Collection "Décors et Couleurs" Album No. 2, Planche 1

Pochoir pattern book, titled "Collection 'Décors et Couleurs' Album No. 2: Soixante-dix motifs décoratifs en dix-huit planches" (Collection 'Designs and Colors' Album No. 2: Seventy decorative motifs in eighteen plates), with Art Deco designs, probably for textiles, created by Jean Burkhalter and published in Paris by Éditions Albert Lévy, probably in the second half of the 1920s or the early 1930s. The book consists of a title page and 18 plates numbered 1-18, each with several designs, bound with dark blue linen boards. The designs contain a variety of geometric, abstract and semi-abstract motifs executed in various colors, some of them including natural-inspired figures such as birds and flowers. All of them are typical of the Art Deco style, which was characterized by its eclecticism, drawing from a variety of sources that sought to combine old European design traditions with the modern style diffused by avant-garde art, while also reflecting the romantic fascination with early Egyptian and Meso-American "exotic" cultures promoted by archaeological discoveries of the times.

The first plate of the album presents five different design motifs, most with semi-abstract floral and natural patterns. The first design, presented in a horizontal strip on the upper part of the sheet, contains a variety of overlapping abstract shapes rendered with black, orange, and shades of blue and green, some of them also decorated with semi-abstract spots. Two other designs are presented in vertical strips: one containing a bundle with semi-abstract branches with leaves colored with green, blue, pink and shades of brown over a blue ground, and the other containg an unfulating vertical brown branch with semi-abstract leaves colored with blue, green and black, and semi-abstract flowers with blue, brown and orange petals and blue, green and red pistils, over a green-and-brown ground. Between them is a design with a large semi-abstract rose colored with shades of pink, standing on a stem with semi-abstract leaves colored with shades of green, over a background colored with dark grayish-blue to its right and white with a light green border and short horizontal strokes to its left, possibly presenting two different design alternatives for the same floral motif. The fifth design is presented in a horizontal stripe on the lower part of the sheet, and contains a semi-abstract natural landscape with flowers and trees rendered with orange, red, and shades of blue, brown and green that stand in front of a green mountain under a blue sky.