Textile Design with a Red, Black 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 is made up of a checked pattern with thick intersecting diagonal stripes rendered with thin undulating vertical red lines over a white ground and with thinner black stripes aligned in the center above them over a red ground. The lozenges formed at the intersections colored with white, and the black stripes are rendered with thin vertical undulating black lines above them, with the small lozenge forming by their intersection in the center of the white lozenge colored fully with white. These intersecting stripes are separated by thin diagonal intersecting white (unrendered) stripes, whose intersections form small black lozenges.