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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.
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