Textile Design with a Blue, Black, Orange and White Checked Pattern

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 consists of a checked pattern made up of thin intersecting vertical and horizontal white lines that border, to the left and below, thicker intersecting vertical and horizontal royal blue stripes that are bordered to the right and above by a pair of thin black intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. The intersections between the blue lines form black squares, and the white spaces left from the checks created by these lines over an unrendered ground are bordered, to the right and above, by a thin horizontal orange line and a thin vertical orange line, which intersect on the upper-right corner of the squares to form a tiny red square.