"Kaléidoscope: Ornements Abstraits"; Plate 3, Four Abstract Design Motifs

Various artists/makers

Not on view

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 four designs for textiles with abstract motifs. The first, presented in a thin vertical rectangle, contains a variety of curved shapes, stripes, and circles, colored with orange, red, yellow, and shades of blue and purple, with some highlights executed in gold. The second is presented on a large square, and contains a repeating pattern of what is possibly an abstract bird, decorated with a yellow circle where its wings would go, over a background that could be an abstract interpretation of the bird's natural habitat in the trees, made up of shapes colored with shades of green and orange semi-circles that could represent fruits. The third design is presented in a semi-circle, and contains several silver, white and pink stripes, triangles colored with blue and pink, a circle, half-colored with blue and half-colored with silver, several curving shapes colored with aquamarine, and other geometric motifs colored with blue, light green, and silver. The final design is placed to the right of the semi-circle, and thus has one curved side, and wha are possibly abstracted frogs colored with shades of green, and with orange eyes, over a geometric pattern executed with two shades of blue.

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