"Kaléidoscope: Ornements Abstraits"; Plate 12, Four Abstract Design Motifs

This book, titled "Kaléidoscope: Ornements Abstraits" (Kaleidoscope: Abstract Ornaments), is bound on dark blue linen boards and contains a title page and 20 plates (numbered 1-20) presenting a total of 87 designs for textiles, in the style of Art Deco. Having its peak during the "Roaring Twenties" (second half of the 1920s) and the Depression years of the 1930s, the eclecticism of Art Deco was permeated by both traditional European design traditions and contemporary avant-garde. The designs presented in this book contain colorful, abstract motifs, which evoke, with their fragmented vocabulary, the dynamism of modern culture that was common of Art Deco.

This plate presents four designs for textiles with abstract motifs. The first one contains alternating rows of semi-abstract octopus-like figures colored with two shades of pink and rows of gray abstract shapes, almost resembling the head of some type of shark, with light blue dots, separated by vertical stripes colored with blue, light pink and purple. The second design is probably for a ribbon or border, and contains a vertical strip created by a repetition of abstract motifs created with squares, triangles, circles and semi-circles, colored with shades of green, blue, cream and purple, over a black ground, between two bluish-gray vertical stripes with zig-zagging borders. The third design presents an abstract pattern created by geometric figures, including squares, stripes, and semi-circles, colored by fragments with two shades of green, cream and brown, and a border on the left and upper sides made up of alternating light blue rectangles and blue squares; the placing of the border on only two sides of the rectangle presenting the design suggests that the pattern could be repeated indefinitely in the creation of different sizes of textiles. The last design contains a variety of motifs created with curves, colored with blue, purple, black and cream; the cream shapes also contain smaller versions of these types of curvy shapes colored with green, dust color and black.