"Kaléidoscope: Ornements Abstraits"; Plate 13, Five 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 five designs for textiles with abstract motifs; one of them is located in the center of the sheet and is presented inside an octagonal shape, and the others are placed around it: two above and two below it. The first one contains a variety of overlapping fragments of circles rendered with blue, gray, and two different shades of purple, or with diagonal stripes executed with blue, black, and various shades of gray, and smaller fragments of circles colored with yellow and with round, cream highlights. The second design contains alternating groups of scrolling motifs, colored with black and orange or with shades of purple, over a background of diagonal stripes executed with aquamarine, light bluish-gray and blue. The third design, in the center of the sheet, presents a variety of rectangles and fragments of circles colored with black, purple, and shades of blue, green and gray, above which stand out red undulating stripes separated by thin white undulating lines; the pattern in the design is probably an abstraction of a water view from an urban space. The fourth design contains a variety of fragments of circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, and fragments of curved stripes, executed in various shades of green, black, cream, yellow and gray, suggesting possibly an abstraction of a tropical jungle. The last design contains a variety of vertical stripes, rectangles and squares, colored with blue, brown, cream and green, above which stand out semi-abstract buildings colored with black.