Plate 39 from "Prismes: 40 Planches de Dessins et Coloris Nouveaux"
Designer Emile-Allain Séguy French
Publisher Editions d'Art Charles Moreau French
Not on view
Design with light blue ground over which stand out irregular zig-zagging lines colored with mint green and strips of royal blue parallellograms of different sizes that intersect to form lozenge-shaped frames with zig-zagging edges that contain semi-abstriact dark blue grass ground and abstract tree motifs made up of a scrolling row of yellow triangles.
The design is part of a pochoir pattern book, titled "Prismes: 40 Planches de Dessins et Coloris Nouveaux" (Prisms: 40 Plates of Designs and New Colors), with Art Deco designs, probably for textiles, created by Émile-Allain Séguy and published in Paris by Éditions d’Art Charles Moreau, probably in the second half of the 1920s or the early 1930s. The book consists of a title page and 40 plates numbered 1-40, each with one design, bound with dark blue linen boards. The designs contain a variety of geometric, abstract and semi-abstract motifs executed in various colors, some of them including natural-inspired figures such as birds and flowers. All of them are typical of the Art Deco style, which was characterized by its eclecticism, drawing from a variety of sources that sought to combine old European design traditions with the modern style diffused by avant-garde art, while also reflecting the romantic fascination with early Egyptian and Meso-American "exotic" cultures promoted by archaeological discoveries of the times.