in general society. His particular patron was Louis Barthou, a prominent political personage, but he numbered other celebrities among his familiar acquaintances. This part of his existence was not without its bearing on his commercial success, for such friends in many instances bought his books, and their support was important to him in maintaining his lavish way of life. By 1925, indeed, he had won the allegiance not only of French book collectors but also those of other countries. In 1927 he held a major exhibition on the premises of Arnold Seligmann at 11 East 52nd Street, New York City, printing for the occasion an opulent catalogue of his work, which is now itself in demand among collectors. The dealer later told Ritchie of the prices achieved by the volumes shown, "one with a special binding fetched $10,000 and others $4,000 and $5,000 each" (p. 25).

Though Schmied still accepted commissions which restricted his freedom of action—books for societies of bibliophiles, for example, or volumes in which his contribution was primarily to engrave and print in color the designs of other artists—he could now experiment with entire freedom when he chose to do so. Among his boldest efforts was Oscar Wilde's Deux contes, which appeared in April of 1926 in an edition of 162 copies, with a further 20 copies in an English version entitled Two Tales. Not only was this volume published through the "friendly initiative" of a group of friends, which included Louis Barthou and Frank Altschul, but it was sure of a ready sale at a formidable price among the widening circle of collectors in whose eyes Schmied could do no wrong.

The five large designs in this substantial quarto, one for the cover and two for each of the stories, are relatively conventional. That depicting [3.18] the statue of the Happy Prince is representative. But Schmied's chief concern was with his vignettes, one of which adorns each of his 54 pages of text. These are bands five-eighths of an inch across, the length of the page for "The Happy Prince" and its width for "The Rose and the Nightingale." Schmied made it clear that they are intended to illustrate as well as decorate by including a table which gives the subject of each [3.19] engraving. That the band beginning the second story represents "the student and the nightingale" would not be readily apparent without this assistance. Particularly in his designs for "The Happy Prince," however, he comes much closer to his objective; indeed, some of them rise triumphantly above the Procrustean limitations which he has imposed upon

himself. Certainly Deux contes is a notable Art Deco book, the selective elegance of which stands in marked contrast to the sumptuous profusion of Le cantique des cantiques.

Les ballades françaises of 1927, published in 162 copies for the Cercle Lyonnais du Livre, may be regarded as the counterpart from Schmied's machine presses of Les climats of 1924, which was printed on his handpress. For each of its 26 plates the artist began with one of Paul Fort's poetic tributes to the mountains, forests, plains, and seas of France, proceeding to impose on this conception a decorative pattern of his own [3.20] devising. In a typical design of a stream winding through a dusky wood he realizes the "eternal melancholy" which the poet had found in the scene. The plates are complemented by vignettes chiefly in the form of [3.21] bands which are much wider than those in Deux contes, vertical for the four section headings, otherwise horizontal. For Schmied, the typography and layout are relatively conventional. Though a supremely competent piece of bookmaking, Les ballades françaises cannot be counted among Schmied's more personal statements.

When the printing of Les douze césars of Suetonius was finally achieved in December of 1928, one of Schmied's most prolonged enterprises was brought to its completion. The colophon records that "the plates and ornaments of the book were exhibited, along with the maquetteof the text, at the George Petit gallery, 8 rue de la Sèze, in December, 1922." In the interval it may well have come to seem task-work to Schmied and his helpers. Nonetheless, the portrait frontispieces and emblematic tailpieces to the 12 chapters help to redeem its somewhat [3.22] crowded pages. The plate of Nero (before p. ccxiii) is typical. It will be remembered that Schmied also engraved and printed in color at the end of the decade two books with illustrations by George Barbier (Mauricede Guérin's Poèmes en prose of 1928 and Marcel Schwob's Les vies imaginairesof 1929) and two with illustrations by Paul Jouve (La Fontaine's Fables of 1929 and Pierre Loti's Un pèlerin d'Angkor of 1930).

I have reserved for discussion as a group the eight books in which Schmied collaborated with Dr. J.-C. Mardrus. This somewhat mysterious savant, best known for his translation of The Arabian Nights, had much to offer the artist. Théo Schmied wrote in 1930: "There is a true Arabian Sheikh in my father. He found in the reading of Mille nuits et une nuita savoury description of that eastern life. His tastes and that reading gave rise to his friendship with J.-C. Mardrus who revealed so much to him."[51] That Mardrus also appealed to the side of Schmied's mind which took satisfaction in the abstract decoration of Daphné is confirmed by the long

essay which he contributed to the catalogue of Schmied's New York exhibition. After discounting the advertising function of this statement, the reader will find it by turns enlightening and impenetrable. Mardrus's comments on Schmied's individual books are sometimes valuable, since he had the advantage of working closely with the artist, but the philosophic pretensions of the context in which they are presented are less easy to accept. For Schmied, however, this sort of discourse was evidently of a piece with the profundities which he glimpsed in Mardrus's translations in La création and Le livre de la vérité de parole.

At any rate, the first fruits of their alliance were a notable success. These were the three books which Schmied made out of Mardrus's translations from The Arabian Nights: Histoire de la princesse Boudour of 1926 and the two separate and distinct editions of Histoire charmante de l'adolescente Sucre d'Amour, both of 1927. In the Histoire de la princesse Boudour Schmied for the first time did not color his own designs. Instead he sent them for coloring after his originals to the workshop of the great lacquerist of the age, Jean Dunand, with whom he was also collaborating at the time on bindings. The story of Princess Boudour and Prince Kamaralzamân has a variety of erotic episodes and allusions, many of which are explicitly realized by Schmied. For the most part his 60 large [3.23] designs depict one or two figures, presented in the style of Persian miniatures, but there are also other subjects—a royal palace, a ship at sea, birds of prey. The text is ornamented with headpieces, bands, tailpieces, and initial letters, as well as smaller decorations in abundance, which en- [3.24] rich every page. In the vignette shown two supernatural figures dispute over Princess Boudour. In a page of text which includes a decorative [3.25] panel featuring a harp, it is related how an attendant sings to Kamaralzamân of the beauties of his Princess. Dunand's coloring endows this profusion of illustration and ornament with a freshness and limpidity which Saudé himself hardly surpassed. The book's limitation to 20 copies has had the effect of making it inaccessible even in the world's great libraries. Otherwise it would long since have become well known to amateurs of illustrated books.

The Histoire de la princesse Boudour was followed in 1927 by Mardrus' translation of an unpublished story from The Arabian Nightscalled Histoire charmante de l'adolescente Sucre d'Amour. This tale of the adventures of an orphaned daughter is also of an erotic cast. Once more Schmied's engravings from his own designs were colored by Dunand. The limitation was to 25 copies, and a larger format and a more open type page were employed. There are 71 substantial designs includ- [3.26] ing a three-page foldout, in one panel of which Schmied portrayed himself

in Arabian attire. With regard to the pages, approximately one in seven, where major decorations appear, the book rivals Le antique des cantiques in richness, but in general it is less lavishly adorned than the [3.27] Histoire de la princesse Boudour. The vignette of the page shown depicts a garden against a turquoise sky, rendered by Dunand with all the precision and sparkle of the original.

Confusion has arisen from the fact that Schmied published another edition of the Histoire charmante de l'adolescente Sucre d'Amour in 1927.[52] Extending this time to 170 copies, it has 13 plates and several [3.28] hundred smaller illustrations and decorations. Its most salient plate is the frontispiece, a representation of Caliph Haroun Al-Raschid in an Art Deco frame. Dominating the smaller illustrations are hundreds of vignettes, one at the bottom of each page. These are small engravings, [3.29] oddly reminiscent of Bewick in placement and conception. In the opening shown the verso depicts a moonlit garden, the recto a lotus flower. In general, this edition of the Histoire charmante de l'adolescente Sucre d'Amour, with its darker coloring and more sober effects, hardly rises to the level of its counterpart. One wonders if Schmied did not devise it to placate those clients to whom he could not offer copies of his grander book.

La création of 1928 is one of Schmied's most imposing volumes, a folio with 41 engravings printed in color, including 12 large plates. In addition to the first three books of Genesis, as literally translated by Dr. Mardrus, and a genealogical tree of Adam's descendants, it includes a learned introduction explaining the conflicting accounts of creation which the work puts forward. Even Schmied addressed himself to no more demanding subject, and some gorgeous compositions resulted. [3.30] When compared with a grandiose conception like "Let there be light!" (opposite p. 6) or the making of the sun and the moon (opposite p. 18), however, it must be admitted that the artist's human figures seem relatively commonplace.

Dr. Mardrus thought that Schmied's most "revealing" work as an illustrator was his own Livre de la vérité de parole of 1929 which he described as "a rendering in French of Egyptian hieroglyphics concerning life after death, texts which are the foundations of all civilizations" (p. 261). Eschewing any sort of historical reconstruction, Schmied chose instead to interpret the text as he had Vigny's Daphné, through largely abstract designs. For each of the book's 12 "portals," as Mardrus calls [3.31] them, he provided a plate. That shown is for the seventh of these section openings, the voice of truth speaking as a lotus. Since Schmied omitted his usual printed backgrounds of gold, platinum, or silver, the book is

relatively somber. Dark browns predominate at the beginning, shading to lighter tones as the reader progresses. For Schmied it is an unusually austere work, but a harmonious one.

Schmied's last three books with texts translated by Dr. Mardrus were all published in 1930: Ruth et Booz, Le livre des rois, and Le paradis musulman. In his introduction to Ruth et Booz Théo Schmied claimed that the book embodies a "modern conception of beauty" in that detail is sacrificed to the ensemble, returning to the purity of Italian primitive design. It is certainly true at least that the unit is the opening rather than the page, the illustrations being large rectangles in which the tale of Ruth and Boaz is depicted step by step, extending across verso and recto, and that for Schmied decoration is held to a minimum. The engaging [3.32] qualities of the book may be seen in the wedding of Ruth and Boaz, in which a predominantly sad story ends in happiness. In Le paradis musulman Schmied returned to the style of his pair of stories from The Arabian Nights, this time in an edition of 197 copies. It is a sumptuous book, the greater availability of which allows the amateur to gain some conception at first hand of the artist's achievements in his unfindable earlier volumes.

As the year 1930 began Schmied had good reason to be confident about the future. In a survey for Byblis of the fine books of the previous 12 months, Pierre Guerquin offered this summary of his accomplishment:

The reception of the six books which Schmied completed during the year seemed to confirm Guerquin's tribute. All have already been mentioned except Kipling's Kim, which was published by the firm of Gonin in Lausanne, and Chateaubriand's Les aventures du dernier Abencérage, issued for the Bibliophiles de l'Amérique Latine. Yet the financial crisis of the following winter, which tested everyone connected with the livre d'art, showed Schmied to be particularly vulnerable. Even at the height of his prosperity in 1928 Roland-Marcel had written of "the controversies, the jealousies, the speculative fevers" that surrounded him and the envy and malice which pursued him (pp. 151, 154). This reservoir of ill will now found open expression. In defending Le paradis musul-

man in February of 1931 his supporter Pierre Mornand conceded that "like all those who dare, who seek new patterns beyond the beaten path, [Schmied and Dr. Mardrus] are violently attacked."[54] And when his enemy Jean Bruller essayed a comprehensive survey of the French livre d'art for Arts et métiers graphiques in November, he felt able to dismiss Schmied in a concluding aside: "Undeniably he is an excellent engraver. But as a creator and a publisher, I believe that his only talent has been to know how to get his carefully cultivated clientele to accept his motifs de catalogue as real art."[55]

These doubts concerning Schmied's artistic standing came to a head at a time when his financial position was drastically overextended. He had a number of books under way at his atelier and elsewhere, books for which the demand had become uncertain at best. Moreover, he felt it his duty to protect the market for his earlier works after the crash, so Ward Ritchie relates, "buying bravely to keep up their value, but he could not keep on forever and finally had to give up. He lost almost everything he had" (p. 24). His yacht, the Peau-Brune, was sold. The atelier in the rue Halle was closed. And in 1935 his library, including his precious personal copies of his own books, was dispersed at auction at the Hôtel Drouot.

While these sad events were occurring, the books begun by Schmied during his time of prosperity continued to appear. Indeed, eight further titles were added to his bibliography before he died. Beset with material worries, he was in no position to exercise the strict control over the production of his works which had hitherto assured their excellence. Hence these final volumes vary widely in merit. The most attractive by all odds is Peau-Brune de Saint-Nazaire à la Ciotat of 1931, his journal of a Mediterranean voyage aboard his yacht, illustrated with more than 100 engravings printed in color after his drawings. The most disappointing, given the labor and resources which went into it, is a four volume edition of the Odyssey, published between 1930 and 1934, all of the 140 sets of which were printed on vellum. This could have been a rewarding experiment, since Schmied's 100 drawings were engraved in black at the rue Halle and sent to Saudé for pochoir coloring, but Schmied was so dissatisfied with the typography and printing of Maurice Darantière that he wrote an article for L'Illustration of Christmas 1932 explaining how the work should have been designed.[56]

Given this accumulation of setbacks, Schmied's occupation appeared

to be gone, but at last friends procured an appointment for him at a desert outpost beyond Marrakech in Morocco. "Here he created a miniature palace for himself from a deserted fort," Ward Ritchie relates," painting its walls with colorful murals, planting the desert and bringing order and beauty to the place" (p. 25). He alleviated his lonely life by continuing to draw, providing the illustrations, indeed, for two books engraved and printed by Théo Schmied. After his death of the plague during January of 1941, he was buried there in a tomb of his own design.

Schmied's death in "a petty fortress," far from the scenes of his earlier triumphs, might stand merely as one more example of "the vanity of human wishes," were it not for the saving reflection that he left behind him one of the most brilliant bodies of work ever encompassed by a book artist. This achievement has been obscured by the fact that he created so many books, 36 by Léopold Carteret's count (3: 193-196), published in such small editions. Few collectors and students have had the opportunity to study and compare his productions in a consecutive way, and consequently the filtering process of time, which usually operates automatically, has not proceeded very far in his case. Once attention is fixed on such books as Les climats, Daphné, Le cantique des cantiques, Deux contes, his two Arabian tales colored by Dunand, and La création among the books for which he himself made the designs, and Le livre de la jungle, Personnages de comédie, Salonique, and Les vies imaginairesamong the books in which he engraved the designs of others, the magnitude of his accomplishment will become clear. That he represents the Art Deco book at its best, as well as its most typical, is self-evident. He was also the supreme "architect of the book" of the 1920s, surpassing rivals like Louis Jou and Jean-Gabriel Daragnès as far in the complexity of his aims as in the mastery of his execution. But even these qualifications pale beside his command of wood engravings printed in color, which he employed as freely and easily as other master craftsmen who worked in black and white. As Carteret told him, he was "the magician of color" (3: 192).

4. Jean-Émile Laboureur

Jean-Émile Laboureur's achievement as a print-maker, and over the past few years the attention devoted to his place in the early development of cubism, have given him a standing in the larger world of art not matched by either Barbier or Schmied. We are concerned with him as a brook artist, however, and here it is enough to assert that by common consent, he, Barbier, and Schmied continue to be regarded as the leading

Art Deco illustrators. At the same time his work differs so greatly from theirs that he has rarely been seen as their rival. He dealt almost entirely in black and white rather than in color. He relied far more on vignettes than on plates. And his cool, austere designs stand in marked contrast to their warm, ornate creations. Rather than seeking to "load every rift with ore," he was frugal with his illustrations, realizing each with a disciplined selection of lines and dotting every series with a sparing hand throughout the text which it was to decorate. To many books, indeed, he contributed nothing but frontispieces, and only occasionally did his illustrations, despite their small size, exceed 20 in number.

Moreover, far from aspiring to be an architecte du livre, a master of all the arts of the book, Laboureur was not even a bibliophile. "In an illustrated book," he told Marcel Valotaire, "only the designs interest me."[57] Not for him were the infinite pains taken by Barbier and Schmidt to ensure that all aspects of their books would fully realize their intentions. For Laboureur that was the business of the publisher. Hence Jean Prinet, in the standard inventory of books illustrated by Laboureur,[58] was able to describe 132 titles, a much larger number than the production of Barbier and Schmied combined. In the survey of his career which follows it will be necessary to limit consideration to certain salient yet representative books from this long list.

Laboureur was deservedly fortunate in his publishers, who admired him, allowed him to select texts which interested him for illustration, and did their best to ensure that the mise en page, typography, and paper of the resulting volumes would be worthy of his designs. From Camille Bloch and the Nouvelle Revue Française, who were his early patrons, to Au Sans Pareil and the bibliophile societies, who later performed a similar service, his publishers saw to it that most of the volumes to which he contributed were sufficiently attractive. The effect they sought was one of understated elegance: open, airy pages to which an engraving or an etching, usually in the form of a headpiece or a tailpiece, would add the finishing touch. Such a setting harmonized with the works chosen, which were invariably idiosyncratic, usually laconic, and often ironic.

Despite these pains, since Laboureur usually limited himself to black and white, since his books were sparsely illustrated, since he favored short texts which could be printed in small formats, even his major works typically received only demi-luxe treatment by their publishers. The outstanding exceptions to this rule were two books issued by societies of bibliophiles—Jean Giraudoux's Suzanne et le Pacifique of 1927 for Les

Cent Une in an edition of 125 copies, and Aristophanes' La paix of 1930 for Les Bibliophiles du Palais in an edition of 200 copies—and Oscar Wilde's Le portrait de Dorian Gray of 1928 published by Le Livre in an edition of 280 copies. In consequence his work became much better known at first hand among collectors in general than that of either Barbier or Schmied. This circumstance has protected Laboureur from the extremes of acceptance and rejection which the works especially of Schmied have experienced.

Nowhere has this been more true, it may be noted, than in England and America, where from the 1920s on he has had many admirers. Laboureur was an Anglophile, who knew England and the English well, and a number of his illustrations appeared in books published in England or in books with English settings. In the former category his volumes for the Golden Cockerel Press should be particularly mentioned, together with his work for W. Heinemann, which was usually in the form of frontispieces to Marcel Boulestin's culinary volumes. In the latter were such titles as André Maurois' Les silences du Colonel Bramble of 1926 and Les discours du docteur O'Grady of 1929, both among his best books.

As a preface to an account of Laboureur's career as a book artist, some remarks about the formation of his distinctive style will be useful. The most influential writers on the livre d'art in the 1920s, Clément-Janin, Raymond Hesse, and the author of the volume on the book in the Rapportgénéral for the Art Deco exhibition of 1925, all emphasized the way in which the decorative spirit of the time led book artists towards déformationor distortion.[59] Since literal realism no longer served their purpose, they felt at liberty to discard it. Laboureur was the prime example of this development, regarded as a leader by other illustrators. He thought that the exact depiction of nature no longer had any interest for the artist. Valotaire records his comments on the absurdity of reproductive engraving in an age which had mastered photomechanical process, and imagines him going on to remark about his original work: "This is how it pleases me to represent the world in which I live and the people who move restlessly around me. I wish to see them like that; I see them like that because it amuses me" (p. 43).

Of crucial importance in the evolution of Laboureur's style was his brief adherence to cubism, which began in 1913. Though his prints of this period rank with those of La Fresnaye, Marcoussis, Picasso, and Villon, the masters with whom he exhibited, his interest in cubism was "decorative rather than analytical," and he used the new style from the

first for subjects of an anecdotal nature.[60] This personal emphasis became more pronounced in the burins of his album, Petites images de la guerre sur le front britannique of 1916, which Raoul Dufy thought superior to his earlier etchings.[61] And when he turned to book illustration after the War, he in effect left cubism behind him. Burr Wallen, the scholar who has studied his cubist prints most closely, is able to claim for Laboureur's books after 1920 only that "his elegant plates . . . carry the stylishness of the Art Deco years to unrivalled heights of graphic refinement."[62]

Moreover, despite the geometric simplification of the images of Laboureur's cubist phase—the elongation of his figures, their ovoid heads, the reductions of his settings to their linear essentials—his work from the beginning had a classic cast based on his grasp of what the early masters of European engraving had to teach. "Whatever their anatomical distortion by the artist," Valotaire observes, "however schematic their presentation, [his people] still have a real existence; silhouette, attitude, gestures are always translated, transposed, in exact keeping" (p. 43). And as the years passed, the element of distortion in Laboureur's work progressively diminished, in the process enhancing his range and subtlety as an illustrator without impairing the distinctiveness of his style.

Born to a solid middle-class family in Nantes during 1877, Laboureur received a humanistic education in that city before he enrolled at the age of 18 at the Sorbonne.[63] His studies in Paris were widely dispersed, including law as well as literature, and he was also much interested in the visual arts. Cézanne was the master whom he most revered, but his closest acquaintance was with Toulouse-Lautrec. Louis Godefroy relates that, after Laboureur met the painter in 1895, "he often saw him at work in the lithographic printing house which sometimes served as his studio," and that in time this association led him to take up painting himself, acquiring in the process something of his mentor's "subtle penetration into the comic aspect of men and things" (p. 20). Laboureur told Valotaire, indeed, that Lautrec's conversation "opened my eyes on many things; . . . he had the quickest of minds, spontaneous, altogether instinctive;his words had a turn, a sense as sharp as his design" (p. 13). Meanwhile, Laboureur was learning the technique of wood engraving from Auguste Lepère, to whom he had been introduced by Lotz-Brissonneau,

the patron of the arts in Nantes who had also befriended Barbier. Though his first wood engraving and his first etching both date from 1896, it was not until after the War that his designs on metal began to outnumber his designs on wood.

After performing his obligatory military service in 1898, Laboureur began his long years of travel. A student devoured by insatiable curiosity, he moved from country to country, at the same time applying himself in a desultory way to his craft as an etcher and an engraver. In 1898 and 1899 he was in Dresden, where he worked in the Cabinet des Estampes, pondering the prints of the early Italian, German, and French masters of engraving. From them, Godefroy holds, Laboureur took "the slightly unbending boldness of his precise figures, [his] often-used perspective of the stained glass window, and [his] anecdotal relish," without lapsing into false naïvete or anachronism (p. 21). Between 1903 and 1908 he passed much of his time in the United States and Canada, instead, as he put it, of "vegetating in Nantes or Paris."[64] There he was particularly drawn to Pittsburgh whose scenes of vast industrial activity he recorded in his etchings. During these years he toured the continent as a lecturer for the Alliance Française on subjects which touched both art and literature. After a protracted sojourn in London, where he developed a passion for Rowlandson, a trip to Greece in 1909 made him acquainted with the decorative art of ancient vases and frescoes, and his immersion in the Florentine world during the following spring led him to transfer the vision they offered, so Godefroy maintains, to the world around him." The spectacle of modern life would henceforth suffice for Laboureur" (p. 25). He returned to Paris in 1910, where he settled down at last to a career as an artist.

With the outbreak of the War, he was soon in uniform. Speaking fluent English, though with an American accent, he was attached as an interpreter, first to the Twelfth Division of the British Army for more than two years and then to the American Naval Base at Saint Nazaire. No doubt active participation in organized communal life was a revelation to Laboureur, but it should also be noted that his was a special sort of military experience. "Here we hardly speak of the War," he wrote, "—but of literature, cooking, travel, the arts . . . and we pay no attention to cannons or airplanes, at any rate unless they are very near at hand."[65] Falling in with Marcel Boulestin, a fellow army interpreter, he prepared with him in 1915 a plaquette called Dans les flandres britanniques, which contained, in Boulestin's words, "no concessions to public sentimentality, no horrors, no patriotism—just picturesque little scenes of life in British

Flanders."[66] Stimulated by the success of these illustrations, Laboureur devoted some of his abundant leisure the following year to the nine designs of Petites images de la guerre sur le front britannique. For all its slightness this album was of special significance in Laboureur's career as a book-artist, displaying, as it did, what his friend Max Jacob had recognized as his particular sort of cubism, tempered by a distinctive humor and a full appreciation of Cézanne's contributions. It also saw the first employment of what became his characteristic technique on metal. Unable to carry about with him the equipment required for etching, he had recourse to the burin, using his graver to work directly on copper plates which he obtained from army stock. (The resulting prints are unlike the typical dry point, and I shall refer to them simply as burins.) Several plaquettes of wood engravings in a similar style ensued, among them Types de l'armée américaine en France of 1918, recording his impressions of the American Expeditionary Force.

Laboureur's last months in uniform were spent installing the collections of the Musée de la Guerre. Once again a civilian, he had to consider what the future held for him. Though he was well known as an etcher and engraver, he discovered that a new career was opening out before him. The combination of artistic talent and broad literary culture which he had to offer was eminently marketable in the publishing world of the 1920s. For several years, nonetheless, he remained primarily a printmaker, the various books which he adorned being of relatively minor importance. In 1923 he founded Les Peintres-Graveurs Indépendantes and served as its first president. His profound mastery of both the history and technique of engraving ensured that he would be in demand as a lecturer and as a writer, and a forceful personality combined with his many accomplishments to make him a person of consequence in the Parisian art world.

Moreover, the erstwhile wanderer had settled down to a comfortable domestic existence. After his marriage in 1919, he and his wife lived chiefly on the Breton coast near Nantes, latterly in a house which they built at Kerfahler in the Morbihan. Two sons were born to them. His [4.1] appearance during this time of great prosperity is suggested by an affectionate if teasing word-portrait which his friend Roger Allard drew of him in 1925:

We may turn now to Laboureur's career as a book artist. His various war-time albums have been mentioned. His first true book illustrated with original graphics was L'Appartement des jeunes filles by Roger Allard, who had written a letter-preface for Petites images de la guerre sur le front britannique. [68] Projected before the War, it finally appeared in 1919. To adorn his friend's poems about young women at play, enjoying tennis, swimming, and less innocent diversions, Laboureur [4.2] provided six burins, still very much in the style of Petites images de la guerre.Even so, they were not always received as cubist inventions, some critics being reminded instead of the elongated bodies and small heads in Louis Binet's illustrations for the novels of Restif de la Bretonne. Though hardly more than a plaquette, the volume was well presented by its publisher, Camille Bloch, and bibliophiles found it attractive.

Through his connection with the Nouvelle Revue Française, Allard persuaded Gaston Gallimard in 1920 to commission designs from Laboureur for Valery Larbaud's Beauté, mon beau souci, the story of a romance between a young Frenchman and a London typist. This was a much more substantial undertaking than L'Appartement des jeunes filles. Allard knew now to ensure that, despite its being only a demi-luxeedition of 412 copies, typography, layout, and paper were more than acceptable. Instead of the six isolated plates of L'Appartement des jeunes filles, drawn without regard for their placement in the text, Laboureur designed a frontispiece and 38 vignettes. His evocation of London was essentially what could be seen by a visitor quite outside the city's intimate life. The flavor of English existence is conveyed chiefly through street scenes—the top of an omnibus (p. 43), for example, or the Marble Arch (p. 69). Only occasionally is the focus narrowed even to such a subject as [4.3] the couple at tea in the Edgware Road (p. 72). It will be noted that the distortion of Laboureur's figures has become less extreme than in L'Appartement des jeunes filles. The many miniature illustrations dropped in the text—a bouquet of flowers (p. 36), a pair of letters (p. 66), or a [4.4] crocodile-skin valise (p. 139)—were already a trademark with the artist.

Beauté, mon beau souci was a key book for Laboureur in that it established the pattern which he typically followed during his 20 years

as a book artist. His aim was to establish an ambiance for his text through decorative compositions, not to detail once again in pictures what had already been written in words. So the effect of his designs comes more from their impact as a series than from the specific contribution of each individual illustration. In a phrase once used by The New Yorker, what counts is "all of the whole of the tout ensemble." When compared with the blaze of color that one finds in Barbier and Schmied, Laboureur's minimal blacks and grays may at first seem meager and drab. Yet the strategy works, for the reader has been brought to a properly receptive frame of mind by the decorative vision which Laboureur's spare and elegant line imposes.

Despite its excellence, the small edition of Beauté, mon beau souciwas not exhausted for two years, a circumstance which Allard invidiously ascribed to the vogue of "horrible coloriages printed in the style of luxurious catalogues" (p. 73). Meanwhile, Laboureur was demonstrating his mastery as a book-artist of other graphic techniques: of wood [4.5] engravings printed in color in Évariste Parny's Chansons madécasses [4.6] of 1920, of aquatint in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainvilleof 1921, and of lithographs in Jean Giraudoux's Promenade avec Gabrielle,which was finished in 1921 though it was not published until 1924. Even if in the future he often resorted to wood engraving, and occasionally to lithography, for his illustrations, he was henceforth regarded primarily as an engraver and an etcher.

Passing by a variety of minor, though interesting, publications, we may take up the tale again in 1925. Laboureur's position as an illustrator was now established. His collaboration in a livre d'art guaranteed its acceptance by bibliophiles. He could pick and choose among commissions, sometimes taking the initiative himself with publishers, in fixing on texts which appealed to his sophisticated personal taste. For a time the major books to which he applied himself were off-beat stories of 20th century French life, each revived for publication with his designs after it had achieved a following among a discriminating public. These included Jacques de Lacretelle's Silbermann of 1925, Remy de Gourmont's Le songe d'une femme of the same year, and Colette's L'Envers du music-hallof 1926.

It is easy to see why Silbermann, originally published in 1922, recommended itself to Laboureur. This short novel, which turns on the hostility and persecution encountered by a sensitive Jewish schoolboy at his Parisian Lycée, had a special significance in the perfervid atmosphere of the 1920s. In his 16 burins, eight plates and eight headpieces, the artist as usual devoted much of his attention to the ambiance of the tale. Scenes at the Lycée, in and out of class, in the comfortable family apartments

of Silbermann and of his comrade who tells the story, and in the country where the boys take their vacation bring an easy and cultivated way of life before the reader. But Laboureur also shows an unaccustomed interest in the characters and their crucial confrontations. Mme. Silbermann is the subject of a full-scale portrait (p. 42). There is a stirring [4.7] tableau of Silbermann pulling himself together after a fight at school (opposite p. 68), and Laboureur does not neglect the moment of truth in [4.8] which the narrator overhears his parents talking about his friend (opposite p. 136). The result is one of Laboureur's more forceful series of designs. Without subordinating his decorative scheme, he has become as well an illustrator of psychological penetration. Published by the Nouvelle Revue Française, and evidently patterned on Beauté, mon beausouci, which that firm had issued in 1920, this demi-luxe book (442 copies) is equally attractive in its presentation, and Laboureur's response to its theme gives his illustrations a weight and meaning which do not detract in the least from their grace and elegance.

Among the books illustrated by Laboureur of which Camille Bloch was the publisher, Le songe d'une femme is the most successful. Paul Escoube described Remy de Gourmont's novel in letters as "a kind of album of attitudes towards love, from the most modest and chaste to the most daring,"[69] and these attitudes are comprehensively suggested in the [4.9] artist's 27 burins. Indeed, the frontispiece is dominated by a woman's head in outline, beyond which are glimpsed her diverse imaginings. But one may surmise that Laboureur found an even stronger reason for reviving this book after 20 years in the opportunity it gave him to depict the French countryside, thus embarking on what for him was a largely unexplored range of subjects. Distinctive as his female figures are, it is [4.10] the scenes of forest (p. 65), country house, and seashore (p. 109) which most engage the reader's attention. Once more the miniature designs, [4.11] country still-lifes such as just-prepared pots of jam (p. 31), have their special charm. Bloch's realization of this small quarto, published in an edition of 455 copies, has its ingenious touches, from the facsimiles of the correspondents' signatures to the choice of an Italic type newly designed by Bernard Naudin as "suitable to the epistolary form of the work."[70] It may be mentioned that Bloch's final book illustrated by Laboureur, Remy de Gourmont's Couleurs of 1928, though more elaborate is less successful. The colors added to its 36 etchings seem superfluous in the work of this master of black and white.

If we pass by the Tableau des grands magasins for the moment, Laboureur's next work of importance was his friend Colette's L'Envers

du music-hall. Once again he had chosen a novel subject for his graver. In this account of music-hall existence before the War, first published in 1913, Colette drew upon reminiscences of a difficult period in her life. For its 440 copies Laboureur composed 32 burins, vignettes except for five plates, which convey the harshness of second-rate performers' lives [4.12] as seen from "the wrong side." The frontispiece, showing the troupe in the rain as it sets out on its travels, sets the tone for all the designs which follow. In consonance with Colette's vision there is glamor neither in the vignettes, which depict the habitual round of the players and their ani- [4.13] mals—on stage (p. 9), at the side-scenes, or in the dressing-rooms—nor in the plates, which present the chief figures of the anecdotes that she relates. The artist has made his illustrations as bleak as his author's text.

After 1925 Laboureur's work as a book artist became so diverse and abundant that it would be tedious and confusing to review it in strictly chronological order. I shall comment instead on some of the principal groups into which his books fall: (1) those with English subjects, including those with English texts published in England; (2) those concerned primarily with the material background of the life of worldly leisure; (3) a representative selection from his less substantial works; and (4) the two culminating books of the period, Suzanne et le Pacifique and Les contrerimes. An examination of these volumes will make it clear why Raymond Hesse could write by 1928: "Laboureur occupies a place entirely apart in illustration and . . . presents a personality of the first significance" (p. 54).

Such an examination will also reveal decisive changes both in his approach to illustration and in his technique. Without ceasing to be primarily a decorative artist, imposing his vision through the uniform style of his many small designs, he made increasing concessions to illustration as traditionally conceived. He no longer confined himself, as of set purpose, to the marginal aspects of his texts. On occasion he allowed himself to be direct rather than oblique, portraying leading characters and depicting dramatic encounters. Moreover the calculated distortions and rigidities of his style became less pronounced; indeed, the figures in his designs assume almost normal proportions, and the settings in which they appear are drawn with increasing freedom.

With regard to technique, Valotaire discerned a "second manner" in Laboureur's development as a book artist beginning with Les silences du Colonel Bramble. Supporting his argument from Laboureur's essays on the art and history of engraving, the critic shows how he came to employ a variety of tools, such as the etcher's needle and the roulette, to enrich and make flexible his basic work with the graver. Laboureur achieved thereby a fuller, subtler technique, better adapted to realizing the more

complex values which he wished to impart to his illustrations (pp. 39-40). An example of Laboureur's "second manner" is offered by his contribution to one of the most delightful of Art Deco books, the tricentenary edition of Perrault's Contes published in 1928. Each of 33 graphic artists contributed a plate, but it was left to Laboureur to provide the striking [4.14] medley from Perrault's tales (Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and the rest) which opens this édition dite des "33 graveurs."

It will be remembered that Beauté, mon beau souci of 1920 had London as its setting. Laboureur returned to an English subject in two of his most engaging series of illustrations, those for André Maurois' Les silences du Colonel Bramble and its sequel Les discours du docteur O'Grady, in 1926 and 1929 respectively. The former, according to Valotaire, was regarded as "the book which without any doubt has been the artist's greatest triumph" (p. 33). A perfect match between author and artist ensured that Laboureur would eventually illustrate these volumes, which were originally published in 1918 and 1922. Maurois had served as a liaison officer with the British Army during the War, and he based his narratives on his memories of these years. Laboureur had gone through very similar experiences; indeed, he might have been the interpreter Aurelle who figures in Maurois' books.

Moreover, Maurois and Laboureur saw the world from a like perspective. Both would have endorsed W. E. H. Lecky's affirmation, which stands as the epigraph to Les silences du Colonel Bramble, that there are few better models in life than the English gentleman. The humor and charm of Maurois' ensuing text derives in large part from the imperturbable acceptance by his little group of British officers of whatever may befall them. Since they are serving behind the lines in Flanders during the later years of a war of attrition, the trials that come their way are relatively minor. Maurois' subject for the most part is not combat but that equivalent of peace-time domestic life which men fashion for themselves under such conditions and above all the conversations on all subjects under the sun which are thereby encouraged.

Laboureur found much to appeal to his whimsical turn of mind in such a subject: for example, the gramophone in the officer's mess which becomes the Colonel's pride and joy (p. 13), or his being called upon to [4.15] reassure a maiden lady who has complained of the "shocking spectacle" presented by his soldiers at their morning ablutions (p. 167). Yet the dreariness of such a war is not suppressed in Laboureur's graphic commentary, as his frontispiece bears witness; nor are its dangers, as in his rendering of Maurois' almost mathematical demonstration that a shell [4.16] had to destroy Private Scott because no man escapes his destiny (p. 75). It is significant, as well, that in Les discours du docteur O'Grady Laboureur

selects for illustration an anecdote related by Bramble which suggests the ruthlessness which lay beneath his amiable manner. Private Biggs, a small cockney, has complained that he runs so slowly that he will never get a chance to kill. In the next attack his gigantic mates corner two Germans [4.17] in their trench until Biggs can finish them off (p. 112). Throughout the two volumes Laboureur characterizes his principal personages exclusively through their bodily confirmation and posture. Their faces count for nothing, yet their silhouettes identify them unmistakably, as in this [4.18] rendering of the Colonel and Aurelle setting out for Ypres (Bramble,p. 135).

Both Les silences du Colonel Bramble and Les discours du docteur O'Grady have a frontispiece and 14 vignettes, burins in the first and burins completed by etching in the second. They were printed in editions of 440 and 430 copies respectively, but it must be admitted that, except for Laboureur's engravings, they would hardly qualify as livres d'art.

Laboureur's designs for Oscar Wilde's Le portrait de Dorian Grayare among his best work, and once again they show him departing widely from his usual strategy for presenting a text. The sober elegance of the large headpieces executed by burin and roulette which introduce each of the 20 chapters of this ambitious livre d'art, published in 1928 in an edition of 280 copies, makes them highly decorative, but in their indirect and understated way they are also true illustrations. Until his final design Laboureur is content to play down the sensational elements of Wilde's novel. For example, the reader never sees the portrait which must bear the cumulative effect of Dorian Gray's misdeeds. In the headpiece to [4.19] the first chapter, while Lord Henry Wotton speaks to Basil Hallward as the painter adds his finishing touches (p. 1), the canvas is shown from behind. Later it is wrapped for removal to storage (p. 183), and still later our angle of vision is limited to Basil Hallward's reaction when Dorian draws back the curtain which conceals it (p. 239). Again, when the young actress Sybil Vane kills herself after her brutal rejection by Dorian, we are shown her corpse (p. 143), but the true horror of the episode has already been brought home by Laboureur's depiction of Dorian's sinister [4.20] figure as he returns home at dawn through Covent Garden Market after their confrontation (p. 125). Indeed, the stages of Dorian's degradation are rarely presented in a broad or obvious way. The experiments in behavior into which he is led by his absorption in Huysmans' À rebours are suggested merely by a glimpse of him reading in his study. Yet in the latter half of the book the mood of the artist's designs does become increasingly threatening: blacks and dark grays predominate in his engravings

of London's gloomiest aspects. Then comes Wilde's melodramatic climax, which even Laboureur could not resist. We see at last what the portrait would have revealed, when Dorian, seeking to destroy the can- [4.21] vas with the knife which he used to kill Basil Hallward, thereby kills himself (p. 341).

Laboureur's extensive English connections led to his providing designs for some 18 books with texts in English, nearly all of them printed in England. The most considerable of these were Jacques Cazotte's The Devil in Love of 1925, Thomas Carew's A Rapture of 1927, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy of 1928 and 1929-30 respectively (the last three for the Golden Cockerel Press), and George Farquhar's The Beaux' Strategem also of 1928. Of The Devil in Love 395 copies were printed for England and 365 for the United States. The latter issue has six etchings. In dealing with this short picaresque tale, first published as Le diable amoureux in 1772, Laboureur paid more attention than usual to period decor and costume, and though his plates are highly decorative, they are also tied to specific episodes in the text with the relevant passages printed below the images. Moreover, the moments Laboureur chose are crucial to the progress of the story, as in this Venetian tableau of the seeming assassination of [4.22] Biondetta, with whom the narrator is in love (p. 48). The result is a commentary on Cazotte's text as pertinent as it is lively. A Sentimental Journeymay stand as representative of the works of classic English literature which Laboureur illustrated. As with his 15 plates for Tristram Shandy,his six for this work combine engraving and etching. Hardly more than sketches of passing moments in Sterne's chronicle, his designs leave unexploited such familiar passages as that on "The Dead Ass" in which an old traveller discourses mournfully on the loss of his patient companion. But in style and manner they harmonize with Sterne's carefully informal text, just as they suggest the book's 18th century background. An ex- [4.23] ample is Sterne's purchase of gloves from a fair shopkeeper in Paris (opposite p. 69). Also deserving of comment is William Cowper's The Diverting History of John Gilpin, published by Ronald Davis of Paris in 1931 in an edition of 57 copies. It is stated of the comic drawings of this little book that "the lithographs have been drawn by Lucien Serreet Cie." In the style of English caricatures of the later eighteenth century, and thus after their fashion contemporary with Cowper's poem, they may have been intended by Laboureur as a tribute to a long-time favorite, Thomas Rowlandson. They are altogether unlike his work on metal, though they have a certain kinship to the lithographs from his own hand in Jean Giraudoux's Promenade avec Gabrielle of 1921. As will be seen

[4.24] from the opening shown, their animation, color, and abundance (one to a page) make an appeal quite different from that of Laboureur's usual designs.

Finally, Laboureur's friendship for Marcel Boulestin led him to design frontispieces for a number of the latter's culinary and gastronomical works. They also collaborated in two books, Petits et grands verres, of which more presently, and The New Keepsake for the Year 1921. For the latter Boulestin selected the texts and Laboureur the plates. Among the artists he chose were Robert Bonfils, Galanis, Marcel Gromaire, Marie Laurencin, and Dunoyer de Segonzac—the French contemporaries whose work he found most congenial. His own contribution, characteristically, [4.25] was the portrait of a barmaid (p. 35), which may serve to represent his illustrations for Boulestin in general.

Laboureur's frontispieces to Boulestin's books provide a natural transition to an idiosyncratic category among his books of the middle and later 1920s, those in which he took as his subject the material setting for the life of worldly leisure. Himself a bon vivant who delighted in food, wine, and the spectacle of society, he here concerned himself not so much with its people as with its background and accoutrements. In his hands these things, usually left to the often gross and always suspect attentions of advertisers, were imbued with a grace and elegance which make them a delight to behold.

J. Valmy Baysse's Tableau des grands magasins of 1925 surveys the great Parisian department stores through informal essays and sketches. Published in the collection "Tableaux contemporains, " which included another notable volume in Tristan Bernard's Tableau de la boxe with etchings by Dunoyer de Segonzac, it appeared in an edition of 315 copies with 12 burins by Laboureur: six plates, which are among his most ambitious illustrations, and six headpieces. As the author observes, the department store claimed all retail commerce as its province, and to attract the public to this novel initiative it drew upon the boldest experiments of contemporary decorative art (p. 25). Thus Laboureur's plates in their small way are as representative of the Art Deco style as was anything in [4.26] the great exhibition of the same year. An example is a scene before an elevator (opposite p. 55). Elsewhere he shows the store at its busiest and most animated, during sales, for example, or just before Christmas (op- [4.27] posite table of contents). "The hectic, charming, Parisian atmosphere" (p. 126) of the establishment is omnipresent in his engravings.

Petits et grands verres: choix des meilleurs cocktails of 1927 was translated from the English of Nina Toye and A. H. Adair by Laboureur himself under the pseudonym of Ph. Le Huby. The unsigned preface, the work of Marcel Boulestin in the English version of 1925, has touches

which can only have come from Laboureur. The resulting small quartois one of the artist's most delightful books. Only the 260 copies of the limited edition included his 10 burins, plates which again exceed his usual scale. The preface opens with a nostalgic survey of the Parisian bars of the beginning of the century. Included are reminiscences of Toulouse Lautrec, for whom "all bars were good, but he had his preferences" (p. 2). Lautrec was not above inventing cocktails, it is related, though he himself preferred a bottle of Scotch and a siphon. A section on the history of the cocktail follows, in which assurance is offered that they are now served as frequently at home as in public. There is a concluding admonition to the reader to try his own hand at devising recipes, thereby contributing "to the progress of a young art, which is full of promise" (p. 6). Laboureur's plates begin with bars at various social levels, including a design set in the 1890s and inscribed "hommage to Toulouse-Lautrec," [4.28] which shows the painter's occasional subject, "Chocolat dancing in a bar." He proceeds to groups of drinkers in other settings, beside a tennis court, in a boudoir, at a picnic, and—as a tribute to creole cuisine—on a plantation. That the book was a labor of love for Laboureur, in both its text and its illustrations, is evident throughout.

How Laboureur could transform the backgrounds against which the leisure class led its life was shown again in 1927 through the 10 burins which illustrated Valery Larbaud's 200 chambres, 200 salles de bain, a volume issued in 366 copies. The glimpses offered of the appearance and routine of this luxurious Portuguese hotel, which was considered large at [4.29] the time—its exterior, the arrival of guests, its garden, its dining room, and so on—show it to be a palace of distinction and elegance. These designs lead one to speculate on what Laboureur might have made of Arnold Bennett's Imperial Palace of 1930.

Before paying tribute to Laboureur's outstanding books of the later 1920s, Suzanne et le Pacifique and Les contrerimes, I should mention three other works of interest. Georges Camuset's Les sonnets du docteur,the poems of a nineteenth century practitioner resuscitated by a Dijon publisher in 1926, has four etchings by Laboureur. An hors d'oeuvreamong the artist's books, it is yet worth mentioning for two reasons. It shows him working in the same field as did Daumier, one of the masters to whom he was most devoted, in Némésis médicale, and it contains a [4.30] plate which in its way foreshadows his own fate. This striking design depicts Camuset's great-uncle Bernard, "still vigorous, but very old," succumbing to a stroke at table after consuming an excellent but too copious dinner (p. 52). Gastronomic subjects were always attractive to Laboureur, but it is curious that he should have chosen one with such admonitory overtones.

Les caves du Vatican, a sortie or entertainment by André Gide, was first published in 1914. For the reissue of 1929-30, printed in an edition of 372 copies by the Nouvelle Revue Française, Laboureur provided a frontispiece for each of the five spacious volumes, as well as a headpiece for each chapter, for a total of 44 etchings. An unusual feature was the printing in bister of the headpieces with added touches of bister in the frontispieces. The publication presents both artist and author in a lighthearted mood, rather as if Eric Gill had undertaken to illustrate Steven- [4.31] son's New Arabian Nights. The frontispiece of the final volume shows Lafcadio committing his famous acte gratuite, a perfectly motiveless murder.

Laboureur's designs for the 1930 reissues of Maeterlinck's La vie des abeilles, La vie des fourmis, and La vie des termites, first published in the years 1901 and following, constituted something of a tour de force.In the rich illustrations for an edition of La vie des abeilles which had appeared in 1908, Carlos Schwabe did full justice to the country settings of that book but ignored the insects which are its main concern. Not so Laboureur, who had at his command the delicacy and precision to deal expertly with these tiny creatures. Only a few of the 32 burins of these volumes are plates, such as that showing a beekeeper and his hives which [4.32] serves as the frontispiece to La vie des abeilles. The rest are vignettes, appearing on the opening page of each section of the three volumes, hardly larger than the insects they depict. Most successful, perhaps, are the headpieces for La vie des termites, made oblong rather than square [4.33] to accommodate these white ants in their habitat. Here is Laboureur's sketch of the queen and her consort, about which Maeterlinck wrote: "this queen presents the most monstrous hypertrophy that one finds in the whole world of insects, and yet Nature is not miserly with monstrosities" (p. 89). Apart from Laboureur's designs these three volumes, published in editions of 750 copies each, make only modest claims for themselves.

We come now to Jean Giraudoux's Suzanne et le Pacifique. A reissue of 1927, six years after its initial appearance, it was undertaken for the bibliophile society, Les Cent Une. Since Laboureur's 33 burins, all vignettes but unusually large, made it one of his two or three finest books, it is unfortunate that the limitation of the edition to 125 copies has prevented most amateurs from becoming acquainted with it at first hand. Giraudoux's fantasy on the tropical island theme is related by an 18-year- old girl. Living with her tutor near Toulouse, Suzanne learns that she has won a trip around the world in a competition held by an Australian newspaper. Laboureur's designs for the early chapters, which show her at [4.34] home and aboard an ocean liner on her way to Sydney (as on p. 62), establish the familiar world from which she is swept by a tempest. Then

comes the heart of the book, her experiences on the island where she finds herself. For Giraudoux the interest of the situation lay in her responses, at once naïve and sophisticated. Laboureur found his opportunities in the hitherto unexplored scenes offered to him, vegetation, birds, animals, all under a different sun. Suzanne is cordially received by the [4.35] island's creatures (p. 101), for in its way it is a paradise. At one with [4.36] nature, her adventure becomes an idyll (p. 180). Indeed, her rescue, [4.37] when it occurs, is an anti-climax (p. 244). Godefroy has well observed how marvelously Laboureur contrived to associate "his brilliant linear art with Giraudoux's sparkling, mannered prose. These small prints, ethereal, transparent, and satin-like with tropical light, have the shimmering brightness of the text which they accompany" (p. 29). It is revealing to compare Laboureur's burins with the copper engravings which the always estimable Jean-Gabriel Daragnès made for his edition of Suzanneet le Pacifique the following year. Though dealing with a tropical paradise, a subject which would seem to call out for bright colors and a wide canvas, Laboureur's delicate art prevails.

Even if judged by entirely conventional expectations concerning the livre d'art, Paul-Jean Toulet's Les contrerimes of 1930 has few rivals among Art Deco books. Issued in an edition of 301 copies, it is a large quarto to which paper, typography, and mise en page have all made their appropriate contributions. The artist's 62 vignettes, distributed evenly through its 145 pages, make it his fullest effort of illustration. The distortion that marked the figures of Beauté, mon beau souci a decade earlier has virtually disappeared, yet the subtler aspects of Laboureur's style continue to give his designs a unifying stamp. Indeed, they are as harmonious as they are varied, never departing from their note of urbane elegance.

Among Toulet's hundred-odd poems—polished, witty, and worldly—Laboureur seized upon whatever points happened to catch his fancy. Often a passing image or allusion provided the hint for a small decora- [4.38] tion. When love is compared to smoke, for example, a small engraving shows cigarettes, a holder, an ashtray, and a matchbox, all in the Art Deco style (p. 87). At the other end of the scale, a reference to Arles or London, to Djibouti or Saigon, calls forth a more substantial rendering. These crisp and economical evocations are usually generalized, but sometimes they reflect special conditions imposed by the text, as when Toulet [4.39] describes an elephant on the streets of Paris (p. 33). Since love, always profane, is a prominent theme, Laboureur depicts many pretty ladies. [4.40] So a young girl awakens from a dream of lost virginity (p. 30), or an orgy is glimpsed during a moment of lassitude (p. 61). In sum, the world of Toulet's imagination is offered to the reader with consistent distinction,

the poet's command of intricate verse forms being matched by the artist's mastery of his graver.

Laboureur's career as a book artist had reached its peak between 1926 and 1930, when each year saw the appearance of several significant volumes with his designs. Yet the financial crisis of 1930—31 was not the disaster for him that it was for Schmied. It is true, however, that thereafter, apart from the drawings for two volumes of Maupassant's Oeuvres complètes in 1934 and 1936, which were reproduced by mechanical process, only a few major commissions came his way, and those for the most part were for editions of 200 copies or fewer, directed at the minuscule market of wealthy collectors whose devotion to livres d'art had survived the crash. Indeed, the most appealing of these, Perrault's Peau d'âne of 1935 with 31 etchings, limited to 75 copies, was issued by the artist himself. But Laboureur had another string to his bow. Once again he turned to print-making as his principal occupation, and some of his most ambitious works, including the 25 landscapes of the series devoted to a vast swamp near the Loire called La Grande Brière, date from this period.

The serious illness which had overtaken Laboureur at the end of 1938 left him permanently paralyzed at Kerfahler after an attack during the following Easter vacation. Though he could no longer draw, a letter of 15 December 1941 to his friend and patron Jacques André in Paris, which is mounted in a copy of Le portrait de Dorian Gray owned by a New York collector, bears witness that he remained mentally alert and still concerned with the interests of a lifetime. Dictated to his wife, but bearing his faltering signature, it acknowledges the receipt of 2500 francs for "putting all the color desirable" in a set of his illustrations for Wilde's novel and expresses his eagerness to visit Paris in order to see the bindings which Paul Bonet had created for André's copies of books with his illustrations. Whether he was allowed to leave the zone interdite of which the War had made Kerfahler a part is uncertain. He died there in 1943.

Though Laboureur was a supreme Art Deco book artist, and each of his principal books exemplifies the style in a striking way, I should emphasize in my conclusion that he also became an outstanding illustrator in the traditional sense. An intelligent man of wide sympathies, as much at home in literature as in life, he was expert at mastering and interpreting the texts which he himself chose. Despite the abundance of his production, he succeeded in avoiding repetition and monotony. Since he worked through selection rather than profusion, he never overwhelmed the reader with his designs. Once his cubist phase was over, his style acquired a suppleness which enabled him to achieve the varied effects demanded by his ever changing subjects, without losing any of the distinctiveness which marked it as his own. Moreover, his way of seeing the

world was witty in itself. The human comedy is always amusing as presented through his eyes. Since he invariably employed original graphics over which he had complete control, his resourcefulness enabled him to present his personal vision with a precise elegance which made the smallness of scale to which he worked a major asset. In sum, his notable volumes, among them Beauté, mon beau souci, L'Envers du music-hall, Les silences du Colonel Bramble, Suzanne et le Pacifique, Le portrait de Dorian Gray, and Les contrerimes, are among the classics of the French illustrated book.

5. Pierre Begrain and Art Deco Bookbinding

We come finally to the bindings of the 1920s, which have been far more influential than illustrations in attracting admirers of Art Deco to the books of the period. In Victor Arwas' recent survey, for example, they are the subject of a major chapter, whereas illustrated books in themselves receive only sporadic attention.[71] Moreover, the interest of collectors of Art Deco bindings now extends beyond Begrain, Schmied, and Rose Adler, beyond Cretté, Creuzevault, and Bonfils, beyond a dozen other authentic workers in the style, to binders whose productions had dropped out of sight for decades and perhaps will do so again. Indeed, almost any elaborately decorated binding of the 1920s, no matter how inferior its quality, seems today to find its purchaser, a situation that will surely change as the original and accomplished work of the time becomes more generally known.

It will be well to begin with a brief account of what Begrain and his followers were to disavow. That the 25 years between the publication of Marius Michel's L'Ornementation des reliures modernes in 1889 and the outbreak of the War were a high point of French fine binding is now generally conceded. The ranking masters were Henri Marius Michel,Émile Mercier, and Charles Meunier, but there were a dozen other binders like Canape, Carayon, Chambolle-Duru, Gruel, Kieffer, Maylander, and Noulhac, whose work was regarded as almost equally acceptable. The revolutionary principle announced in the preface to Marius Michel's treatise, that one should "make the exterior decoration of a book accord with the subject treated therein" (p. 2), was explored in all its nuances with remarkable results. As Marius Michel himself pointed out, this principle could be applied as appropriately to modest as to elaborate bindings, but in the eyes of posterity, the idea of opulence came to be associated as firmly with bindings as with all other aspects of Belle Epoque production. There is the story, indeed, of the traditionalist, distressed by

the tendencies of the time, who remarked of a characteristic example: "You call that a binding? It is the foyer of the Opéra!"

At any rate, when a reaction occurred after the War, it was in the name of simpler, more restrained decoration, though still one appropriate to the book being bound. What critics then found to deplore will become evident if we glance at four examples of Belle Epoque binding [5.1] at its most ambitious. Marius Michel's creation for Huysmans' À rebours of 1903 illustrated by Lepère is a particularly successful specimen of the floral ornament which he made synonymous with Art Nouveau binding. Its suitability to the text is achieved by a subtle harmony of color and design, not by anything assertively allusive. Far less restrained were the so-called reliures parlantes of the period, decorated with pictures in mosaic morocco of scenes from the text. Their sumptuousness [5.2] is shown in Meunier's doublure for Octave Uzanne's Physiologies des [5.3] quais de Paris of 1893. Even richer is the Arabian splendor of Maylander's binding for Toussaint's Le jardin des caresses of 1914, illustrated by Léon Carré. A double purpose is served by my final example. [5.4] Another reliure parlante by Meunier, this time on Erastène Ramiro's Faune parisienne of 1901, with illustrations by Louis Legrand, it makes use of incised leather panels after Legrand's etchings. Though executed in every respect as if it had been done at the time of the book's publication, it is dated 1924—thus underlining the persistence of conservative taste among post-War bibliophiles.

During the course of the 1920s the dominance among bibliophiles of the binding tradition just described was called into question, shaken, and finally overcome by the example of one man, Pierre Begrain. But this was a gradual process, and the assertion in Pierre Begrain relieur, the standard catalogue of his work, that between 1919 and 1929 he was the "uncontested master" of the art of binding[72] is far from correct. The story of his brief but spectacular career in bookbinding is more complex as well as more interesting.

The son of a well-to-do industrialist, born 20 October 1889, Begrain passed his early years in a Parisian suburb. By the age of 12 he had left school to apply himself to the study of design, which he pursued with increasing fervor. He was almost equally devoted to sports, notably tennis, cycling, and pelota (jai alai). Excessive exertion during a cycling tour brought on a nearly mortal attack, and he was henceforth afflicted with a cardiac condition which made him incapable of sustained physical effort. At the same period his father suffered drastic business reverses,

and the elder Legrain's death shortly thereafter left Begrain and his mother without resources. Following a period of recuperation in the Auvergne, he returned to Paris to earn their living by his designs.

Eventually his drawings brought him to the attention of the decorator Paul Iribe, whose friend and assistant he became. Between 1908 and 1914 he was Iribe's unacknowledged collaborator in all sorts of decorative work, sometimes originating designs, sometimes completing them from Iribe's sketches. After the War began, he saw such noncombatant duty as his physical condition permitted. He also married the young mother of Jacques Anthoine, later himself a well-known binder under the name Jacques Anthoine-Begrain, and she gave him a happy and comfortable home.

This was Legrain's situation in 1916 when Jacques Doucet made him a momentous proposal.[73] Adept at everything having to do with decoration, he yet had little public reputation of his own. And at a time when the War had suppressed both the materials and the market for the decorative arts, he was hard put to find employment. Doucet was celebrated as a fashion designer, a collector, and a patron of artists and writers. Having sold his great 18th century collection in 1912, he was in the process of forming another, a bibliothèque moderne, which would include not only the books but also the working manuscripts and the proofs of leading contemporary authors—a truly original conception anticipating by decades the institutional collecting policies of our own time. Through his commissions to artists and artisans he was also one of the principal inspirers of the Art Deco style. If Begrain had talent in need of employment, Doucet had a collection of books requiring to be bound, and in his atelier were the materials for such bindings. Marie Darmoy, Doucet's first librarian, imagines him addressing Begrain, "while the battle of Verdun was raging," in these terms:

When Begrain protested that he had no competence as a binder, Doucet replied: "You will draw the maquettes, and the binders who have worked for me up till now will execute them." So Begrain was installed in

Doucet's dining room, comfortably warm even under wartime conditions, at the then acceptable wage of 300 francs a month. Between 1917 [5.5] and 1919 he designed some 370 bindings which were executed principally by René Kieffer, but also by Canape, Noulhac, and Germaine Schroeder.

Thus it happened that a great binder found his vocation and that the first step was taken towards revolutionizing the style of modern French binding. The books which resulted exist today, intact and fresh, at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris. The originality of Legrain's work is evident at a glance. In their restrained elegance they offer a refreshing change from the still prevailing opulence of Belle Epoque binding. Begrain touched on the rationale of these early bindings in an interview of 1923. While explaining how the artist differs from the artisan, he remarked that "one must know how to take advantage of large surfaces, of elliptical hints which point to subtle thoughts, and which, under very simple appearances, allow very delicate ideas to be surmised." Above all one should not "over-embellish" but use the Jansenist cover as a base, rejecting "traditional lace patterns, ancestral fleurons, complicated mosaics, raised bands dividing the spine."[75]

Considered intrinsically rather than historically, however, Legrain's earliest bindings can hardly be regarded as masterpieces. No doubt they employ the best morocco. No doubt such frills as gilt edges are disdained. No doubt their austere geometric patterns are harmonious and their infinitely varied use of typographic characters from a book's title to adorn its front cover is truly original. No doubt, as Jacques Chapon has recently shown (pp. 257-258), the bindings designed for each of Doucet's authors, Claudel, Gide, Verlaine, and the rest, form a distinct group with its prevailing colors, styles, and motifs. Yet to a degree these are negative virtues. If it is hardly a question of the emperor's new clothes, one nevertheless understands why the wits of the time affected to see in Doucet's ensemble of book furniture chiefly the "insistence on detail" characteristic of a grand couturier (p. 157). Legrain's great achievements as a binder lay ahead.

After he completed his bindings for Doucet in 1919, he continued to work for him as a designer of furniture and other objects. Indeed, as Jacques Guignard is careful to emphasize: "until the end of his life binding remained only a secondary preoccupation with him, and he never forgot what he had been from the first: a decorator."[76] Begrain had shown his bindings with success at the Société des Artistes Décorateurs in 1919, and he did not lack for other clients. As he continued to exhibit each year at the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, and beginning in 1922

at the Salon d'Automne, interest in his work grew apace. From the latter year onward articles about his bindings appeared with increasing frequency in periodicals devoted to art, decoration, and book collecting.[77] He could now pick and choose among clients, and sometimes even among books, and he no longer had to produce nearly 200 bindings a year. His services were sought by the more adventurous bibliophiles of the day, among them Baron Robert de Rothschild and Hubert de Montbrison.

It was only after Begrain had left Doucet, incidentally, that his work began fully to reflect the spirit of the often quoted dictum which he pronounced in 1923: "Each binding is the frontispiece to each book; it synthesizes the work, it is the frame which should embellish and give value to it."[78] Two descriptions of bindings provided by Begrain himself offer examples of his practice. Of a binding on Maeterlinck's Serres [5.6] chaudes (No. 644) he wrote: "a few circles and two curved lines on a background of orange will suggest the creepers of rich tropical vegeta- [5.7] tion," and of a binding of 1922 on Roland Dorgelès' Les croix de bois (No. 246): "The wooden crosses . . . will be black on a silver background to create a striking ensemble in harmony with the speculations of the book."[79] Further examples are provided by two maquettes in the New York Public Library, both rendered in 1921 by René Kieffer for Baron [5.8] Robert de Rothschild. The first is on René Boylesve's Nymphes dansant avec les satyrs of 1920 (No. 103). This design, which is carried out on bottle green calf, decorated in silver with inlays of black morocco, suggests a fountain with a single jet. (Begrain explains his correction of the lettering in a note: "Les naïades sont des satyrs.") The second was de- [5.9] signed for Oscar Wilde's Ballade de la géôle de Reading of 1918 with wood engravings by Daragnès (No. 1219), perhaps of all livres d'art the one most frequently selected for extra binding during the 1920s. Begrain alone decorated no fewer than 12 copies. Executed on black calf with the chains in silver, it may be preferred in its powerful simplicity to the more elaborate binding of 1929 for the same work which will be shown later in the lecture.

Here I should note that I have worked with actual bindings wherever possible. Starting with my own collection, I have drawn particularly on the holdings of the New York Public Library, the Yale University Library, and the Stanford University Library. But in the interest of comprehensivenes I have supplemented these resources by reproductions from secondary works: from Pierre Begrain relieur of 1965, which includes

the standard catalogue of his bindings; from the third volume of Devauchelle's La reliure en France de ses origines à nos jours of 1959-61; and from Rose Adler's Reliures, a portfolio of 1929 surveying contemporary binding. The volumes in the New York Public Library require a brief description. With one exception they were received from George Blumenthal in 1937. They were bound for Mrs. Florence Blumenthal, an American living in Paris, in the years following the award of the Prix Blumenthal to Begrain. Mrs. Blumenthal was an ardent patron of literature, the friend of Proust and Valéry, as well as a bibliophile. Five of her bindings are unrecorded in the standard catalogue, and others are listed but not described. They show her commissions developing from relatively simple designs on modest first editions to elaborate compositions on large-scale livres d'art, a typical progression, one imagines, among Legrain's clients of the later 1920s. The exception mentioned above is one of three albums, and by far the most important, in which Begrain near the end of his life collected the maquettes for his bindings.[80] This large folio contains 96 drawings in black and white and in color, many with instructions to the binders, though these are usually laconic, his rule obviously being that design was his province, its realization his binders'. The drawings cover his entire career from 1917 to 1929 and are mounted, with some divergences, in something approaching chronological order. There is no more significant volume for the study of his work.

A new phase in Legrain's work had begun by 1923. Hitherto he had relied on Kieffer and others to make bindings from his maquettes at their own establishments, but now increasing custom led him to improvise an atelier with the interior decorators Briant and Robert. A year later he removed to his own premises, and though he shifted their location several times, he henceforth had his staff of workers to realize his conceptions. By this time the simplicity and purity which he had initially advocated were no longer dominant aspirations. If he still deplored literal representation, such as a rose window on Huysmans' La cathédraleor the outline of the Acropolis on Renan's Prière sur l'acropole, he freely admitted allusive designs, emphasizing once more that the binding was an "introductory frontispiece, . . . which by its color, manner, decorative spirit, and ordering after a fashion announces the text it contains."[81] From this liberated position he began to create bindings which approached those of the pre-War binders themselves in complexity, though they were composed of very different decorative elements.

Looking through the plates to Pierre Begrain relieur, which reproduce more than 300 bindings in predominantly chronological arrangement,

one sees how vastly Begrain extended his decorative scope during this period. It was then that he was able to take full advantage of the good luck which Paul Bonet later discerned in reviewing Legrain's career: "He had known how to look at cubism and abstract art,—no one yet in the little world of binding was aware of these things—he, who came with fresh eyes and without prejudices, understood the new road that had opened up, [and] he entered upon it."[82] The use of typographical lettering continued to be a mainstay, but there were many new departures. More and more of his designs are asymmetrical. Arrangements of repeated small squares or circles are common, as are parallel lines, whether continuous or broken into dots, now straight, now curved, now crossed. Inlays are the rule, and, as Guignard points out, Begrain felt free to employ incrustations of unaccustomed materials: metals, rare woods, or mother-of-pearl.[83] Here is a pair of examples of this practice, drawn from his earliest bindings for Mrs. Blumenthal in 1925. Relatively simple designs for literary first editions, they rely chiefly on novel substances [5.10] for their effect: black calf with mother-of-pearl inlays for André Gide's La porte étroite of 1909 and two tones of brown calf surrounding an oval of stained and polished wood with a translucent facing for the same au- [5.11] thor's Isabelle of 1911.

Since he was now binding illustrated books as well as literary texts, he sometimes drew inspiration from a volume's graphic contents. This was true, for example, of his many bindings for Schmied's notable books of 1924 and 1925. The directly representational bindings of earlier years are far less in evidence, though they still occur. An example is Octave [5.12] Mirbeau's Le journal d'une femme de chambre (No. 698), bound between 1922 and 1924, the pattern of seeming bars on which actually derives from the book's wrappers simulating a chambermaid's ledger. But enough has been said to suggest Legrain's wonderful fertility of invention.

We come now to the period in which Begrain in fact became the "uncontested master" of French binding. During the early 1920s when his rising reputation and increasing clientele were beginning to make perceptible inroads on the position of traditional binders, their acknowledged leader remained Henri Marius Michel. This magnificent veteran had entrusted the active management of his atelier to Georges Cretté in the years following the latter's return to Paris in 1919, but he remained vigorous and alert to what was going on in his world. Upon hearing his young friend Georges Blaizot, son of the book dealer Auguste Blaizot, express his pleasure in the bindings which Begrain had displayed at the

Société des Artistes Décorateurs, he mockingly remarked: "So, young man, you admire that, decorative art created with a square, a compass, and a drawing pen."[84] Yet in other moods he was capable of a detached response to the changes going on around him. Speaking to the students of the École des Arts Décoratifs in 1922, when he was 76, he conceded: "I am no longer regarded as a revolutionary. Just as in politics a person always seems reactionary to someone, in decorative art, a person is always pompous and pretentious [pompier] to the following generation and more than pompous and pretentious [vieux pompier] to the very young. You will be the same in your turns, but since decorative art is a long chain in which each new generation comes to forge a new ring, it suffices that the one which you will bring should intelligently fill its place for you to leave an honorable trace there."[85]

By presenting Legrain's challenge to traditional binding to public view, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925 sealed his reputation. Even Clément-Janin, by no means a friendly observer, conceded in L'Artvivant that "Begrain, who is enjoying a recent access of fame, well symbolizes our epoch through his bindings"[86] and illustrated his article with reproductions of six of Legrain's creations. Indeed, they were illustrated everywhere in reviews of the Exhibition as ranking Art Deco objects.[87] The opposition between old and new came to be summed up by the work of Marius Michel on the one hand and the work of Begrain on the other. To feel the impact of this confrontation, we cannot do better than consider two copies of the edition of Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau which was published in 1924 with illustrations by Bernard Naudin. The two generations of the Blaizot family commissioned bindings for this book, [5.13] the father from Marius Michel and the son from Begrain. The first, which is reproduced from the third volume of Devauchelle's La reliureen France (after page 90), is decorated with one of the master's richest patterns of floral ornamentation. It is an uncompromising example of [5.14] le style 1900, a superb anachronism. The second, which serves as the frontispiece to the same volume, shows Begrain, no longer hampered by theoretical restrictions, applying the full resources of the Art Deco style to bookbinding. Certainly it is among the earliest in the long series of Legrain's masterpieces.

No doubt Legrain's career would have developed in much the same way if there had been no Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in 1925, though surely not as rapidly, but his triumph there did unmistakably confirm his arrival. This success was not a matter of chance. As Crauzat points out, the Jury which selected bindings for display, under the vice-presidency of René Kieffer, chose to interpret literally general rule four of the Exhibition which limited admission to "works of a novel inspiration and a real originality." Hence Marius Michel, faithful to the floral ornament of Art Nouveau, was excluded altogether, as were a number of other well known binders in traditional modes. The binders shown, in a somewhat irregular and scattered way, included true innovators like Begrain, Schmied, and Bonfils; a bevy of relieurs-femmes like Rose Adler, Germaine Schroeder, and Jeanne Langrand; and some long-established artisans who had admitted elements of modernity into their work like Canape, Gruel, Noulhac, and Kieffer himself. Legrain's mark was everywhere;it was he who had provided, Crauzat notes, "a marvellous impetus towards domains previously unknown and unexplored" (2: 177).

Far from being gratified by this evidence of his influence, Begrain issued a circular-letter entitled Copying is Stealing (Copier, c'est voler), in which he complained that for several years he had been "the victim of manifest theft" by a generation of young binders. He pointed particularly to the School of the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, where such systematic plagiarism was part of the program, as demonstrated by its display at the Exhibition. The replies which he received bore out his accusations. A Jury member recalled the "false Legrains" which had been paraded past him and his fellows. But in general Legrain's friends and admirers urged him to take the matter quietly, to reflect that this was the way in which styles imposed themselves. Indeed, René Lalique, who had been through the same ordeal, told him that it was "the consecration of success."[88]

Marius Michel died on 9 May 1925, not long after the opening of the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. In November of that year the continuing loyalty of bibliophiles to him was affirmed when the third section of the great library of René Deschamps-Scrive was sold at auction, its principal offerings being modern illustrated books in Marius Michel's mosaic bindings. The sale contained a single binding by Begrain, on Jules Renard's Histoires naturelles of 1899 with lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec. The catalogue's comment was laconic: "Curious binding in the modern style" (lot 275). The critical and financial success of the sale showed that most bibliophiles still placed their faith in the man whom Henri Beraldi

called "the most considerable artist who had come along in binding since the Renaissance."[89] A similar reception was accorded the memorial exhibition of his bindings held in 1927. But though Marius Michel's successor, Georges Cretté moved away from his style only slowly, and other binders working in traditional modes retained their clients, Begrain by the later 1920s had carried the day. When he died in 1929, Crauzat, the ranking authority, wrote simply: "P. Begrain is `contemporary binding' " (2: 301). In our own time, of course, Marius Michel and Begrain are no longer seen as competitors, but in the former's long philosophic perspective as masters in a succession which runs: Marius Michel, Pierre Begrain, Paul Bonet, and perhaps Pierre-Lucien Martin.

The years between 1925 and Legrain's death in 1929 saw the appearance of most of his best work. His understanding of the technique of binding, about which doubts had remained earlier, was complete. His workmen stood ready to execute whatever maquettes he gave them, even if at first they declared his inventions to be impossible of realization. Though he continued to be in great demand as a decorator, he came more and more to favor binding, even giving some thought to becoming an architecte du livre like Schmied, interesting himself in all aspects of the creation of livres d'art. Under these circumstances he had obviously left the rule, the square, and the compass far behind him. Indeed, Crauzat mentions that one of the motives for the increasing elaboration of his bindings was to discourage plagiarism. "His designs, very simple at the beginning, have been intentionally complicated, in order to render them as inimitable as possible, and thereby to dampen the ardor of his rivals" (2: 29).

Perhaps the work of Legrain's period of full maturity can best be explored from the actual bindings available to me, either in my own collection or in the New York Public Library, by considering six volumes the decoration of which is based in various ways on one of his favorite patterns: parallel lines. Their arrangement varies from the simple to the complex, they make use as well of other design elements, their abstractions sometimes yield symbolic interpretations, but they all belong to the same family of compositions. When one realizes that Begrain had at his disposal many other such families, the range of his achievement will at least be glimpsed.

First, three bindings in which the parallel lines are straight. That on [5.15] Valéry's Monsieur Teste of 1927, one of 20 copies on special paper for subscribers presented by the author to Mrs. Blumenthal, has a criss-cross pattern of gold, silver, and black lines, irregularly spaced and asymmetrically arranged, both on its covers and its doublures of dark green morocco.

A modest conception for this period, it is a model of elegance, appropriate to a small but treasured volume. His more casual composition [5.16] for the Comtesse de Noailles' Les forces éternelles of 1920, one of three identical bindings in calf executed for Mrs. Blumenthal in 1927 (No. 746), was presumably as close as Begrain now cared to come to the sort of general library bindings he had earlier executed for favored clients. It shows how Legrain's patterns of parallel lines could be varied by reorientation and the introduction of non-linear elements. Much more [5.17] elaborate, a major undertaking indeed, is Wilde's Deux contes of 1926. Seemingly another abstract pattern, this complex creation is in fact based on Schmied's highly original decorative scheme for the book. The rectangles composed of dots combine the narrow vertical bands illustrating the first of the two stories, and the narrow horizontal bands illustrating the second, the whole design then being rotated on its axis some 20 or 25 degrees.

Now, three bindings in which the parallel lines are curved. The sim- [5.18] plest of these covers René Boylesve's Souvenirs d'un jardin détruit of 1924 (No. 105), an unpretentious volume with wood engravings by Maximilien Vox, bound for Mrs. Blumenthal in 1926. Two blocks of parallel lines in gold on a background of gray morocco sufficed for such a book. Very different was the commission which Begrain received from the well known bibliophile Dr. Lucien-Graux for a first edition of Baudelaire's [5.19] Les paradis artificiels of 1861 inscribed to Edouard Thierry (No. 58), an exemplaire truffé to which three autograph letters of Baudelaire had been added. The reversed curves of Legrain's parallel lines are only a starting point for a design of restrained splendor evoking the opium and hashish dreams of Baudelaire's text. This binding attracted admiring notice from the time of its first exhibition in 1927. Equally ambitious was his creation of the following year for Mrs. Blumenthal's inscribed [5.20] copy of Valéry's La jeune Parque of 1925 (No. 1055), a much larger volume. Here Begrain used his reversed curves to suggest the serpent of [5.21] Valéry's text, also shown in a title page vignette.

A second way of sampling the bindings of Legrain's later years is offered by the concluding maquettes in the New York Public Library album. These are all large and splendid designs, but I must rest content [5.22] with four. That for Gérard d'Houville's Le diadème de flore bound in 1929 (No. 463) was among those selected by Rose Adler for inclusion in her portfolio of 1929 surveying contemporary binding. On a background of white morocco, a handful of rings and concentric circles, bands and triangles, have been thrown in such a way as to suggest through abstract forms the profusion of nature. This is what Marius Michel's floral ornament had become by the end of the 1920s. French binders ever since have

been following Legrain's lead in this experiment with color on white. [5.23] Perhaps the latest of Legrain's 12 designs for Wilde's Ballade de la géôlede Reading of 1918 (No. 1215) shows him reinforcing the idea of confinement, so simply presented eight years before, by a heavily barred window and a massive grill set in a gray wall. The unusual number of verbal instructions on the maquette were necessitated by the abundance [5.24] of mosaic work involved. Then there are Legrain's designs for the dou- [5.25] blures of the album itself, two of his most intricate geometric compo- [5.26] sitions, which far exceed in magnificence his composition for the covers of the volume. Since he elsewhere almost never decorated doublures, their presence attests to the importance he attributed to this collection of his maquettes.

Finally, some discussion is required of the controversial topic of Legrain's bindings for early livres de peintre, all designs dating from the later 1920s. As has been mentioned, after the 1925 exhibition Begrain was established as the chosen binder of bibliophiles with modern tastes. Not only did they give him contemporary books to bind, both first editions and livres d'art, but they also sought out surviving copies in sheets of the pre-War livres de peintre which they were just beginning to collect. So it happened that these books bound by Begrain, or by binders like Cretté who came gradually to work in an idiom related to his, exist in some abundance. It is usually assumed that this is an altogether happy conjunction resulting in modern books in modern bindings.

Yet questions arise. When a binder addresses himself to an unillustrated book, it may well suffice to declare with Rose Adler that he is "at the service of the text."[90] But when the book is illustrated, the same principle suggests that he should show a comparable awareness of the illustrations. Now, as Jacques Guignard has remarked, Begrain was "impervious to the manner of certain contemporary painters; his strict, classical style seems to take no account of that of the peintre-graveur."[91] This observation is particularly true of the livres de peintre which he bound most frequently: the 11 copies of Verlaine's Parallèlement of 1900 illustrated by Pierre Bonnard, the five copies of Longus' Daphnis et Chloé of 1902 illustrated by the same artist, and the three copies of Jules Renard's Histoires naturelles of 1899 illustrated by Toulouse-Lautrec. The carefully unfinished lithographs of these volumes, so shadowy in Bonnard's case that uncomprehending contemporary critics dismissed them as "uncertain" and "indecisive," remain obstinately uncorrelated with the precise compositions which Begrain designed for the bindings of the books in which they appear. Of the most successful it may be

said that the relationship is neutral, much as with a Jansenist binding. [5.27] Witness this well-known creation for Parallèlement (No. 1153). In the [5.28] least successful, such as this copy of Daphnis et Chloé (No. 583), Legrain's aggressive geometry clashes radically with Bonnard's cloudy drawings.

Insofar as harmony between binding and illustrations is concerned, if not in other ways, Legrain's even more numerous bindings for another group of 20th century illustrated books are far more satisfactory. I have in mind the books of the masters of Art Deco illustration, of Barbier, of Laboureur, and in particular of Schmied. The favor enjoyed by Schmied among collectors of livres d'art has been described in an earlier lecture. With good reason the collectors, particularly of his notable books of the mid-1920s, found a natural affinity between them and the novel style which Begrain had introduced into binding. So it came about that Begrain devoted some of his most lavish designs to 12 copies of Daphné, for example, to nine of Le cantique des cantiques, to seven of Wilde's Deux contes, and to five of the Comtesse de Noailles' Les climats.

Begrain paid these books the compliment of close study, and in his bindings he sometimes offered a synthesis of Schmied's decorative conceptions. His binding for Schmied's edition of Wilde's Deux contes has already been shown. Equally characteristic are his creations for the two [5.29] copies of Le cantique des cantiques (Nos. 112 and 113) which Rose Adler [5.30] selected for her portfolio of contemporary bindings. Writing about this substantial part of Legrain's oeuvre in 1961, when Schmied's reputation was at its nadir, Georges Blaizot had the delicate task of explaining how the master could have brought himself to bind so many more of Schmied's volumes than those of any other artist. Here is his ingenious apology: "Compared with the bindings designed by Schmied [himself] for the same works, the bindings of this family show us that Pierre Begrain, while remaining faithful to the laws of decoration imposed on the book, knew how to play a flute solo at the threshold of the volume, within which would swell forth sounds of choirs, now swooning, now roaring, and of organs."[92] You will see some of Schmied's bindings later in the lecture.

During these years of intense activity as a designer of bindings, Begrain was no less busy as a decorator. Jacques Doucet and more recent clients like Mme. Tachard and Pierre Meyer relied upon him for the adornment of their apartments, and he had many other commissions carried out, like his bindings, in his atelier on the Place de Val-de-Grâce. Meanwhile, his health continued to deteriorate. With a view to concentrating his efforts on binding, he rented and remodeled a charming and

commodious villa near the residence of the artist H. Laurens. On the morning of 17 July 1929, when he was about to move there, he died, a few months before his fortieth birthday. Left behind in his bindery "were more than a year of work in the course of production" as well as many projects still to be executed.[93]

Something should be said about the bindings completed after Legrain's death under the supervision of his stepson, Jacques Anthoine Begrain, of which 75 are listed in the standard catalogue.[94] Undertaken, as they were, at the height of his powers, they are for the most part ambitious indeed, but their execution was not always at the level of those which he himself lived to see completed. An example is afforded by [5.31] Georges Rouault's Paysages légendaires of 1929 bound for Mrs. Blumenthal. This is one of six copies in which two of the lithographs which Rouault drew to illustrate his own poems are colored by the artist. Legrain's conception seems to allude to the final words of the text:

illustrated by a bleak city-scape surmounted by a moon. Legrain's more hopeful perspective shows the moon against the firmament rather than the earth. The result is a striking Art Deco design, blemished by the almost total illegibility of the book's title stamped in blind on the lower half of the moon. Considering Legrain's mastery of the use of typographic characters in his compositions, one wonders what he would have thought of the way in which his conception had been rendered. Not open to objection on the score of obscurity, certainly, is his composition for [5.32] Mrs. Blumenthal's copy of Valéry's Poésies of 1929. A large folio, the book demanded a bold design, yet there is some want of subtlety in its execution.

We may turn next to Rose Adler, for whom Begrain was the "uncontested master" of modern binding.[95] Her reputation has never stood higher than it does today. Indeed her bindings are more eagerly sought after than those by Begrain himself, if only because they appear so rarely on the market. Whereas almost 1300 bindings are recorded for his 12 years of activity, her nearly four decades seem to have yielded a small fraction of that total.

Born in 1890, Rose Adler was a student from 1917 to 1925 at the École d'Art Décoratif, where she had the active encouragement of Andrée

Langrand, its Director. Her work of this period is exampled in a rare [5.33] early binding at the New York Public Library on F. C. Longchamp's Les vices capitaux of 1922, which is also signed by A. Cuzin as doreur.The irregular geometric pattern in which she has arranged her panels of snakeskin and of black and green calf demonstrates how completely she had already broken with traditional conceptions of binding design.

Rose Adler encountered Jacques Doucet in 1923 at an exhibition of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs where her bindings were shown. As impressed by her talent as he was smitten by her beauty and sympathy, he showed her the bindings Begrain had done for him and commissioned further work from her hand. Over the next six years, as his friend and advisor, she bound many of his finest books and manuscripts. The patronage of other collectors followed, and she became an important figure in the world of decorative art generally.[96]

Having seen Legrain's achievement, Rose Adler knew exactly what she herself wanted to do. To introduce the selection from her bindings shown at the first exhibition of the Société de la Reliure Originale at Paris in 1947 she told how Begrain in his work for Doucet, "seeking to reorient binding to adapt it to contemporary literature," tried to make it a "discrete synthesis" of what "emanated from the text." Thus came into being "a stripped-down style, in which only the essential remained. Begrain understood the value of silence, for in expression the danger is to substitute oneself for the author, to write a sixth act."[97] As we have seen, Begrain soon put behind him this aesthetic of allusive selectivity, but Rose Adler remained faithful to it all her life.

In her 1929 portfolio surveying contemporary binding she included seven examples of her own work. Though elsewhere in this volume she does full justice to the rich effects achieved by Begrain and others, for her part she was content to make little count for much, as may be seen [5.34] in her creations for Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Trois contes cruels and Mérimée's Carmen (plate 37). Only in her composition for Colette's L'En- [5.35] vers du music-hall of 1926 (plate 49) did she depart from her accustomed restraint. Yet the six exuberantly kicking limbs of this design seem subdued in comparison with the binding by Begrain for the same book which [5.36] she reproduces (plate 42) with its suggestion of overlapping beams from a score of spotlights.

Two bindings by Rose Adler which go beyond my chronological limits demand to be presented because they can be shown from the books themselves rather than from reproductions. So spare is her usual work [5.37] that her design of 1931 for Tristan Bernard's Tableau de la boxe in the

New York Public Library may in comparison almost be called massive. As is so often the case with her, lettering provides the main element of the decor, and the dominant colors, here brown and blue, form an unexpected combination. There seems to be no obvious allusion in the design, unless the inset panel is taken to be either a tableau or a boxing ring. In her later career Rose Adler carried her procedures to further reaches of refinement. Consider, for example, her binding of 1948 on Toulet's [5.38] Les contrerimes of 1930 with etchings by Laboureur, a design inspired, one surmises, by the shape given the type-page by the writer's verse forms, rather than by either text or illustrations.

Of the many other workers who at this time created what Rose Adler called the "binding of sensibility and sentiment—[the] reliure-femme,"[98] I shall mention only three, her most prominent predecessors, Germaine Schroeder and Jeanne Langrand, and her most prolific rival, Mme. Marot-Rodde. The manner in which they adapted Legrain's simpler patterns is exampled by Germaine Schroeder's design for Giraudoux's [5.39] Juliette au pays des hommes of 1926 with colored engravings by Chas Laborde. In consonance with Legrain's compositions two or three years earlier, many of which she had executed herself, she provides a checkerboard pattern of tan morocco across which is festooned the book's title in green. Legrain's more elaborate style is paralleled in a binding for [5.40] Schmied's edition of Vigny's Daphné by Andrée and Jeanne Langrand, the geometric conception of which reflects Schmied's own decorations, just as do most of Legrain's bindings for this book. Mme. Marot-Rodde's [5.41] creation for Gustave Geffroy's L'Apprentie of 1924 with etchings and dry points by Auguste Brouet is characteristic of her work: a binding of brilliant execution the decoration of which is straightforward to the point of assertiveness. It is hard to reconcile its design with Crauzat's assertion that "at no point does Legrain's influence make itself felt in her bindings" (2: 138).[99]

As a designer of Art Deco bindings François-Louis Schmied has for some years been ranked with Begrain himself, at least if one is to judge by the prices realized in European and American auction sales. They were also regarded as equals in the later 1920s, when collectors besieged Schmied with commissions to bind copies of his own works. In the intervening decades, however, his bindings, like his books, fell into deepening

disfavor. Writing in 1961 the even-handed Devauchelle largely ignored him in his comprehensive history of French binding, calling him, indeed, by the wrong first name.[100] There is a pressing need today for a monograph on Schmied's bindings, which might take as its point of departure the 50 odd examples listed by Crauzat with lacquer panels by Jean Dunand (2: 104-108).

A Swiss, like Schmied himself, and a collaborator with him in annual exhibitions at the Galérie Georges Petit, Dunand had learned the art of lacquering from the Japanese craftsman Sugawara before the War. Having mastered this demanding process, calling for the application of many layers of lacquer to a metal or wood base over a prolonged period of time and under controlled atmospheric conditions, he was without a rival in its use during the 1920s. Beginning in 1925 panels designed by Schmied and rendered in lacquer by Dunand were incorporated in bindings by Georges Cretté and others, while later such bindings came to be executed by Schmied's own staff. Initially these panels had metal as their base and occupied the entire cover, but the technical problems to which this operation gave rise led to the employment of smaller panels on ebonite which were mounted in the covers, an arrangement which allowed Schmied to make Dunand's renderings of his drawings parts of larger binding patterns.

Schmied bound only works of his own creation, choosing above all the books of his great years—more than 20 copies of Le cantique des cantiques, for example, but also Daphné, Les climats, Les ballades françaises, his Arabian tales, and Deux contes. The subjects of his designs came from the decorations of the books themselves: doves, gazelles, gardens, and particularly the figures of Solomon and his maiden for Le cantique des cantiques; landscapes and seascapes for Les climats and Les ballades françaises, abstract patterns for Daphné, and nightingales for Deux contes. They were rendered by Dunand with a variety and richness of color, not to mention a freshness and a sparkle, that even mosaic morocco could rarely match. At their best, indeed, they are among the most spectacular of all Art Deco bindings.

The Frank Altschul copy of La création at Yale offers an example of [5.42] the larger panels by Dunand mentioned above. Indeed, Schmied's ma- [5.43] quette, mounted in the volume, is virtually an Art Deco painting. As will be seen, this composition, which supplements the decorations in Book I devoted to "Creation through the Word," was reproduced with resplendent exactness by Dunand. The task of the binder, Cretté, was

simply to make the lacquer panel into the book's front cover. Schmied's alternative procedure is shown in another volume from the Altschul collection, Le cantique des cantiques, which was executed by Schmied's [5.44] own workers. The panels which Dunand made from two much smaller [5.45] maquettes, one of King Solomon and one of a stylized garden, were [5.46] mounted in the front and rear covers. This time he radically altered [5.47] Schmied's color scheme for the garden, and Schmied himself had the opportunity of devising a handsome abstract setting for his portrait of King Solomon.

Schmied also designed bindings, again for his own books, in which he did not collaborate with Dunand. In a sense, these gave him a freer hand, since he had the whole cover at his disposal, not simply the frame surrounding the lacquer panel. Signed simply "F.L.S.," they were executed at his own atelier in the later 1920s. Here is an example on another [5.48] copy of La création. At first glance the central panel of galuchat may seem to have no purpose beyond the contrast it offers to Schmied's abstract frame. Then one realizes that the line of large white bubbles is intended as nothing less than a symbol of germination, the emergence of life itself from inanimate matter.

Our attention is next claimed by the beginnings of two binders who were to go on to long and distinguished careers, Georges Cretté and Henri Creuzevault. In contrast to the more celebrated Pierre Begrain and Paul Bonet, they not only designed bindings, they executed them, and latterly there has been some disposition among their admirers to claim superiority for them on this score over mere maquettistes. [101] For Cretté, indeed, the distinction was crucial. In a rare confession of faith he wrote in 1947: "The only allowable fantasy [for a binder] is what the métier can realize; thus, for me, the role of the technician is as important as that of the artist and I can't conceive a binding without taking an active part in its execution."[102] However, we are concerned with manifestations of the Art Deco style, where Legrain's contribution is hors concours, and this debate need not concern us.

Cretté was born near Paris in 1893. A brilliant student of decorative design and of binding at the École Estienne, he entered the atelier of Marius Michel in 1911, where he became the master's "pupil, his preferred disciple, almost his adopted son."[103] After a long and difficult War, much of which he spent in German captivity, he returned to the atelier in 1919. By this time old and sick, Marius Michel made Cretté first its effective director and in 1925 its proprietor. The signatures of

both are sometimes to be found on the firm's bindings before this date; afterwards for at least five years the formula was "G. Cretté successeur de Marius Michel," a signature that continued to be used for certain kinds of bindings well into the 1940s.

While Marius Michel was alive, the firm's avowed policies of decoration did not change, though a receptivity to new ideas became apparent. When Cretté took over, he issued a circular which read in part: "Formed by that great artist Marius Michel, I hope on the one hand to continue the beautiful realizations of my predecessor and on the other hand to adapt to the classical and elegant methods of execution, which he conserved so well, the conceptions of modern decorative art."[104] Many of the bindings which Cretté created were of a transitional nature, half-way houses in which floral ornament is selectively employed. That decorating [5.49] the large paper edition of Proust's A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur of 1920, one of 50 copies, is a model of delicate restraint (No. 460).[105] In his more modern conceptions, far from copying Begrain, Cretté gradually evolved his own style, which at this period often involved "the play of lines," both in gold and in blind. An example is offered by Émile Ver- [5.50] haeren's Les campagnes hallucinées, of 1927, the midnight black of which is in harmony with the wood engravings and lithographs by Frank Brangwyn serving as its illustrations. When required by the book in hand, however, Cretté did not disdain Art Deco patterns. This was true in particular of the many books of Schmied for which he himself designed bindings, as well as of those on which Schmied commissioned [5.51] him to mount lacquer panels by Dunand. A related creation is his binding for Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's XII élégies of 1925 with lithographs by Charles Guérin, on which is mounted a large floral enamel by Jean Goulden, inspired, it may be surmised, by Guérin's compositions [5.52] rather than by house tradition. His binding for A. Suarès' Le livre d'émeraude of 1927 with etchings by Auguste Brouet (No. 531) combines a cream morocco inlay with the play of lines and dots on blue-green morocco, in an emblematic design appropriate to this tale of the Brittany coast.[106]

Like Cretté, but at a much younger age, Henri Creuzevault had the task of reorienting an established bindery, which served a veteran clientele, towards an accommodation with Legrain's innovations. Born in 1905, the older son of Louis-Lazare Creuzevault, Henri Creuzevault began his training as a finisher at the age of 12. He joined his father's atelier in 1920, and after a few years he was signing the firm's bindings as

doreur. [107] He won his first prize in 1928 from the Société d'Encouragement des Arts et des Industries. By the following year Crauzat could write of him: "His wise principles, combined with the passion of a youthful temperament which is stimulated by the taste of his time and the claims of a necessary renewal, his perfect technique at the service of a designer gifted with a highly developed decorative sense, could not fail to yield excellent results" (2: 54-55). The bold and robust conceptions of this young master, related to Legrain's yet bearing his individual mark, soon found their place among the best work of the decade.

Creuzevault's adaptation of Legrain's relatively simple early style for [5.53] Gus Bofa's Synthèses littéraires et extra littéraires of 1923 is character- [5.54] istically forceful. For Paul Valéry's Discours of 1928 on being received into the French Academy he created a combination of geometry and typographic lettering which recalls Begrain without servile imitation. There is even a hemisphere of mother-of-pearl in the "o" of discours. [5.55] For Francis Carco's Quelques-unes of 1931 with etchings by Louis Legrand his conception hardly differs from the criss-cross mosaic binding by Begrain already shown for Wilde's Deux contes, yet its more massive components and darker color scheme result in a quite different effect. Creuzevault also devoted himself to the books of Schmied and Maurice Denis, for which he produced stylized representational designs. His con- [5.56] ception for Carnets de voyage en Italie of 1925, which concentrates the landscapes of Denis' book into a single image, provides a reminder that he was a painter as well as a binder. Notable as Creuzevault's later work became, his early Art Deco productions remain a distinctive and important phase of his career.

There are a dozen other binders who would demand treatment if time were available. There is the elegant Robert Bonfils whose stylized use of representational elements in his designs, often of the human face [5.57] or figure in profile, renders his work identifiable at a glance. This is his binding for a special number of the Revue musicale of 1921 with an article by Paul Valéry on the ballet from the Gunst collection at Stanford. There is the indefatigable René Kieffer, who for 55 years played "the sedulous ape" to a succession of styles, always with impeccable technique. Representative of his Art Deco phase is a binding also at Stan- [5.58] ford executed in 1927 on Blaise Cendrars' La fin du monde of 1919 with illustrations after Fernand Léger. But I had better conclude by explaining why I have not discussed Paul Bonet.

Though he was born in 1889, the same year as Begrain, and though he had begun to design bindings by the end of 1924, Bonet's domination

of French binding was achieved in the years following 1930. Indeed, he came to general notice among bibliophiles only at the auction sale of the library of his first client, R. Marty, in that year.[108] Moreover, if Bonet was impelled towards his astonishing career by Legrain's example, as he freely admitted in his Carnets, "to be himself" he determined from the first to "follow another path,"[109] and he would certainly not have regarded himself as an Art Deco designer.

Consequently, two examples of Bonet's early work must suffice for our purposes. They represent the half-bindings which he favored for his own library, and they are more appealing, to my mind, than Legrain's creations for Doucet, particularly on volumes designed to be viewed together as a series. Bonet is severe on his bindings of this period in his Carnets, but he would perhaps have allowed the comment "an amusing [5.59] binding" for this copy of Henri Béraud's Le martyre de l'obèse of 1925, if half-bindings had been recorded therein. The semi-circles of his composition correspond exactly to the figure of Béraud's rotund protagonist [5.60] as depicted in the illustrations by Gus Bofa. The second example is still another binding for Colette's L'Envers du music-hall. For the most part Bonet did indeed avoid the Art Deco style. Two revealing comments from the Carnets may be cited. There is a plate in this book which shows his display at the Salon d'Automne of 1927. Of these volumes, bound chiefly for Marty, Bonet on the whole approved. Only concerning that on Duhamel's Deux hommes (Carnets, No. 33), an Art Deco creation, did he admit deprecatingly that "it was in the manner of the times!" In 1930 he similarly dismissed a copy of Dr. Mardrus's Histoire charmante de l'adolescente Sucre d'Amour with the words: "a binding in the style of Schmied, alas!" (Carnets, No. 78).

One's final estimate of Art Deco binding depends on one's estimate of Begrain, though, as I have tried to show, there was much notable work from other hands during the 1920s. Perhaps Robert Bonfils has offered the soundest appraisal, surveying his friend's career 35 years after Legrain's death. He found the supreme distinction of this "artist of Cartesian intelligence, enthusiastic temperament, and an aesthetic full of charm" to reside in his ability to create works in which "innovation was matched by equilibrium" during an epoch when "anarchy and liberty were confounded."[110] Legrain's bindings do indeed provide the criterion by which Art Deco bindings in general can be judged, a touchstone never more useful than at present when so much garish and ill-considered work is uncritically accepted.

Secondary Works Cited

For works entirely devoted to individual artists, see the following: for Barbier, see Catalogue, Clément-Janin (4th item), Valotaire (2nd), and Vaudoyer; for Bonfils, see Burnand and Deshairs; for Cretté, see Garrigou; for Creuzevault, see Du Pasquier; for Doucet, see Chapon; for Dulac, see Valotaire (3rd); for Jouve, see Mauclair; for Laboureur, see Allard, Allen, Godefroy, Loyer, Prinet, and Valotaire (4th); for Begrain, see Breslauer, [Begrain], and Pierre Begrain relieur; for Schmied, see Clément-Janin (3rd), Guiffrey, Mardrus, Ritchie, and Roland-Marcel. (Some additional works, published after 1985, are mentioned in the penultimate paragraph of the introduction above.)

Adler, Rose. Reliures présenté par Rose Adler. ("L'Art International d'Aujourd'hui," 17.) Paris: Éditions d'Art Charles Moreau, [1929].

Allard, Roger. "J.-É. Laboureur, un vignettiste de notre temps," Plaisir de bibliophile, 2 (April 1925), 67-76.

Allen, Robert. Jean-Émile Laboureur: A Centenary Tribute. New York: Alliance Française, 1977. [Exhibition catalogue.]

Angoulvent, P. J. "The Development of the Book," The Fleuron, 3 (October 1924), 61-72.

Arwas, Victor. Art Deco. London: Academy Editions, 1980.

Barbier, George. "Pochoirs," Arts et métiers graphiques, 3 (1 February 1928), 162-163.

Beraldi, Henri. La reliure du XIXe siècle. 4 vols. Paris: L. Conquet, 1895-97.

Bibliothèque Nationale. Catalogue de l'exposition: la reliure originale. Paris, 1947.

Bonet, Paul. Carnets, 1924-1971: répertoire complet, descriptif et bibliographique de toutes ses reliures. Preface by Julien Gracq. Paris: Auguste Blaizot, 1981.

Bonfils, Robert. La gravure et le livre. Paris: Éditions Estienne, 1938.

Breslauer, Martin. [Description of Pierre Legrain's album of maquettes], in Books, Manuscripts, Autograph Letters, Bindings from the Ninth to the Present Century (catalogue no. 101; London, 1970), item 324 (pp. 266, 268; illustrated on pp. 242, 269, and as frontispiece).

Bruller, Jean. "Le livre d'art en France: essai d'un classement rationnel," Arts et métiers graphiques, 26 (15 November 1931), 41-66.

Burnand, Robert. "Robert Bonfils: peintre, illustrateur, relieur," Byblis, 8 (1929), 49-51.

Carteret, Léopold. Le trésor du bibliophile: livres illustrés modernes, 1875 à1945. 5 vols. Paris: L. Carteret, 1946-48.

Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu M. George Barbier. Introduction by Jean Giraudoux. 2 vols. Paris: Hôtel Druout, 13-15 December 1932 and 10-13 March 1933.

Cent ans de reliures d'art, 1880-1980. Toulouse: Bibliothèque municipale, 1981. [Exhibition catalogue.]

Chapon, François. Mystère et splendeur de Jacques Doucet 1853-1929. Paris: J. C. Lattès for Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie and Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, 1984.

Clément-Janin, [Hilaire Noël Sebastien]. Essai sur la bibliophilie contemporaine de 1900 à 1928. 2 vols. Paris: René Kieffer, 1931-32.

Clément-Janin, [Hilaire Noël Sebastien]. "Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs: le livre et ses éléments," L'Art vivant, 15 August 1925, pp. 26-32.

Clément-Janin, [Hilaire Noël Sebastien]. "François-Louis Schmied, peintre-graveur-typographe," Byblis, 1 (1921-22), 10-14.

Clément-Janin, [Hilaire Noël Sebastien]. "George Barbier, costumier des muses," Plaisir de bibliophile, 19-20 (1929), 134-147.

Crauzat, Ernest de. La reliure française de 1900 à 1925. 2 vols. Paris: René Kieffer, 1932.

Deshairs, Léon. "Robert Bonfils," Art et décoration, 55 (January-June 1929), 33-43.

Devauchelle, Roger. La reliure en France de ses origines à nos jours. 3 vols. Paris: J. Rousseau-Girard, 1959-61.

Du Pasquier, Jacqueline. Henri Creuzevault: naissance d'une reliure. Bordeaux: Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs de la Ville de Bordeaux, 1984. [Exhibition catalogue.]

"L'Enluminure au pochoir, un art méconnu," Nouvelles de l'estampe, 21 (May-June 1975), 9-15.

Fleurent, M. "Où va la bibliophilie? une enquête du `Portique,'" Le portique,2 (Summer 1945), 117-128.

Garrigou, Marcel. Georges Cretté. Toulouse: Arts et Formes, 1984.

Godefroy, Louis. L'Oeuvre gravé de Jean-Émile Laboureur. Paris: Chez l'Auteur, 1929.

Guerquin, Pierre. "Le beau livre en 1929," Byblis, 8 (1929), xxv-xxix.

Guiffrey, Jean. "Les tendances modernes dans les livres de F.-L. Schmied," Byblis, 3 (1924), 95-98.

Hesse, Raymond. Le livre d'après querre et les sociétés de bibliophiles, 1918-1928.Paris: B. Grasset, 1928.

Hesse, Raymond. Le livre d'art du XIXe siècle à nos jours. ("A travers l'art français" series.) Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1927.

[Legrain, Pierre.] [Illustrations of his bindings], Art et décoration, May 1925, p. 176; L'Amour d'art, August 1925, p. 289.

Loyer, Jacqueline. Laboureur, oeuvre gravé et lithographié. [Paris: Tournon], 1962.

Mardrus, J.-C. Catalogue des livres de F.-L. Schmied: exposés en mars 1927 chez Arnold Seligmann Rey and Co., . . . sous le haut patronage de Madamela Marquise de Ganay. Preface by Louis Barthou. Paris: Schmied, 1927.

Marius Michel, Jean and Henri. L'Ornementation des reliures modernes. Paris: Marius Michel et fils, 1889.

Mauclair, Camille. Paul Jouve. ("Les artistes du livre," 22.) Paris: Henri Babou, 1931.

Mornand, Pierre. "Livres parus et livres à paraître," Le bibliophile, 1 (1931), 45-48.

Périer, Yvonne. "Mises au point," Le jardin du bibliophile, Christmas 1927, pp. 44-48.

Pierre Begrain relieur. With essays by Jacques Millot and Jacques Anthoine-Begrain. Paris: Auguste Blaizot for Société de la reliure originale, 1965.

Prinet, Jean. "Les illustrations de J.-Émile Laboureur," Le portique, 1 (January 1945), 7-25.

Rapport général de l'exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, Paris, 1925, edited by Paul Léon et al. Vol. 7 ("Livre (Class 15)"). Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1929.

Ray, Gordon N. The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914. 2 vols. New York and Ithaca: Pierpont Morgan Library and Cornell University Press, 1982.

Ritchie, Ward. François-Louis Schmied, Artist, Engraver, Printer: Some Memories and a Bibliography. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Graduate Library School, 1976.

Roland-Marcel, P.-R. "François-Louis Schmied, peintre, graveur et imprimeur," La renaissance de l'art, 11 (1928), 149-156. [In French and English.]

Saudé, Jean. Traité d'enluminure d'art au pochoir. Paris: Éditions de l'Ibis, 1925.

Slatkine Beaux Livres. Livres illustrés 1900-1930. Geneva, 1980.

Strachan, W. J. The Artist and the Book in France: The 20th Century Livre d'Artiste. London: Owen, 1969.

Très beaux livres modernes illustrés, très riches reliures, ouvrages sur les beaux-arts, éditions originales, composant la bibliothèque de M. R. Marty. Introduction by Georges Grappe. (Hôtel Drouot sale, 10-13 February 1930.) Paris: Auguste Blaizot et Fils, 1930.

Valotaire, Marcel. "The Pochoir Process of Colour Reproduction," The Studio, 92 (1926), 236-240.

Valotaire, Marcel. "George Barbier," The Studio, 93 (1927), 404-410. [In English.]

Valotaire, Marcel. "Jean Dulac," Byblis, 8 (1929), 111-117.

Valotaire, Marcel. Laboureur. ("Les artistes du livre," 4.) Paris: Henri Babou, 1929.

Valotaire, Marcel. "Le studio d'éditeur," Le bibliophile, 1 (1931), 31-35.

Vaudoyer, J.-L. George Barbier. ("Les artistes du livre," 10.) Paris: Henri Babou, 1929.

Wallen, Burr, and Donna Stein. The Cubist Print. Santa Barbara, California: University Art Museum, 1981.

Illustrations

The following list identifies the 183 illustrations that are cited by marginal numbers in the text of the lectures. (The two-part entry numbers used here refer to the lecture number and—after the period—to the illustration number within that lecture.) The marginal numbers in the text are positioned (as in Ray's typescript) to show where the slides were to be shown; and the entries that follow identify each slide in terms of the content of the image, the book or album from which the image comes (frequently with a page or plate number), and—except for secondary sources—the collection holding the specific copy that was photographed. For a record of the illustrations grouped by collection, see the index that follows, under the entries for Columbia (2 items), Dr. Jack Eisert (4), Harvard (2), Metropolitan Museum of Art (9), Morgan Library (69), New York Public Library (28) Princeton (18), Stanford (5), and Yale (33). Thirteen illustrations were presented by Ray from secondary sources: 4.1, 5.5-7, 5.13-14, 5.27-30, 5.34-36.

The illustrations may be viewed by visiting the website of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia at {http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/artdeco}. Eight of these illustrations are also included in the present volume: 1.18, 2.16, 3.24, 3.30, 4.27, 5.26, 5.37, 5.45.

1. The Livre d'Art of the 1920s

2. George Barbier

3. François-Louis Schmied

4. Jean-Émile Laboureur

5. Pierre Begrain and Art Deco Bookbinding

Index to List of Illustrations

• À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, 5.49

• À rebours, 5.1

• Adair, A. H., 4.28

• Adler, Rose, 5.29-30, 5.33-38

• Album dédié à Tamar Karsavina, 1.10

• Allard, Roger, 4.2

• Altschul, Frank. See Yale University Library

• Amyot, J., 5.28

• Annonce faite à Marie, L', 5.5

• Aphrodite, 2.33

• Appartement des jeunes filles, L', 4.2

• Apprentie, L', 5.41

• Artisan du Livre, L', 4.32-33

• Au Sans Pareil, 4.12-13, 4.28, 5.35-36, 5.60

• Audin, Marius, 5.51

• Aulard, L'Imprimerie, 4.31

• Babou, Henri, 4.1

• Ballade de la géôle de Reading, 5.9, 5.23

• Ballades françaises, Les, 3.20-21

• Ballets Russes, 1.7

• Banderole, La, 5.7

• Barbier, George, 1.8-10, 1.14, 2.1-30

• Baudelaire, Charles, 5.19

• Beaumont, C. W., 1.9

• Beauté, mon beau souci, 4.3-4

• Beinecke Library. See Yale University Library

• Belle Édition, La, 1.9, 1.13

• Beltrand, Camille, 3.4, 3.10

• Beltrand, Georges, 5.22

• Beltrand, Jacques, 3.10, 5.56

• Bénédictus, Édouard, 1.3

• Béraud, Henri, 5.59

• Bernard, Tristan, 5.37

• Bernouard, Francis, 1.13

• Berque, Jean, 3.7

• Blaizot, Auguste, 2.20, 5.5-7, 5.13-14, 5.27-28

• Bloch, Camille, 2.1, 2.18-19, 4.2, 4.9-11

• Blumenthal, Florence, 5.10-11, 5.15-16, 5.18, 5.20-21, 5.31-32

• Blumenthal, George, 5.10-11, 5.15-16, 5.31-32

• Bofa, Gus, 5.53, 5.59

• Bonet, Paul, 5.59-60

• Bonfils, Robert, 1.15-18, 5.57

• Bonheur du jour, Le, 2.2-7

• Bonnard, Pierre, 5.27-28

• Borel, Pétrus, 2.32

• Boris Gudonov, 1.7

• Bouchet, Pierre, 2.16-17, 2.19, 2.23-25, 3.1-5

• Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 4.6

• Boulestin, X. Marcel, 4.25

• Boylesve, René, 2.26, 5.8, 5.18

• Brangwyn, Frank, 5.50

• Brouet, Auguste, 5.41, 5.52

• Brunelleschi, Umberto, 1.11

• C., A. S., 1.13

• Calavas, 1.2

• Calmann-Lévy, 5.6, 5.8

• Campagnes hallucinées, Les, 5.50

• Camuset, Georges, 4.30

• Cantique des cantiques, Le, 3.15-17, 5.29-30, 5.44-47

• Carco, Francis, 5.55

• Carmen, 5.34

• Carnets de voyage en Italie, 3.10, 5.56

• Carré, Léon, 5.3

• Carrosse aux deux lézards verts, Le, 2.26

• Cartier, Jacques, 2.31

• Caves du Vatican, Les, 4.31

• Cazotte, Jacques, 4.22

• Cendrars, Blaise, 5.58

• Cent Bibliophiles, Les, 5.1

• Cent Une, Les, 4.34-37

• Cercle Lyonnais du Livre, 3.20-21, 5.51

• Chamontin, Émile, 4.17, 4.19-21. See alsoLivre, Le

• Chansons de Bilitis, Les, 2.13-15

• Chansons madécasses, 4.5

• Chasse de Kaa, La, 3.4-5

• Chelsea Book Club, 4.25

• Chez les Auteurs, 3.6

• Choses de Paul Poiret, Les, 1.5

• Chronology (numbers in italics mean that the cited year in each case refers

  ---

  128

  
  
  
  to the date of the book, not necessarily the binding): 1861: 5.19. 1893: 5.2. 1896-98: 1.1. 1900: 5.12, 5.27. 1901: 5.4. 1902: 5.28. 1903: 5.1. 1908: 1.4. 1909: 5.5, 5.10. 1910: 5.6. 1911: 1.5, 5.11. 1912: 1.15, 5.5 1913: 1.6-7, 1.9. 1914:1.2, 1.8, 1.10-12, 5.3. 1916: 1.14, 5.5 1917: 5.5. 1918: 1.13, 1.17, 5.5, 5.9, 5.23. 1919: 1.16, 3.1-3, 4.2, 5.5, 5.58. 1920:2.2-5, 4.3-5, 5.8, 5.16, 5.49. 1921: 2.26, 2.31, 4.6, 4.25, 5.7, 5.8-9, 5.57. 1922:1.18, 2.10, 2.13-17, 3.6, 5.7, 5.12, 5.33, 5.37. 1923: 1.3, 2.8, 3.8, 5.53. 1924: 2.67, 3.9, 3.11-14, 5.4, 5.13-14, 5.18, 5.4041. 1925: 2.9, 2.12, 3.7, 3.10, 3.15-17, 4.7-11, 4.22, 4.26-27, 5.10-11, 5.20-21, 5.29-30, 5.44-47, 5.51, 5.56, 5.59. 1926:2.11, 2.32, 3.18-19, 3.23-25, 4.12-13, 4.15-16, 4.18, 4.30, 5.17, 5.18, 5.35-36, 5.39, 5.60. 1927: 2.1, 2.18-19, 3.20-21, 3.26-29, 4.28-29, 4.34-37, 5.15, 5.16-17, 5.19, 5.34, 5.50, 5.52, 5.58. 1928: 2.2022, 3.22, 3.30, 4.14, 4.19-21, 4.23, 5.20, 5.22, 5.42-43, 5.48, 5.54. 1929: 2.23-25, 2.27, 3.31, 4.1, 4.17, 5.24-26, 5.31-32. 1930: 3.4-5, 3.32, 4.31-33, 4.38-40, 5.38. 1931: 4.24, 5.37, 5.55. 1934: 2.28-30. 1936: 2.33. 1948: 5.38.

• Clara d'Ellebeuse, 1.15

• Claudel, Paul, 5.5

• Climats, Les, 3.9, 3.11-12

• Colette, 4.12-13, 5.35-36, 5.60

• Columbia University Library, 1.9, 1.12

• Contes (Perrault), 4.14

• Contrerimes, Les, 4.38-40, 5.38

• Corrard, Pierre, 1.10, 2.13-15

• Coulouma, Robert, 2.27, 4.3-4, 5.52

• Cowper, William, 4.24

• Création, La, 3.30, 5.42-43, 5.48

• Cretté, Georges, 5.43, 5.49-52

• Creuzevault, Henri, 2.33, 5.53-56

• Croix de bois, Les, 5.7

• Crusoe, Robinson, 2.32

• Cuzin, Adolphe, 5.33

• Daphné, 3.13-14, 5.40

• Daphnis et Chloè, 5.28

• Daragnès, Jean-Gabriel, 5.9, 5.20-21, 5.23

• Darantière, Maurice, 5.55

• Davis, Ronald, 4.24

• Davray, Henry-D., 5.9, 5.23

• Defoe, Daniel, 2.32

• Denis, Maurice, 3.10, 5.56

• Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline, 5.51

• Designs on the Dances of Vaslav Nijinsky,1.9

• Dessins sur les danses de Vaslav Nijinsky,1.9

• 200 chambres, 200 salles de bain, 4.29

• Deux contes (Wilde), 3.18-19, 5.17

• Devambez, Éditions d'Art, 5.52

• Devauchelle, Roger, 5.13-14

• Devil in Love, The, 4.22

• Diadème de flore, Le, 5.22

• Diderot, Denis, 4.6, 5.13-14

• Discours (Valéry), 5.54

• Discours du docteur O'Grady, Les, 4.17

• Diverting History of John Gilpin, The,4.24

• Divertissements des princesses qui s'ennuient,1.17

• Dorgelès, Roland, 5.7, 5.53

• Doucet, Jacques, 5.5

• Douze césars, Les, 3.22

• XII élégies, 5.51

• Ducret, Charles, 5.33

• Duhamel, Georges, 5.5

• Dunand, Jean, 3.23-27, 5.43, 5.45, 5.47

• Dunoyer de Segonzac, André, 4.1, 5.7, 5.37

• Duval, Paulette, 2.19

• Éditions de la Guirlande, 2.26

• Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française. See Nouvelle Revue Française, Éditions de la

• Éditions de la Sirène, 5.58

• Éditions d'Art Devambez, 5.52

• Éditions du Raisin, 4.30

• Eisert, Jack, 4.7-8, 4.32-33

• Ellebeuse, Clara d', 1.15

• Émile-Paul Frères, 5.20-21, 5.39, 5.59

• Envers du music-hall, L', 4.12-13, 5.35-36, 5.60

• Estève, Joseph, 3.22

• Falbalas et fanfreluches, 2.8-12

• Falké, Pierre, 2.32

• Fasquelle, E., 5.12

• Faune parisienne, 5.4

• Fayard, A., 5.16

• Ferenczi, J., & Fils, 5.18

• Fêtes galantes, 2.21-22

• Fin du monde, La, 5.58

• Flament, Albert, 2.16-17

• Flaubert, Gustave, 3.8

• Floréal, 1.2

• Forces éternelles, Les, 5.16

• Fort, Paul, 3.20-21

• Frapereau, Félix, 4.19-21

• Fry, Charles Rahn. See Princeton University Library

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129





• Gallimard, 4.31. See also Nouvelle Revue Française, Éditions de la

• Gasperini, E., 2.27

• Gautier, Théophile, 2.27

• Gazette du bon ton, La, 1.6-7

• Geffroy, Gustave, 5.41

• Gide, André, 3.7, 4.31, 5.10-11

• Giraudoux, Jean, 4.34-37, 5.39

• Golden Cockerell Press, 4.23

• Gondrexon, J., 4.29

• Goulden, Jean, 3.6, 5.51

• Gourmont, Remy de, 4.9-11

• Grasset, Eugène, 1.1

• Grégoire, Frédéric, 5.41

• Guérin, Charles, 5.51

• Guérin, Maurice de, 2.20

• Guirlande, Éditions de la, 2.26

• Guirlande des mois, La, 1.14

• Gunst, Morgan A. See Stanford University Library

• Harvard University Library, 2.21-22

• Heinemann, William, 4.22

• Helleu & Sergent, 5.50

• Hilsum, Robert, 4.14

• Histoire de la princesse Boudour, 3.23-25

• Histoire charmante de l'adolescente Sucre d'Amour, 3.26-29

• Homme en tête, L', 5.5

• Houghton Library. See Harvard University Library

• Houghton Mifflin, 4.22

• Houville, Gérard d', 1.11, 5.22

• Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 5.1

• Imprimerie Aulard, L', 4.31

• Imprimerie Lahure, L', 5.41, 5.56

• Imprimerie Rigal, L', 4.31

• Iribe, Paul, 1.4

• Isabelle, 5.11

• Jaloux, Edmond, 2.1, 2.18-19, 4.19-21

• Jammes, Francis, 1.15

• Jardin des caresses, Le, 5.3

• Javal & Bourdeaux, 3.4-5, 5.54

• Jeune Parque, La, 5.20-21

• Jonquières, Henri, 2.32

• Jourde, A., 4.34-37

• Journal d'un femme de chambre, Le, 5.12

• Journal des Dames et des Modes, 1.11

• Jouve, Paul, 3.1-4

• Juliette au pays des hommes, 5.39

• Karsavina, Tamara, 1.10

• Kieffer, René, 1.16, 5.5-6, 5.8-9, 5.58

• Kipling, Rudyard, 3.1-5

• Laborde, Charles, 5.39

• Laboureur, Jean-Émile, 1.13, 4.1-40, 5.35-36, 5.38

• Laboureur, 4.1

• Laclos, Choderlos de, 2.28-30

• Lacomblez, L., 5.6

• Lacou, Marcel, 5.56

• Lacretelle, Jacques de, 4.7-8

• Lafcadio, 4.31

• Lahure, L'Imprimerie, 5.41, 5.56

• Lainé, Émile, 5.56

• Langrand, Andrée, 5.40

• Langrand, Jeanne, 5.40

• Larbaud, Valery, 4.3-4, 4.29

• Le Huby, Ph., 4.28

• Léger, Fernand, 5.58

• Begrain, Pierre, 5.5-12, 5.14-20, 5.22-32, 5.36

• Legrand, Edy, 2.31

• Legrand, Louis, 5.4, 5.55

• Lepape, Georges, 1.5-6

• Lepère, Auguste, 5.1

• Lévy, 1.3

• Liaisons dangereuses, Les, 2.28-30

• Libraires-Imprimeurs Réunies, 5.2

• Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 1.1

• Librairie des Bibliophiles, 5.33

• Livre, Le, 3.8, 4.15-21, 5.22

• Livre Contemporain, Le, 2.23-25

• Livre de la jungle, Le, 3.1-3

• Livre de la vérité de parole, 3.31

• Livre d'émeraude, Le, 5.52

• Longchamp, Frédéric Charles, 5.33

• Longus, 5.28

• Louÿs, Pierre, 2.13-15, 2.33

• Lutetia, 1.17

• Mac Orlan, Pierre, 2.32

• Maeterlinck, Maurice, 4.32-33, 5.6

• Manesse, Georges Henri, 5.2

• Maquet, 1.5, 1.8

• Mardrus, J.-C., 3.23-32, 5.42-43, 5.48

• Marius Michel, Henri, 5.1, 5.13

• Marot-Rodde, Mme., 5.41

• Martin, Charles, 1.12, 2.1

• Marty, André-Édouard, 1.7, 2.33, 5.22

• Martyre de l'obèse, Le, 5.59

• Mas, Émile, 5.2

• Masques et les personnages de la comédie italienne, Les, 1.11

• Maurois, André, 4.15-18

• Maylander, Émile, 5.3

• Mercure de France, 1.15

• Mérimée, Prosper, 5.34

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2.1, 2.16-19, 4.22, 4.28-30

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130





• Meunier, Charles, 5.2, 5.4

• Meynial, Jules, 1.14, 1.18, 2.2-12, 2.16-17

• Miomandre, Francis de, 1.9

• Mirbeau, Octave, 5.12

• Modes et manières d'aujourd'hui, 1.8,1.18

• Monsieur Teste, 5.15

• Moreau, Charles, Éditions d'Art, 5.29-30, 5.34-36

• Morgan (Pierpont) Library (Gordon N.Ray Collection), 1.4, 1.13, 1.15-16, 2.26-33, 3.1-5, 3.7, 3.10, 3.13-18, 3.30, 4.2, 4.5-6, 4.9-18, 4.23, 4.25-27, 4.3437, 5.1-4, 5.12, 5.17, 5.19, 5.38-41, 5.4856, 5.59-60

• Mornay, A. & G., 2.27, 5.53

• Naudin, Bernard, 5.13-14

• Nero, 3.22

• Neveu de Rameau, Le, 5.13-14

• New Keepsake for the Year 1921, The,4.25

• New York Public Library, 4.3-4, 4.19-21, 4.24, 4.31, 4.38-40, 5.8-11, 5.15-16, 5.18, 5.20-26, 5.31-33, 5.37

• Nijinsky, Vaslav, 1.9

• Noailles, Anna Elisabeth de Brancovan, comtesse de, 3.9, 3.11-12, 5.16

• Nouvelle Revue Française, Éditions dela, 4.3-8, 4.26-27, 4.31, 5.5, 5.11, 5.15, 5.32, 5.37, 5.49, 5.57

• Nymphes dansant avec les satyrs, 5.8

• Offrande lyrique, L', 3.7

• Pain dur, Le, 5.5

• Paradis artificiels, Les, 5.19

• Parallèlement, 5.27

• Parny, Évariste, 4.5

• Paysages légendaires, 5.31

• Pellet, Gustave, 5.4

• Perrault, Charles, 4.14

• Personnages de comédie, 2.16-17

• Petiet, H.-M., 4.38-40, 5.38

• Petits et grands verres, 4.28

• Photiadès, Vassiliaky, 5.33

• Physiologies des quais de Paris, 5.2

• Piazza, H., 2.21-22, 5.3

• Pichon, L., 5.9, 5.23

• Pierpont Morgan Library. See Morgan (Pierpont) Library

• Pierre Begrain relieur, 5.5-7, 5.27-28

• Plante et ses applications, La, 1.1

• Poémes en prose (Guérin), 2.20

• Poésies (Valéry), 5.32

• Poiret, Paul, 1.4-6

• Porte étroite, La, 5.10

• Porteret, 5.31

• Portrait de Dorian Gray, Le, 4.19-21

• Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 5.19

• Princeton University Library (Charles Rahn Fry Collection), 1.1-3, 1.5-8, 1.10-11, 1.14, 1.17-18, 2.2, 2.8-12

• Pro Amicis, 5.55

• Proust, Marcel, 5.49

• Quelques-unes, 5.55

• Raisin, Éditions du, 4.30

• Ramiro, Erastène, 5.4

• Ray, Gordon N. See Morgan (Pierpont) Library

• Régnier, Henri de, 1.16

• Reidel, H., 2.2-7

• Reliure en France de ses origines à nos jours, La, 5.13-14

• Reliures présenté par Rose Adler, 5.29-30, 5.34-36

• Renan, Ernest, 3.15-17, 5.29-30, 5.44-47

• Rencontres de monsieur de Bréot, Les,1.16

• Revue musicale, 5.57

• Rigal, L'Imprimerie, 4.31

• Robes de Paul Poiret, Le, 1.4

• Roman de la momie, Le, 2.27

• Rouault, Georges, 5.31

• Rousseau-Girard, J., 5.13-14

• Ruth et Booz, 3.32

• Salammbô, 3.8

• Satie, Erik, 1.12, 1.18

• Saudé, Jean, 1.3, 2.26

• Savine, Albert, 3.18-19, 5.17

• Schmied, François-Louis, 2.13-14, 2.16-17, 2.20, 3.1-3, 3.6-9, 3.11-32, 5.17, 5.29-30, 5.40, 5.42-48

• Schroeder, Germaine, 5.39

• Schwob, Marcel, 2.23-25

• Séguy, Eugène Alain, 1.2

• Selonique, le Macédoine, l'Athos, 3.6

• Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, A, 4.23

• Serre, Lucien, et Cie., 4.24

• Serres chaudes, 5.6

• Sheherazade, 1.9

• Silbermann, 4.7-8

• Silences du Colonel Bramble, Les, 4.15-16, 4.18

• Sirène, Éditions de la, 5.58

• Société de femmes bibliophiles, 4.34-37

• Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale, 5.34

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131





• Société du Livre Contemporain, 3.1-3, 3.9, 3.11-12

• Société du Mercure de France, 5.10

• Songe d'une femme, Le, 4.9-11

• Sonnets du docteur, Les, 4.30

• Souvenirs d'un jardin détruit, 5.18

• Spectre de la rose, Le, 1.9-10

• Spencer Collection (New York Public Library),4.3-4, 4.38-40, 5.8-9, 5.18, 5.20-26, 5.33, 5.37

• Sports et divertissements, 1.12

• Stanford University Library (Morgan A. Gunst Collection), 3.22, 3.31-32, 5.57-58

• Sterne, Laurence, 4.23

• Suarès, André, 5.5, 5.52

• Suetonius, 3.22

• Supplément au voyage de Bougainville,4.6

• "Sur la vie," 5.5

• Suzanne et le Pacifique, 4.34-37

• Synthèses littéraires et extra littéraires,5.53

• Tableau de la boxe, 5.37

• Tableau des grands magasins, 4.26-27

• Tagore, Rabindranath, 3.7

• Tolmer, 2.31

• Toulet, Paul-Jean, 4.38-40, 5.38

• Toussaint, Franz, 5.3

• Toye, Nina, 4.28

• Trois contes cruels, 5.34

• Types de l'armée américaine en France,1.13

• Uzanne, Octave, 5.2

• Valéry, Paul, 5.15, 5.20-21, 5.32, 5.54

• Valmy-Baysse, Jean, 4.26-27

• Valotaire, Marcel, 4.1

• Variations, 1.3

• Vasseur, Le, 2.28-30

• Vaudoyer, Jean-Louis, 1.10

• Verhaeren, Émile, 5.50

• Verlaine, Paul, 2.21-22, 5.27

• Vernant, A., 4.3-4

• Vers et Prose, 5.5

• Vices capitaux, Les, 5.33

• Vie des abeilles, La, 4.32

• Vie des termites, La, 4.33

• Vie et les aventures . . . de Robinson Crusoé, La, 2.32

• Vies imaginaires, 2.23-25

• Vigny, Alfred de, 3.13-14, 5.40

• Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Philippe Auguste Mathias, comte de, 5.34

• Vingt-cinq costumes pour le théâtre, 2.1, 2.18-19

• Vogel, 1.12

• Vollard, Ambroise, 5.27-28

• Vox, Maximilien, 5.18

• Voyages et glorieuses découvertes, 2.31

• Watson Library (Metropolitan Museum), 2.1, 2.18-19

• Whittelsey, Elisha, 2.16-17, 4.22

• Wilde, Oscar, 3.18-19, 4.19-21, 5.9, 5.17, 5.23

• Yale University Library (Frank Altschul Collection), 2.3-7, 2.13-15, 2.20, 2.23-25, 3.6, 3.8-9, 3.11-12, 3.19-21, 3.23-29, 5.42-47