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The Art Deco Book in France
The 1985 Lyell Lectures
by GORDON N. RAY
edited by G. Thomas Tanselle
Editor's Introduction
When Gordon Ray delivered the Lyell Lectures at Oxford in 1985, he chose as his subject the Art Deco book illustrations and bindings produced in France in the 1920s. This topic was not a surprising choice, for he had previously written magisterial annotated catalogues, largely based on his own collection, of British illustrated books from 1790 to 1914 and of French illustrated books from 1700 to 1914. His Lyell Lectures formed a natural continuation of the latter and gave him the opportunity to express his views on still another area in which, through his collecting and research, he had become expert. He accompanied his lectures with 183 slides, the majority of them in color, and those illustrations are in fact the reason that the lectures have not been published until now: the expense of producing so many illustrations was too daunting for the publishers that Ray approached.
Today a happy solution to this problem is available in the form of digital presentation on the internet, and Ray's work is now being offered in a combination of printed and electronic forms. The verbal text of his lectures is printed in the present volume (supplemented by eight plates, showing striking examples of the work of the major figures discussed), and all of the available illustrations are being published on the website of the Bibliographical society of the University of Virginia, at {http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/artdeco}. Numbers placed in the margins of the lectures refer to these illustrations, which are correspondingly numbered on the website. (The online illustrations are provided with detailed captions, which are also printed in a numbered list following the text of the lectures.) One may profitably—and pleasurably—read these lectures without recourse to the illustrations. But naturally Ray's incisive judgments gain greater force when one can see what he is talking about, and the ready availability of the internet to most readers will, I trust, make the process of viewing the illustrations scarcely more burdensome
I
As matters turned out, Ray had only a year and a half to live after he delivered his Lyell Lectures, and they are his last major piece of work. Although they are not his masterpiece, they are certainly a triumphant and elegant coda to an astonishing body of work. And they reflect in mature form the subtlety of judgment and breadth of knowledge that he always displayed. Most of the audience at Ray's lectures in 1985 would have been aware of his distinction as a scholar and a collector and would have recognized his eminence as a statesman in the intellectual and cultural world. I think it is in order here, therefore, to sketch Ray's life and career, so as to provide present and future readers of these lectures with some sense of the personal background from which they emerged.
Gordon Norton Ray was born in New York City on 8 September 1915, the son of Jessie Norton and Jesse Gordon Ray (who represented an Indiana limestone company), and grew up on the Chicago north shore, graduating in 1932 from New Trier High School in Winnetka. Looking back, years later, on his education, he recalled that the excellence of New Trier caused him to regard some of the courses he took as a freshman at Indiana University as a disappointment. (He added that his undergraduate years preceded the dramatic rise of Indiana University under his friend Herman B Wells.) In 1932 his parents had moved to Bloomington, where both the university and their new company were located: the Independent Limestone Company had been founded in 1927, with his father as president, to quarry stone from the land owned by his mother's family. (It was income from this company that later allowed Ray to build his collections, and he accepted the presidency of it in 1974.)
Ray graduated from Indiana University in 1936 with A. B. and A. M. degrees in French literature, having been elected to three honorary societies, Phi Beta Kappa, Beta Gamma Sigma, and Phi Eta Sigma. From Indiana he moved to Harvard for graduate work in English literature (holding an Austin Scholarship in 1937-38). After receiving another A. M. in 1938, he settled on Thackeray as the subject for his doctoral dissertation and went to England in the summer of 1939 (on a Dexter Travelling Scholarship) to search for material. Up to that time Thackeray's descendants, respecting the novelist's wish to have no biography, had denied all access to the great mass of his papers. But Ray's visit to Thackeray's granddaughter, Hester Thackeray Fuller, came at a propitious time: the family had decided to select a scholar to work on the papers, and Ray seemed to Mrs. Fuller the right one. He was promptly appointed editor of the Thackeray letters and thus became the envy of graduate students (and their advisers) throughout America. A decade later Richard Altick, writing his account of the glamor and fascination of literary detective work, The Scholar Adventurers (1950), called this episode "One of the most
His work on the letters was inextricably linked with the disruptions of war. He had arranged for the microfilming of the letters before leaving Europe at the outbreak of war in 1939, and he performed much of his editorial work on them (and on the material already in the United States) before his own entry into military service. First he completed his dissertation on "Thackeray and France" and received his Ph.D. in 1940; he then stayed on at Harvard for two years as an Instructor in English (1940-42), assisted in the summer preceding the first year by another Dexter Scholarship and in the seventeen months from July 1941 by two Guggenheim Fellowships. By the time he was ordered to active duty in the United States Navy on 1 December 1942, he had completed his edition of the letters; and he turned his voluminous manuscript over to his adviser and friend Howard Mumford Jones, who undertook to read proofs and check references for him. Ray's forty months in the Navy (to 23 March 1946) included two and a half years in the Pacific aboard the aircraft carriers Belleau Wood (April 1943-September 1944) and Boxer (April 1945-March 1946) and service on the staff of Vice Admiral Donald Duncan; as a fighter director and radar officer, he advanced to the rank of Lieutenant, earning seven battle stars and a Presidential unit citation. His war years made a deep impression on him and were the subject of many later allusions: a model of the Boxer still sat on his office desk at the time of his retirement. The first two volumes of The Letters and Private Papers of William Make peace Thackeray were published by Harvard University Press in 1945, while Ray was still in the Navy. His discharge in the spring of 1946 allowed him to take over the proofreading from Jones beginning with the middle of the third volume, and the third and fourth volumes appeared in 1946. This four-volume work was a superb achievement, presenting a vast amount of new material in a form that still stands as a model of documentary editing.
The next chapter of Ray's career was set at the University of Illinois, where he moved as Professor of English in the autumn of 1946 and remained until the end of June 1960. During the six months between leaving the Navy and settling in Urbana, he had held a third Guggenheim Fellowship (awarded in 1945), enabling him to return to Mrs. Fuller's London house for further work in the Thackeray papers there and in other English collections. The fruits of this research were a series of distinguished publications on Thackeray:two editions (a facsimile, with his introduction, of the Morgan manuscript of The Rose and the Ring in 1947 and a gathering of Thackeray's contributions to The Morning Chronicle in 1955), a critical study based on the lectures he delivered at the Lowell Institute in February 1950 (The Buried Life: A Study of the Relation between Thackeray's Fiction and His Personal history, 1952), and, finally, in 1955 and 1958, the two massive volumes of his life of Thackeray (Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846; Thackeray:The Age of Wisdom, 1847-1863), which constitute—as Bradford A. Booth
In September 1956, just after that Fellowship began, his father died, leaving him (his mother having died in 1954) with a large block of Independent Limestone Company stock and thus a considerably increased annual income;as a result he declined the monetary part of the Guggenheim award. He was also in a position to enlarge the scope of his collecting, and he began concentrating on English illustrated books; but he had already accomplished impressive feats of collecting, both for himself and for his university. His collecting had begun in earnest when he was abroad in 1948-49, inspired by the sight of Michael Sadleir's collection of Victorian fiction (which was for him, as he said in a 1964 autobiographical essay for The Book Collector, "a revelation"). From then on until the end of his life he made visits to England and France nearly every summer searching for books; and until 1957 those trips also produced major acquisitions for the University of Illinois Library. While he was building for himself notably comprehensive collections of English and French literature from 1789 to 1914 (including manuscript, as well as printed, material), he was securing for the university massive archives and whole collections of books (the papers of two important publishers, Richard Bentley and Grant Richards, in 1951 and 1952; the Tom Turner library of 8000 volumes of twentieth-century English literature in 1953; and the papers of H. G. Wells, amounting to 60,000 items, in 1954). Anyone who buys books by the roomful (as he once did in a shop in Penzance) is bound to achieve rapid celebrity in the antiquarian book world, and his book-buying trips of the 1950s have become legendary; but he also added to the Illinois holdings by the systematic purchase of individual titles, increasing the total by several thousand volumes each year. These purchases in turn affected his own research:his interest in H. G. Wells, reflected in his last Guggenheim application, was obviously related to his bringing the Wells papers to Urbana; and three books resulted, two of them editions that appeared while he was at
In 1959 Henry Allen Moe, then Secretary General of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, offered Ray (with whom, as a four-time Fellowship recipient, he had become well acquainted) the position of Associate Secretary General. Ray accepted, made arrangements to move to New York during the summer of 1960 (his books to be placed on newly constructed shelves lining the walls of a river-view apartment at 25 Sutton Place South), and began work at the Foundation on September 1st. Eight months later, following Mrs. Simon Guggenheim's decision to relinquish the title of President and Moe's election to that office, Ray was named Secretary General; and in 1963, when Moe left at the age of 69, Ray was elected president (and trustee) and thus became on July 1st the second principal administrative officer in the Foundation's thirty-eight-year history. During the twenty-two years of his presidency (until his retirement just before his seventieth birthday in 1985), he saw to it that the Foundation maintained the standards of excellence for which it had become known, adhering unswervingly to the policy of awarding Fellowships only to individuals who had significant accomplishments to their credit and who showed promise of making further contributions. His views on this matter and many others were expressed in a series of widely read annual reports, each one an essay characterized by the lucidity and incisiveness with which he could treat complex issues. In his time the Foundation awarded$96,000,000 to 8100 Fellows.
Ray's position at the Foundation gave him a vantage point from which to have a possibly unrivaled view of the scholarly, scientific, and artistic worlds, and his role as adviser to the learned community grew steadily larger during this period. Some idea of that role can be suggested by a recitation of the institutions on whose governing boards he served: the Foundation Center (196268;vice chairman, 1963-65; chairman, 1965-68), Grolier Club (1963-86;president, 1965-69), Modern Language Association of America (trustee of invested funds, 1966-85), Smithsonian Institution (1968-85; chairman, 197085), Pierpont Morgan Library (1970-86; vice president, 1974-86), Rosenbach Museum and Library (1972-81), American Council of Learned Societies (treasurer, 1973-85), Rockefeller University (1973-86), New York Public Library (1975-86; honorary trustee, 1984-86), Columbia University Press (1977-82), Winterthur Museum (1977-85), and Yaddo (1979-85). This list leaves out some two dozen other committees, commissions, and advisory boards relating to higher education and libraries, several of which give him particular pleasure—such as the visiting committees to the Harvard University Library (1966-85), the Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977-86), and the Lilly Library (chairman, 1979-86); the council of the Fellows of the Pierpont Morgan Library (1962-66; chairman, 1965-66) and of the Friends of the Columbia Libraries (1970-86; chairman, 1973-86); and the board of the American Trust for the British Library (treasurer, 1980-86).
He was also frequently (some three dozen times in the 1960s and 1970s) asked to speak on ceremonial occasions, such as the opening of important conferences or the dedication of new library buildings, and some of those addresses—particularly those surveying the state of the humanities and of the rare-book world—have become celebrated. All the while, the honors poured in: election to the Royal Society of Literature (1948), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962), the American Antiquarian Society (1971), the American Philosophical Society (1977; vice president, 1986), and the Roxburghe Club (1982); the award of the University of Evansville Medal of Honor (1970), the Sir Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting (University of San Francisco, 1973), and the Joseph Henry Medal (Smithsonian Institution, 1980); and thirteen honorary degrees, from Monmouth College (Litt.D., 1959), New York University (LL.D., 1961), Syracuse University (Litt.D., 1961), Tulane University (LL.D., 1963), Indiana University (L.H.D., 1964), Duke University (Litt.D., 1965), University of California (LL.D., 1968), University ofIllinois (Litt.D., 1968), Columbia University (LL.D., 1969), Northwestern University (Bitt.D., 1974), University of Southern California (Al.D., 1974), University of Pennsylvania (L.H.D., 1978), and University of Maryland (Bitt.D., 1982).
During his Foundation years, Ray's activities as scholar, teacher, and book collector continued unabated. He accepted a professorship in English at New York University in his third year at the Foundation (1962-63) and taught popular courses there (and directed dissertations) in Victorian literature every year for the next seventeen, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1980. (He also spent a summer during this period—in 1969—as Beckman Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.) His generosity to his students, welcoming them to his Foundation office and offering them the use of materials from his collection, became widely known, and many of them have recorded their indebtedness and appreciation. The focus of his own scholarship in these years, and of the collecting that inspired it, was English illustrated books of the nineteenth century and French illustrated books and bindings from 1700 through the 1930s. (At the same time he was impressively expanding his holdings of literary manuscripts.) By 1976 he was ready to display the English items, and in March and April of that year the Pierpont Morgan Library mounted a major exhibition on the subject, drawn almost exclusively from his collection and accompanied by the publication of his large volume The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914. Six years later (from April through July 1982) the Library held a similar exhibition of his French materials, in connection with which he delivered the Library's Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures (4, 6, 11 May) and published his two-volume work on The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914.These two exhibitions and their associated publications represent the culmination of his life as a scholar-collector. There are few collectors of any period who could provide, almost single-handedly, material of such quality (including drafts and proofs) for two exhibitions of such breadth; and there are fewer still who could write about their fields with such scholarly depth and stylistic
To those monuments he was able to add a "small sequel" (as he called it) that he had long planned: the invitation to deliver the 1985 Lyell Lectures provided the occasion to survey French Art Deco books, bringing his analysis of French book making up to the chronological limit of his own collection. The fortunate timing of these lectures seemed to epitomize the well-regulated nature of his whole life. He liked order and routine, but there was always room in his carefully controlled schedule for the entertainments he enjoyed—such as, in Urbana, his weekend excursions by train to New Orleans; and, in New York, his quiet hours at the Grolier Club reading booksellers' catalogues (probably no other member in recent times used the Club library so regularly). In his earlier years, he was athletic, engaging in basketball, baseball, handball, bowling, and tennis, and he remained all his life a devoted follower of sports: in New York he often invited groups of friends to baseball games;he held a season ticket to the Knickerbockers' basketball games; and he was known to decline social events in favor of games on television. He was an avid reader of detective stories (amassing a fine collection of them as a by-product) and a steady attender of movies; and he apparently remembered them all inconsiderable detail, just as he seemed to keep straight the plots and characters of all the major (and many minor) novels of English, French, and American literature. His range of allusion was thus astonishingly wide; and, although he sometimes revealed his impatience with small talk, he was an engaging conversationalist, alternating anecdotes with pronouncements, bemused detachment with magisterial gravity. (His obituary in the London Times was particularly apt in describing him as "a man of solid and authoritative presence, and of considered and consequential speech.") To some people he appeared formidable at first, but many have reason to know how approachable he could be. His formality and reserve, however, often made it difficult for colleagues and friends to feel that they knew him well, even while they were drawn to him by his charm, his sense of humor, and his balanced and sympathetic concern for their problems.
No doubt more people experienced his conversation over a meal than in any other setting, and his love of good food was probably his best-known diversion. He made a point of inviting many Guggenheim Fellows to lunch, sometimes at the Century Association but equally often at a favorite restaurant (San Marino, La Toque Blanche, La Petite Marmite, Le Chantilly); on summer trips his visits with book dealers were punctuated at midday by lunches with Fellows who were spending their Fellowship periods abroad, and those gatherings at the White Tower, L'Étoile, Le Crillon, and La Tour d'Argent became part of the lore that Guggenheim Fellows share. Ray was at all man, with a large frame, and always handsome, but the trim figure of his
II
The story of Ray's Lyell Lectures begins in the autumn of 1981, when the electors of the James P. R. Lyell Readership in Bibliography at Oxford selected Ray for the 1984-85 year, a decision conveyed to him by Rosemary Schwerdt on 5 October. When he wrote his acceptance letter on 29 October, he indicated his preference for the Michaelmas term (autumn) and said that his topic would probably be "The Art Deco Book in France"—"but," he added, "I may change my mind." By the time of their next correspondence, in July 1983, he had altered his preferred date to the Trinity term (and the days of 6, 8, 10, 13, and 15 May 1985 were soon thereafter confirmed), but he had not changed his mind about the content or title of the lectures.
Indeed, he was already working in earnest to prepare himself for writing, though his general knowledge of the subject was formidable to start with. He made lists of illustrated books that he should consider, drawing on his own collection and on information gleaned from reading auction and dealer catalogues and the secondary literature. He also brought the subject up with knowledgeable friends: in November 1983, for example, he held productive conversations with the New York dealer Lucien Goldschmidt and the Boston collector Peter Wick. His regular lunches with David Kirschenbaum of the Carnegie Book Shop were as fruitful as always, and his almost daily visits to the Grolier Club provided opportunities for reading some of the reference books he did not possess. The knowledge of private collections that he gained through his network of book-world acquaintances is symbolized by his use, near the end of his fourth lecture, of a letter of Laboureur's "mounted in a copy of Le portrait de Dorian Gray owned by a New York collector" (p. 84).
Because his own collection did not include all the books he would need (as had very nearly been the case with his studies of earlier French and English book illustration), he began corresponding with curators of some of the major institutional collections and arranging to visit their premises. Before making a Foundation trip to California in April 1984, for example, he wrote to Michael T. Ryan, then Curator of Special Collections at Stanford, to make arrangements for examining some of the books in the Morgan A. Gunst collection;
The following month he corresponded with Ralph Franklin, then director of the Beinecke Library at Yale, specifying some of the books he wanted to see in Frank Altschul's collection (having prepared himself the previous November and December by talking with Franklin and by asking Marjorie G. Wynne, Research Librarian at the Beinecke and an old friend, to send him copies of the Altschul catalogue cards). Characteristically, he also asked Franklin to arrange a lunch while he was there, to be held at Mory's on 24 May and to consist of Rutherford Rogers (head of the Yale library system), Donald Gallup (the famous curator of the American literature collection), Marjorie Wynne, and Franklin himself; and he got in touch with Gordon and Mary Haight, who invited him to dinner on 23 May. He worked at the Beinecke on 23-25 May, focusing on Altschul's superb assemblage of Schmied items, though he took notes on other books as well; his resulting order for slides totaled thirty-five, all but two of which were used in his lectures.
During the summer and fall of 1984 he concentrated on collections in New York. He had recently become acquainted with Charles Rahn Fry, a young collector who had been elected to the Grolier Club in 1982 and whose collection of books illustrated by the stencil process called pochoir had been the subject of a Princeton exhibition the same year. After the two met at a Grolier gathering in March 1983, Fry sent Ray a letter listing his favorite Art Deco pochoir books, and Ray then knew how important Fry's collection would be for his research. Dinner and an evening devoted to looking at Ray's books ensued in April, and a month later Fry finished preparing a "distilled" list of his collection. In August Ray asked Fry to deposit some fifteen volumes from this list at the Morgan Library, and in the end he used eighteen illustrations from these volumes. Fry continued to furnish material dealing with pochoir, and Ray showed his appreciation by giving Fry a copy of Les rencontres demonsieur de Bréot (1919), with pochoirs by Bonfils that Ray praised in his first lecture. (Fry died prematurely in September 1990, and his collection was purchased by the Princeton University Library.)
Later in the summer and in the early fall, Ray explored the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he was at the time a member of the visiting committee for the Watson Library there), taking special interest in two volumes illustrated by Barbier and four illustrated by Laboureur. (When the nine slides he requested were presented to him by William Bond Walker, head of the Watson Library and a fellow Grolier member, Ray reciprocated by giving the museum an album of fifty Gavarni lithographs entitled Masque set visages, par-ci, par-là.) And at the Columbia University Library (where he was chairman of the Friends), he located two relevant pochoir volumes and had two slides made from them. During the fall, he also examined in New York several books held elsewhere: in October the Harvard copy of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes with illustrations by Barbier was deposited at the Grolier Club for his use (and from which he had two slides made); and in November five
The richest institutional holdings in New York were in the New York Public Library (an institution, two blocks from Ray's office, of which he was a trustee), and in November he arranged with Donald Anderle, then in charge of Special Collections, to see four books illustrated by Laboureur. By the end of January 1985, as he wrote to Anderle, he was concentrating on the last lecture, devoted to bindings. On 19 February he made the first of several visits to the library for the purpose of looking at binding designs, especially the important album of Pierre Legrain's maquettes in the Spencer Collection and the bindings that Begrain designed for Florence Blumenthal. His various visits to the library resulted in a total of twenty-eight slides that he selected for use in the lectures.
In many ways, however, the most important New York collection for his purposes was his own. (In the second paragraph of the opening lecture he refers to Francis A. Kettaneh's collection as the "backbone" of the 1968 Grolier Club exhibition entitled "Art Déco: French Illustrated Books, Drawings, Bindings, and Objets d'art of the 1920's," described in the Club's Gazettefor June 1969; what he does not say is that his own collection provided thirty volumes for that exhibition.) During the early months of 1985 he deposited some fifty of his books at the Morgan Library for photographing by David A. Loggie (the Morgan's photographer, whom Ray paid directly as an independent contractor). Ray's letter to Loggie accompanying one batch of books in March began, "You will begin to think that my needs will never be satisfied." In all, Ray used sixty-nine slides from his own collection in illustrating his lectures.
As he was examining books in many locations and making notes on them, he was also drafting segments of his lectures, so that his judgments would be written up while the books were fresh in his mind (though his memory for bibliographical detail was remarkable). By April 1985 his first typescript, extensively revised by hand, had been retyped by Jean Gaylord, his Guggenheim Foundation secretary. His text was ready for delivery, though he made a few revisions by hand on his reading copy of the final typescript, as well as marginal notations indicating such details of presentation as when the lights should go off for the showing of slides and back on again.
Ray arrived at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford on Sunday, 5 May, and was joined that evening for dinner by Alan Bell and his wife. The next morning he met with the projectionist at the lecture room in the St. Cross Building in Manor Road before lunching at Wolfson College with Julian Roberts of the Bodleian Library. At 5 p. m. that day he delivered the first lecture to an audience of about seventy-five that included such old friends as the scholar Kathleen Tillotson and the Thackeray heir Belinda Norman-Butler, who—after the sherry reception that traditionally follows the first Lyell lecture each year—had dinner with Ray at the Randolph. The festive spirit of the day was further enhanced by the arrival of telegrams from Charles Fry and
The week and a half proceeded smoothly (except for a problem with the slide projector, necessitating its replacement after the second lecture), and Ray's characteristically full social schedule surrounded the lectures themselves. On the days in between the lectures he had lunches with Guggenheim Fellows who were working in England—on the first Tuesday at L'Étoile in London and on the other two days (Thursday the 9th and Tuesday the 14th) at Elizabeth in Oxford. His evenings offered a succession of dinners with book-world friends—such as Richard and Mary Ellmann on the 7th, Robert Schackleton (formerly Bodley's Librarian) at All Souls on the 8th, John Carey at Merton on the 9th, Schackleton again at home on the 10th, and Bent Juel Jensen on the 13th, plus a Bodleian dinner at Wolfson College on the 15th, after the final lecture and concluding sherry party. (In all, as he wrote to Mary Woodring of the Guggenheim Foundation on the 16th after settling in at the Connaught in London, he "was entertained at lunch or dinner at six colleges.") The weekend after the third lecture was spent in the country seeing Robert Burchfield at Sutton Courtenay and Colin Franklin at Culham. Visits to Oxford bookshops filled some of the weekday mornings, and a session at the Bodleian on the 13th was referred to in his lecture two days later. When in the fifth lecture he says, "I had better conclude by explaining why I have not discussed Paul Bonet," he added in the margin, "particularly since I discovered Monday that the Bodleian contains four splendid examples of his work given by Albert Ehrman."
At the beginning of that final lecture, according to the notation he had inserted on his reading copy, he said, "Thanks for the cordial welcome I have received—and for the attentive reception accorded these lectures." He was not merely expressing conventional sentiments, for there is good reason to believe that a great deal of appreciative enthusiasm had been conveyed to him by various members of the audience. After all, no comparable treatment of his subject had previously been attempted in English, and the background he brought to it, as the audience would have recognized, made him an ideal person for the task. As he put it in the first lecture, "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" (p. 20). Indeed, he thought of his subject as an "episode in the history of book collecting" (p. 21), though of course recognizing at the same time "the importance of Art Deco in the evolution of styles" (p. 20). He had skillfully organized the material to fit the required five-part structure and to present both a broad overview and a detailed treatment of a few major figures. The opening lecture sketches the relation of Art Deco to livres d'art in general and their collecting in the 1920s, and then it examines what he calls "the anticipations of Art Deco illustration during the 1910s" (p. 33) in publications relating to design, fashion, and the theatre and in books illustrated by Robert Bonfils. The next three lectures are devoted, in turn, to three major artists, George Barbier
Although a considerable secondary literature on the Art Deco book existed when Ray wrote, it was almost entirely in French, and much of it dated from the 1920s. Indeed, Raymond Hesse's two general surveys appeared in 1927 and 1928, and the chief catalogue of Schmied's work also came out in 1927; and the monographs on Barbier and Laboureur in the series "Les artistes du livre "both appeared in 1929, as did Rose Adler's album of contemporary bindings. Clément-Janin's work on illustration and Crauzat's on bindings came shortly thereafter, in 1931 and 1932. A few significant works (like Carteret's extensive treatment of book illustration in 1946-48 and the basic catalogue of Legrain in 1965) did appear later, but not in sufficient quantity to affect the generalization that much of the writing important for Ray's purposes (both in periodicals and in books) had appeared more than half a century earlier. As for writing in English, the 1976 memoir of Schmied by the California printer Ward Ritchie stands out as a possibly unique instance of a specialized book in English on a French Art Deco book artist. Ray points out at the beginning of the last lecture that Victor Arwas in his 1980 Art Deco gave only passing mention to illustrated books, though he did pay attention to binding—a fact that symbolizes the treatment of Art Deco illustration in English.
Ray's lectures show a mastery of the secondary literature through 1984 (including dealers' and auction-house catalogues), and his surviving notes indicate, not surprisingly, that he had read considerably more material than he referred to in his text. But, as he says in the first lecture, his main source was "of course" the books themselves. His judgment of those books is what makes his lectures important, and would have made them important even if there were not such a shortage of wide-ranging studies written with the perspective of time, especially in English. The stately movement of the lectures makes the choice of books seem almost inevitable, but in fact the ones he selected were the product of a long process of surveying hundreds of books, as his many handwritten lists and notes reveal. Given the very limited edition-size of most of the relevant illustrated books and the uniqueness of individual bindings, the task of locating the material he needed to see was a challenge; and the fact that his remarks rest on such a broad base (including original drawings, special printings, and maquettes) is in itself a significant accomplishment. His final choices and his critical discussions of them reflect a keen eye, trained over many years. If he does not engage in formal analysis as much as one might expect, his characterizations of artists' styles do reflect an understanding of (and include commentary on) the technical processes they were employing. And he never loses sight of the fact that he is dealing with book-related art: he is always alert to the differing effects of vignettes (surrounded by text) as opposed to full-page plates, and he regularly considers whether a given
He also brought to his subject a thorough knowledge of French literature (having received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in it), enabling him to make perceptive comments about the match in certain instances between literary work and illustrator; and knowing the place of each illustrated scene in the structure of the work being illustrated allowed him to evaluate the artists' choices of scenes to depict. He was able to say, for example, that the verbal works selected by Laboureur were "invariably idiosyncratic, usually laconic, and often ironic" (p. 68) and that Laboureur's illustrations for Colette's L'Envers du music-hall were "as bleak as his author's text" (p. 76). Similarly, he could point out that Barbier's designs for Verlaine's Fêtes galantes "are full of fantastic touches without warrant in the poet's text" (p. 42), and he could generalize that Barbier was largely "a decorator rather than an illustrator" (p. 44). With Ray's background, Barbier's designs for theatre costumes took him back to a passage in Gautier's Mlle. de Maupin (p. 42). Schmied, he realized, "abandoned representational illustrations" for Vigny's Daphné, since the novel's primary concern was "the metaphysical speculations which filled the Emperor's mind" (pp. 57-58). His fluency in French served him well in another way, too, for it permitted him to use his own smooth translations of any comments he wished to quote from these artists or from writings about them. His translations are careful (occasionally interspersed with bracketed English words to show what he had inserted or bracketed French ones to show what he had translated), but they are never pedantic or awkward. He did leave a few quotations untranslated, if he thought the French phrases were significant in themselves or if the passages were from poetry—but apparently he translated even those when he delivered the lectures, for handwritten translations of them were added to his reading copy.
Ray's wide reading was of course not limited to French literature and the other works chosen by Art Deco artists, and his discussions are enlivened, and illuminated as well, by various asides and allusions. The way of life of Schmied and his "entourage" reminds him of that of Mr. Wardle and his family in The Pickwick Papers (p. 61). Laboureur's depiction of a luxurious hotel in Valéry Larbaud's 200 chambres, 200 salles de bain causes him to speculate on what Laboureur might have done with Arnold Bennett's Imperial Palace, published three years later (p. 81). The combined work of Laboureur and André Gide in the 1929-30 edition of Les caves du Vaticanconveys the kind of "light-hearted mood" that would have resulted "if Eric Gill had undertaken to illustrate Stevenson's New Arabian Nights" (p. 82). And when he finds Schmied's vignettes in one of J.-C. Mardrus's translations from the Arabian Nights "oddly reminiscent of Bewick in placement and conception" (p. 64), he is drawing on his knowledge of English illustration of an earlier time; or when, speaking of a binding on Daphnis et Chloé, he notes that "Legrain's aggressive geometry clashes radically with Bonnard's cloudy drawings" (p. 97), one knows that he has Bonnard's whole career in the back
His prose throughout has the directness and clarity that were traits of all his writing. There is a deceptive simplicity to his statements, for their lack of grammatical complexity never suggests superficiality. Indeed, only a deep knowledge of the subject could lead to such unhedged assertions as calling Schmied's Daphné "the Art Deco book par excellence" (p. 57) or describing Barbier as "the most haunting of Art Deco book artists" (p. 35). Knowledge of all of Barbier's work leads to identifying costumes that "belong to Barbier-land rather than to history" (p. 40). There is a formality in Ray's writing that mirrors the formality of his personality, but his sense of humor and his wry amusement at human foibles are also in evidence here. He characterizes the Cercle Lyonnais du Livre, for instance, as a group "whose members would not have appreciated any radical departure from the conventional" (p. 56); he describes a statuette of a naked dwarf in one of Barbier's drawings as "dissipated yet vestigially fashionable" (p. 38); and he remarks on the interest shown in "almost any elaborately decorated binding of the 1920s, no matter how inferior its quality" (p. 85).
Ray's lectures, in short, are authoritative, perceptive, elegant, and witty. They were polished by the time of their delivery, and Ray did not feel that they required any further work. While still in Oxford (on 13 May 1985) he sent a note to J. P. W. Roper (Rosemary Schwerdt's successor as secretary of the Lyell electors), indicating that he would give his typescript to Julian Roberts after the final lecture. "I regard it," he said, "as being in publishable form." Although the text was indeed in publishable form, the cost of producing the numerous illustrations was too much for the three publishers Ray got in touch with during the eighteen months before his death—though he was aware of only the first two rejections (from Oxford University Press, which had the right of first refusal, and from Dover Publications, which published the 1986 reprints of his catalogues of English and French illustrated books), for the letter of rejection from the London office of Yale University Press was dated two days after his death.
If Ray were publishing these lectures today, he might perhaps add a few references to publications that have appeared since 1985, such as Sylvain Laboureur's four-volume Catalogue complet de l'oeuvre de Jean-Émile Laboureur (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1989-91), Mauro Nasti's Schmied (Venice: G. Tamoni, 1991), and Yves Peyré and H. George Fletcher's Art Deco Bookbindings: The Work of Pierre Begrain and Rose Adler (New York:
But it is hard to see anything substantial that he would have felt the need to revise. His judgments grew out of the examination of such an extensive array of books that he is unlikely to have encountered others (however much he may have admired them) so absolutely compelling as to have demanded inclusion in preference to examples already selected. His work has not been superseded as a compact and reliable survey. And the quality of his evaluations will give these lectures a secure place in the future study of their subject.
Sources, Treatment of Text, Acknowledgments
Sources. The surviving papers relating to Ray's work on these lectures fall into five categories: (1) correspondence with officials at Oxford, friends, and librarians—the last group of letters including some of the lists of books he wished to see and some of his orders for slides; (2) holograph notes made at libraries and at home while examining primary and secondary material, along with holograph lists of books and preliminary drafts of scattered paragraphs; (3) a partial first typescript, with extensive holograph revisions; (4) multiple copies of the final typescript, including the one annotated for use in delivering the lectures, which shows that the last illustration and the associated comments were added at a late stage (six of the small revisions made on that copy were actually incorporated into the typing of most of the other surviving copies—a situation reflecting the fact that the typing had been done on a magnetic-card typewriter and that small alterations could therefore be made without the need for retyping the unaltered text); (5) photocopies, occasionally annotated, of secondary material. As Ray's literary executor, I have all these papers in my possession at present. The slides that Ray used in the lectures, except for ten that are apparently lost (1.6, 1.9, 2.6, 2.12, 2.33, 3.13, 3.16, 4.40, 5.1, and 5.20 in the list of illustrations below), are now the property of the Pierpont Morgan Library, where Ray's entire collection of books, manuscripts, and art is housed. Ray's own comments on his sources appear in the lectures on pp. 20-21 and 89-90. In my introduction, I have incorporated, as section I, a slightly revised version of the biographical sketch that I originally wrote as part of the introduction to a collection of Ray's essays, Books as a Way of Life (New York: Grolier Club and Pierpont Morgan Library, 1988), a volume that includes a checklist of Ray's writings.
Treatment of text. I have followed the text of the final typescript as revised in Ray's hand for delivery, with two classes of exceptions. (1) I have not accepted those revisions clearly intended only for oral delivery, such as those aimed at speeding up the reading (deleting first names, shortening titles, omitting dates) and those with direct reference to the occasion (such as thanking the audience or noting his visit to the Bodleian, both of which I have quoted in the introduction above). (2) I have made some four dozen alterations of my own, only ten of which go beyond the correction of typographical errors or the adjustment of formal features for consistency:I have substituted "A year" for "Two years" at 23.28, "before these words were published" for "however" at 24.26 (in order to recognize the discrepancy between the date at the end of Clément-Janin's text and the printing dates of the two volumes as given in the colophons), "several" for "six main" at 25.15, "former" for "latter" at 32.27, "leaves" for "pages" at 59.25, "vignette" for "plate" at 63.25, "the last" for "these" at 79.11, and "fewer" for "less" at 22.26 and 84.10; and I have inserted "these" at 82.29. The documentation remains in the form Ray used, except that arabic numerals have replaced roman and some inconsistencies have been regularized—primarily his inconsistent citation of page numbers (sometimes in parentheses in the text and sometimes in footnotes that consisted solely of page numbers where no author or title reference was needed: all such page references are now in the text). The list of secondary works cited and the list of illustrations have been added; they do not exist in any form in Ray's papers.
Acknowledgments. Gordon Ray would have wanted to thank the Oxford officials who handled the arrangements for his visit (including Rosemary Schwerdt and J. P. W. Roper) and the staff members of libraries where he worked, including Julian Roberts (Bodleian), the late Kenneth A. Lohf (Columbia), the late Robert L. Nikirk (Grolier Club), Colta F. Ives and William Bond Walker (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Anna Lou Ashby, Paul Needham, and Charles Ryskamp (Morgan), Donald Anderle (New York Public Library), Michael T. Ryan (Stanford), and Ralph Franklin and Marjorie G. Wynne (Yale)—as well as Eleanor M. Garvey and Roger E. Stoddard, who arranged for a Harvard book to be deposited at the Grolier Club for his
My own thanks go, first of all, to the following institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce—on the website of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and (in several instances) in the present volume—the images made from material in their collections: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Jean Ashton); Houghton Library, Harvard University (Hope Mayo); Pierpont Morgan Library (Charles E. Pierce, Jr.); New York Public Library (David Ferriero, H. George Fletcher, and Thomas Lisanti); and Stanford University Library (Roberto G. Trujillo and Sean Quimby). I also thank Dr. Jack Eisert for permission to reproduce four illustrations from books in his possession. For help with questions regarding permission or citation, I thank Eileen Sullivan (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Rebecca Warren Davidson (Princeton University Library), and Vincent Giroud and Ellen Cordes (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University—which, through the good offices of Vincent Giroud, provided newly scanned images to replace Ray's slides). (For the specific illustrations that come from each source, seethe index to the list of illustrations below; more detailed credit lines accompany each image on the website and each plate in this volume.) For generous assistance of various kinds, I wish to record my indebtedness to Anna Lou Ashby, John Bidwell, Justin Caldwell, Stephen C. Massey, Constance McPhee, Paul Needham, and J. Fernando Peña. Finally, I give particular thanks to four individuals at the University of Virginia who played major roles in helping this work reach publication:Matthew Gibson and Cindy Filer Speer of the Electronic Text Center, who oversaw the careful transfer of the slide images and captions to the Bibliographical Society's website; Elizabeth Lynch, assistant to the editor of Studies in Bibliography, who—in addition to her usual expert proofreading and checking—performed the tasks of matching each slide with its discussion in the text, verifying the vertical and horizontal orientation of each image on the website, locating further information about many of the books from which the slides were made, and writing a preliminary draft of the list of illustrations; and biography, who—in addition to her usual expert proofreading and checking—performed the tasks of matching each slide with its discussion in the text, verifying the vertical and horizontal orientation of each image on the website, locating further information about many of the books from which the slides were made, and writing a preliminary draft of the list of illustrations; and David L. Vander Meulen, editor of Studies in Bibliography, who gave his characteristically detailed and perceptive attention to this work.
Plates in This Volume
(following page 24)
PLATE 1. Robert Bonfils, plate from Modes et manières d'aujourd'hui, 9eanné, 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 Tableaudes grands magasins, 1925 (4.27). Reproduced by permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.
PLATE 6. Pierre Begrain, lower double 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 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.
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