Legrain, Pierre(-Emile)
(b Levallois-Perret,Hauts-de-Seine, 2 Oct 1889; d Paris, 17 July 1929)

French designer. The son of a wealthy distiller, he studied drawing from a young age and from 1904 was trained at the Ecole des Arts Appliques Germain Pilon. In 1908 Legrain joined the studio of the designer Paul Iribe (1883--1935), with whom he collaborated in 1912 on the apartment of the couturier and patron, jacques Doucet. In 1917 Doucet commissioned Legrain to design bookbindings for his collection of manuscripts and first editions. The success of this commission and a disagreement with Doucet led Legrain to open his own bookbinding studio in 1919. The bindings that he designed were Cubist-inspired and invariably geometric in style and were instrumental in the revival of the art of bookbinding in the 1920s. He also framed pictures for Louis Marcoussis. By 1922 he was again working for Doucet, and in 1925 he was in charge of the decoration of Doucet's villa at Neuilly. Much of the furniture that Legrain designed for Doucet and others in the 1920s was inspired by African furniture (e.g. chaise longue, c. 1925; Paris, Mus. A. Dec.) and was executed in a variety of fashionable materials including exotic veneers, parchment and metal (see France, fig. 62).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
M. Dormoy and others: Pierre Legrain, relieur (Paris, 1965)
L. Thornton: 'Negro Art and the Furniture of Pierre-Emile Legrain', Connoisseur, clxxxi (1972), pp. 166--9

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