Textile Design with 'Glitched' Bundles of Flowers and Leaves

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 textile design is made up of bundles of large stylized flowers and flower buds rendered with white, blue and dark blue lines that make them look glitched and leaves of burgundy color, also rendered with lines to make them look glitched, over a pink background. The glitched effect might have been used to imitate a weaving technique on a printed textile, possibly as part of the appreciation for hand-made textiles that took place with the rural revival of the American 'decorator' style of the 1940s. The use of flowers other than the roses traditionally used in "chintz" textile designs, like thoe ones in this design, also corresponds to an important trend in design aesthetic in the production of American textiles during the 1930s and 1940s.