Camus, Jacques – Idees -1 Portfolio of Art Deco Designs - Color Pochoir Prints. Paris: A. Calavas, 1922. Paper on board large format loose leaf folio with applied title reading Ides. Title page reads Ides – 1 de jacques camus douze plances. En vente a la librairie des arts decoratifs, 68 rue Lafayette, paris. Includes twelve (12 ) plates with three (3) or more pochoir fabric designs on each page. Colors are saturated, fresh, and pristine. Measures 16" x 12". In good condition with all 12 plates present. Minimal corner edge wear on a few of the plates.

Pochoir is a stenciling process used for the reproduction of original color works. It was used in France by the most prominent artists and craftsmen to produce illustrated deluxe portfolios, books, limited-edition journals, and decorative and fine-art prints between 1895 and 1935.

From thetextileblog:French artist and designer Jacques Camus produced a range of pattern work portfolios of which Idees is a typical example. Idees was originally published in 1922 and is a perfect example of the changes that had taken place in the decorative arts of Europe during and after the First World War. Although the design work is clearly a continuation of the more developed and later period of the Art Nouveau movement, it had begun to break out of the constraints of pre-war Europe, opening up many more avenues of key influences that were to include, probably for the first time such things as popular culture and the still relatively controversial and often deeply unpopular concepts behind contemporary fine art techniques. The design and decorative work examples are on all pages from Camus Idees portfolio. As the title suggests, the pattern work was all produced by Camus to be used as an inspirational guide to the decoration and ornamentation of the decorative arts. Even though these are clearly a source of excellent surface pattern styling, including various motifs, some even with added suggested colourways, they were also used to inspire the decoration of a range of flat and three-dimensional products from wallpapers, through textiles to ceramics. These portfolios, which were usually French in origin and produced by a whole range of talented artists and designers including Eugene Alain Seguy, Maurice Pillard Verneuill, Edouard Benedictus, Augustus H Thomas, Andre Durenceau, Rene Beauclair and even Sonia Delaunay, have a history that is much longer than is often assumed. Suggested Art Nouveau pattern work was being produced at the very beginning of the twentieth century by the likes of Eugene Alain Seguy. However, the genre of these portfolios goes back well into the nineteenth century and beyond. There were of course other forms of portfolio produced in other European countries apart from France. However, the French production of these portfolios was much more influential and more widely used throughout Europe during the first four decade period of the twentieth century, that in many respects France can be seen to have dominated this particular period of European decorative history, much of it through the concerted effort of the expansion of French inspired pattern work that was not always necessarily clearly French in immediate origin, but was inspirational outside of France and therefore ultimately French. Camus work is an interesting mixture of styles that show the early origin of the pattern work. 1922 could be seen as a point where the late style of Art Nouveau, which had been transforming itself throughout the war period into a much less elaborate and less involved style, was rapidly becoming what we would consider early Art Deco. It is important to note that no style or decorative movement was ever produced in a vacuum. All are dependent upon and very often the direct result of the previous style that it eventually supersedes. When placed next to each other typical examples of both Art Nouveau and Art Deco appear distinctly and clearly dissimilar. Nevertheless, each contains links, continuations and genuine shared vocabulary that clearly pass through and connect the two styles. It is sometimes interesting to see the natural progression of pattern work from Art Nouveau through to Art Deco, by taking the work of a particular designer or artist and tracing their career through the two styles. This is where these French portfolios come into their own as a number of the artists who contributed to them were working from the early years of the twentieth century right through until the 1930s. These valuable illustrations are genuine and important examples, giving us typical an insight into the decorative arts and pattern work of a period. However, perhaps even more importantly, they also give us a good and clear indication of the development and evolution of decoration and pattern work over a continuously longer period, which is fascinating in its own right and these are now invaluable as a source. From the University of Cincinnati Rare Book Collection website: The Art of the Pochoir Book. The effect is arresting: paging through the leaves of a pochoir-illustrated book, the reader is abruptly stopped by the extraordinary effects of lush, vibrant colors and bold geometric shapes. Bright oils and watercolors seem to come alive on the page in an almost three-dimensional experience. These volumes, with their focus on patterns and color interactions, use a stenciling technique to present decorative arts and the possibilities of book printing. In fact, pochoir is the French word for stenciling, a form of coloring pictures that dates to a thousand years ago in China. It was introduced to commercial publishing in France in the late 1800s, and there it had its most exquisite expression. The pochoir process would use from 20 to 250 different stencils applied to a black-and-white collotype print from a photograph. The collotypes are affixed to stencil sheets of metal or board, and the patches to be colored are cut out. Each color to be applied uses a separate pompon, or brush of coarse, shortly-cropped animal hair, to sponge or dab on the paint. Each stencil is done in turn until the image is finished, so it is essential to place the stencils exactly in position. Though pochoir illustration had its heyday in the 1920s, with Paris as its center of greatest artistic production, several places produced pochoir books during this decade, including London, Florence, New York, and the avant-garde publishers of Prague and other Eastern European cities. In the United States, pochoir gave way quite early to related methods like serigraphy and silk-screening. Occasionally today some fine press books are illustrated using the pochoir method, but its most sumptuous flowering eight decades ago represents a remarkable era in the history of the book.