“The art that is frankly decorative is the art to live with. It is, of all visible arts, the one art that creates in us both mood and temperament…The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of patterns give us rest. The marvels of design stir the imagination.”
− Oscar Wilde, “The Artist as Critic”
“The patterns of printed cloth suggest a larger pattern that contains them – what we may call the recycling wheel, which sets the motifs of textile designs on a circular road of eternal return. Nothing disappears, and nothing appears out of nowhere.”
− Introduction, Textile Designs
Never before has the world of printed textiles had a book of this magnitude and lavishness devoted to it. Covering two hundred years of European and American fabric design from the late 18th to the late 20th century, Textile Designs presents a cross section of the printed materials that decorated our rooms and clothed our bodies. Most were the textiles of the common man. The cloth of everyday life – printed calicos, flowered cretonnes and chintzes, polka-dot silks and foulards, and the myriad “imposters” hoping to pass as costly damasks, brocades, tapestries, and embroideries.
Textile Designs is illustrated with 1823 full-color examples organized by motif into more than 320 categories. Together, cumulatively, these patterns become individual words in a gigantic language of the visual imagination. This book is a kind of dictionary of that language.
In Western fabric design, the parts of speech can be divided into Florals, Geometrics, Conversationals, Ethnics, and Art Movements and Period Styles – the subjects of the five chapters of this book. And each of these broad categories, or families, have been divided into many subcategories, such as Roses and Sprigs among the Florals; Chevrons and Herringbones among the Geometrics; Bubbles and Butterflies among the Conversationals; Americana and Chinoiserie among the Ethnics; Art Nouveau and Empire among the Art Movements and Period Styles. The successful textile designer seeks not to devise something never before imagined, but to create a variation on one of these preexisting themes (Or perhaps not even to do that – a quantity of any season’s prints are frank borrowings from earlier designs.) It is the tool of the trade, the language that makes textile speech possible – why try to transcend it? So much can be said with a rose.
See review blurbs.
To purchase this book for $60 plus shipping (with or without autograph), please contact Susan Meller.
Look Inside Textile Designs
Introduction (pages 18 + 19, and selected images)
INTRODUCTION
Left: PATTERN BOOK. France, dated 1821. This is one page from a textile mill’s pattern book containing several thousand small gouache paintings of designs in the French provincial style. It was either from the Oberkampf printworks in Jouy-en-Josas, outside Paris, of from an Alsatian textile company.
Right: LETTER to OBERKAMPF. Nantes, France, dated 1791. On June 18, 1791, the firm Beutier Père et Fils dispatched this rather petulant letter to the great textile printer Cristophe-Philippe Oberkampf with samples of his cotton prints attached. A partial translation reads: “We have made a selection of several patterns from those you kindly sent us…we would appreciate you sending them to us as soon as possible… Do not use a pallet, since the postal coach remains very expensive… We are sorry you have nothing better or prettier to offer us right now at the price of five sols. The taffeta have too many errors.”
Chapter 1 - Floral (pages 44 + 45, and selected images)
“
…And since flowers at their lushest are both so beautiful and so fragile, they are a particularly poetic image of life’s simultaneous richness and transience. But flowers’ twofold symbolism also tells us that they will always be back next year. In this way, floral prints and real flowers are alike: both are perennials.”
− Textile Designs
BORDERS
Left top: BORDER. France, c.1900; gouache on paper; for home furnishing yard goods
Left bottom: BORDER. France, c.1880; gouache on paper; for home furnishing yard goods
Right top: BORDER. France, c.1910; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
Right bottom: BORDER. France, c.1910-20; paper impression; for apparel yard goods
Chapter 2 - Geometric (pages 198 + 199, and selected images)
“
…The textile designer knows that abstraction is inherently, shamelessly decorative. The various symbolic meanings of geometric motifs are often antiquated matters of scholarship, and most people are probably oblivious to these meanings as they look at the cloth… It’s doubtful if many in the chain of decision making are thinking about whether or not the triangle is a symbol of immortality. The extent to which geometrics are meaningful to us is suggested by the degree to which they earn their keep.”
− Textile Designs
PINWHEELS AND SPIRALS
Left (clockwise from top left):
SPIRALS. France, c.1890; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
SPIRALS. France, c.1810-20; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
PINWHEELS. France, c.1810-20; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
SPIRALS. France, c.1890; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
Right (clockwise fron top left):
PINWHEELS. France, c.1810-20; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
PINWHEELS. France, 1893; roller-printed cotton; apparel yard goods
PINWHEEL. France, c.1900-1920; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
PINWHEELS. France, c.1820; block-printed cotton; apparel yard goods
PINWHEELS. France, c.1890, gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
PINWHEELS. France or USA, c.1930s; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
SPIRALS. France, c.1900-1920; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
Chapter 3 - Conversational (pages 256 + 257, and selected images)
“
…A conversational print is one that depicts some real creature or object…a landscape or cityscape… clowns may have enough character and humor to become the talking point of a room… Conversationals are also called novelty prints, for their easily identifiable images tend to be more vulnerable than neutral motifs to the public’s passing moods. An animal print of pandas, for example, may move in and out of fashion quite rapidly depending on how the zoo’s amorous couple are doing in the news at the time.”
− Textile Designs
BIRDS
Left (clockwise from top left):
DUCKS. France, 1886; roller-printed cotton; apparel yard goods
GAME BIRDS. England, c.1830; roller-printed cotton chintz; home furnishing yard goods
BIRDS BORDER. France, 1880-90; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
ROOSTERS. France, 1880-90; gouache on paper; for apparel yard goods
Right (clockwise from top left):
SPARROWS. France, 1930s-40s; roller-printed silk crepe; apparel yard goods
BIRDS on BRANCHES. France, 1930s; roller-printed silk crepe; apparel yard goods
PARROTS. England, c.1830; roller-printed cotton chintz; apparel yard goods
Chapter 4 - Ethnic (pages 392 + 393, and selected images)
“
…Ethnic fashions – meaning, in textile vocabulary any pattern or style with a foreign or exotic feeling – come and go in Western design. Their associations vary with the culture they imitate, but a common implicit theme is a withdrawal from our own technological world through an embrace of the forms of some older, often simpler (supposedly), and certainly less industrialized society.”
− Textile Designs
PAISLEY: BOTEH
Left top:
PAISLEY. France, c.1800-1810; gouache on paper, design for a scarf border
Left bottom:
PAISLEY. France, c.1800-1810; gouache on paper; design for a scarf border
PAISLEY. France, c.1800-1810; gouache on paper; design for a scarf border
Right top:
PAISLEY. France, c.1820-30; gouache on paper; design for a Turkey-red scarf
PAISLEY. France, c.1820; gouache on paper; design for a scarf field
PAISLEY. France, c.1800-1810; gouache on paper; design for a scarf border
Chapter 5 - Art Movements and Period Styles (pages 412 + 413, and selected images)
“
…Textile design, like any other art, or, indeed, any kind of creation at all, cannot help but reflect its time. To find a market, or even to be made in the first place, a pattern must somehow reflect the contemporary mood – even while it plays its part in creating that mood. Though a Renaissance-look print made in 1900 is certainly an imposter, it is no less genuine a response to the needs of its time than, say, an Art Nouveau print made in the same year. In fact, “look” patterns like these, embody the elements of wish fulfillment that fabric printing very democratically makes possible…the fabric designs of an era are like a gigantic book of dreams waiting for their Freud.”
− Textile Designs
ART DECO: FLORAL
Left:
LEAVES. France, 1920s-30s; pencil on paper, for home furnishing yard goods
LEAVES. France, 1930s; gouache on paper; design for a scarf
Right top:
ROSES. France, 1922; roller-printed cotton sateen; home furnishing yard goods
Right bottom:
FLORAL. France, 1930; roller-printed cotton sateen; home furnishing yard goods
All Images and Text on this website and in this book are copyrighted by Susan Meller.
Nothing may be reproduced in any medium (electronic or otherwise) without permission.
