University of Virginia Library

5. Pierre Legrain 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.[192] Moreover, the interest of collectors
of Art Deco bindings now extends beyond Legrain, 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 Legrain 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
[193] 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
[194] is shown in Meunier's doublure for Octave Uzanne's Physiologies des
[195] 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.
[196] 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 Legrain. But
this was a gradual process, and the assertion in Pierre Legrain relieur, the
standard catalogue of his work, that between 1919 and 1929 he was the
"uncontested master" of the art of binding[197] 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, Legrain
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 Legrain 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-Legrain, and she gave him a happy and comfortable
home.

This was Legrain's situation in 1916 when Jacques Doucet made him
a momentous proposal.[198] 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 Legrain 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 Legrain, "while the
battle of Verdun was raging," in these terms:

When Legrain 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 Legrain 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
[200] 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. Legrain 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."[201]

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."[202] Legrain 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.[203]
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 Legrain 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."[204] Two descriptions of bindings provided by Legrain himself
offer examples of his practice. Of a binding on Maeterlinck's Serres
[205] 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-
[206] 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."[207] Further examples are provided by two maquettes in the New
York Public Library, both rendered in 1921 by René Kieffer for Baron
[208] 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. (Legrain explains his correction of the
lettering in a note: "Les naïades sont des satyrs.") The second was de-
[209] 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. Legrain
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 comprehensiveness
I have supplemented these resources by reproductions
from secondary works: from Pierre Legrain 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 195961;
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 Legrain. 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
Legrain near the end of his life collected the maquettes for his bindings.[210]
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 cathédrale
or 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."[211]
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 Legrain relieur, which reproduce
more than 300 bindings in predominantly chronological arrangement,

one sees how vastly Legrain 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."[212] 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, Legrain felt free to employ
incrustations of unaccustomed materials: metals, rare woods, or
mother-of-pearl.[213] 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
[214] 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-
[215] 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
[216] 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 Legrain 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 bookdealer Auguste Blaizot,
express his pleasure in the bindings which Legrain 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."[217] 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."[218]

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'Art
vivant that "Legrain, who is enjoying a recent access of fame, well symbolizes
our epoch through his bindings"[219] 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.[220]
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 Legrain 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,
[221] the father from Marius Michel and the son from Legrain. The first,
which is reproduced from the third volume of Devauchelle's La reliure
en France (after page 90), is decorated with one of the master's richest
patterns of floral ornamentation. It is an uncompromising example of
[222] le style 1900, a superb anachronism. The second, which serves as the
frontispiece to the same volume, shows Legrain, 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 Legrain,
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, Legrain
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."[223]

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 Legrain, 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."[224] 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, Legrain by
the later 1920s had carried the day. When he died in 1929, Crauzat, the
ranking authority, wrote simply: "P. Legrain is `contemporary binding' "
(2: 301). In our own time, of course, Marius Michel and Legrain are no
longer seen as competitors, but in the former's long philosophic perspective
as masters in a succession which runs: Marius Michel, Pierre
Legrain, 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 Legrain 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
[225] 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
[226] 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 Legrain 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
[227] 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-
[228] 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 Legrain received from the wellknown
bibliophile Dr. Lucien-Graux for a first edition of Baudelaire's
[229] 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
[230] copy of Valéry's La jeune Parque of 1925 (No. 1055), a much larger
volume. Here Legrain used his reversed curves to suggest the serpent of
[231] 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
[232] 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.
[233] Perhaps the latest of Legrain's 12 designs for Wilde's Ballade de la géôle
de 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
[234] of mosaic work involved. Then there are Legrain's designs for the dou-
[235] blures of the album itself, two of his most intricate geometric compo-
[236] 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 Legrain
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 Legrain, 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."[237] 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, Legrain was "impervious
to the manner of certain contemporary painters; his strict,
classical style seems to take no account of that of the peintre-graveur."[238]
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 Legrain 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.
[239] Witness this well-known creation for Parallèlement (No. 1153). In the
[240] 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 Legrain had introduced into binding. So it came about that Legrain
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.

Legrain 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
[241] copies of Le cantique des cantiques (Nos. 112 and 113) which Rose Adler
[242] 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 Legrain,
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."[243] You will see some of Schmied's bindings later in the
lecture.

During these years of intense activity as a designer of bindings, Legrain
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.[244]

Something should be said about the bindings completed after Legrain's
death under the supervision of his stepson, Jacques AnthoineLegrain,
of which 75 are listed in the standard catalogue.[245] 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
[246] 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
[247] 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 Legrain was the "uncontested
master" of modern binding.[248] Her reputation has never stood
higher than it does today. Indeed her bindings are more eagerly sought
after than those by Legrain 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
[249] 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 Legrain 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.[250]

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 Legrain 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.
Legrain understood the value of silence, for in expression the danger is
to substitute oneself for the author, to write a sixth act."[251] As we have
seen, Legrain 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 Legrain and others, for
her part she was content to make little count for much, as may be seen
[252] 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-
[253] 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 Legrain for the same book which
[254] 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
[255] 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
[256] Les contrerimes of 1930 with etchings by Laboureur, a design inspired,
one surmises, by the shape given the type-page by the writer's verseforms,
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,"[257]
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
[258] 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
[259] 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
[260] 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).[261]

As a designer of Art Deco bindings François-Louis Schmied has for
some years been ranked with Legrain 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.[262] 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
[263] the larger panels by Dunand mentioned above. Indeed, Schmied's ma-
[264] 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
[265] own workers. The panels which Dunand made from two much smaller
[266] maquettes, one of King Solomon and one of a stylized garden, were
[267] mounted in the front and rear covers. This time he radically altered
[268] 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
[269] 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 Legrain
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.[270] 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."[271] 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."[272] 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."[273] Many of
the bindings which Cretté created were of a transitional nature, half-way
houses in which floral ornament is selectively employed. That decorating
[274] 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).[275] In his
more modern conceptions, far from copying Legrain, 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-
[276] 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
[277] 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
[278] 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.[279]

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.[280] 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
[281] Gus Bofa's Synthèses littéraires et extra littéraires of 1923 is character-
[282] 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 Legrain without servile imitation.
There is even a hemisphere of mother-of-pearl in the "o" of discours.
[283] For Francis Carco's Quelques-unes of 1931 with etchings by Louis Legrand
his conception hardly differs from the criss-cross mosaic binding
by Legrain 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-
[284] 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
[285] 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-
[286] 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 Legrain, 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.[287] 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,"[288] 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
[289] 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
[290] 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 Legrain, 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."[291] 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.