Textile Design with Bundles of Stylized Flowers Inside Square Frames Over a Checked Background
Robert Bryer American
Not on view
Vertical panel with a textile design that is part of a group of 266 textile designs by the American artist Robert Bryer, possibly made for United Designing Co., since most of the designs carry a stamp of the "United Designing Co. / WOrth 4 - 8975". Some of them also contain a stamp in the verso of the "Original Designing Company, Inc."
The collection contains a great variety of designs, from the more traditional floral and stripe patterns, to thematic designs based on various travel destinations, with palm trees and other holiday attributes. Especially interesting among these are patterns inspired by textiles and paintings of Native American tribes, including the Inca, Navajo, Aztec and Maya. The patterns are composed of semi-abstract figures distributed across the design in a regular or, in some cases, a more casual fashion. The spontaneity of designs and the use of floral and animal motifs suggest they were created for printed textiles in the forties.
This particular textile design is made up of scattered square frames with small bundles of stylized red roses and yellow, pink and blue stylized daisies over a checked background made up of dark blue intersecting vertical and horizontal thin lines over a brown ground. Some of the checks in the background are rendered with dark blue and contain a small light pink dot in the center; some are rendered with light pink and contain a dark blue dot in the center. The square frames are also rendered in this alternating fashion: the frames are created with double intermittent lines of light pink color, and they are rendered alternatingly with dark blue between the two intermittent lines and with dark blue inside the frame, as a background for the flowers. This design presents a play on the traditional "chintz" motifs, which was popular in the production of American textiles during the 1930s and 1940s, by using the traditionally used roses in an alternative way, as decorations for other figurative motifs.
