A Study of the Textile Art in its Relation to the Development of Form and Ornament | Page 9

care, producing designs of a more or
less pronounced geometric character. The work is a kind of embroidery,
the parts employed being of the nature of pendants.
These include numberless articles derived from nature and art. It will
suffice to present a few examples already at hand.
[Illustration: FIG. 312. Basket with pendent buckskin strands tipped
with bits of tin. Apache Indians--1/8.]
Fig. 312 illustrates a large, well made basket, the work of the Apache
Indians. It serves to indicate the method of employing tassels and
clustered pendants, which in this case consist of buckskin strings tipped
with conical bits of tin. The checker pattern is in color.
[Illustration: FIG. 313. Basket with pendants of beads and bits of shell,
work of the northwest coast Indians.--1/4.]
Fig. 313 illustrates the use of other varieties of pendants. A feather
decked basket made by the northwest coast Indians is embellished with
pendent ornaments consisting of strings of beads tipped with bits of
bright shell. The importance of this class of work in higher forms of
textiles may be illustrated by an example from Peru. It is probable that
American art has produced few examples of tasseled work more
wonderful than that of which a fragment is shown in Fig. 314. It is a
fringed mantle, three feet in length and nearly the same in depth,
obtained from an ancient tomb. The body is made up of separately
woven bands, upon which disk-like and semilunar figures representing
human faces are stitched, covering the surface in horizontal rows. To
the center of these rosette-like parts clusters of tassels of varying sizes

are attached. The fringe, which is twenty inches deep, is composed
entirely of long strings of tassels, the larger tassels supporting clusters
of smaller ones. There are upwards of three thousand tassels, the round
heads of which are in many cases woven in colors, ridges, and nodes to
represent the human features. The general color of the garment, which
is of fine, silky wool, is a rich crimson. The illustration can convey
only a hint of the complexity and beauty of the original.
[Illustration: FIG. 314. Tassel ornamentation from an ancient Peruvian
mantle.]
We have now seen how varied and how striking are the surface
characters of fabrics as expressed by the third dimension, by variation
from a flat, featureless surface, and how all, essential and ornamental,
are governed by the laws of geometric combination. We shall now see
how these are related to color phenomena.
COLOR PHENOMENA.
Ordinary features.--In describing the constructive characters of fabrics
and the attendant surface phenomena, I called attention to the fact that a
greater part of the design manifested is enforced and supplemented by
color, which gives new meaning to every feature. Color elements are
present in the art from its very inception, and many simple patterns
appear as accidents of textile aggregation long before the weaver or the
possessor recognizes them as pleasing to the eye. When, finally, they
are so recognized and a desire for greater elaboration springs up, the
textile construction lends itself readily to the new office and under the
esthetic forces brings about wonderful results without interfering in the
least with the technical perfection of the articles embellished. But color
is not confined to the mere emphasizing of figures already expressed in
relief. It is capable of advancing alone into new fields, producing
patterns and designs complex in arrangement and varied in hue, and
that, too, without altering the simple, monotonous succession of relievo
characters.
In color, as in relieved design, each species of constructive combination
gives rise to more or less distinct groups of decorative results, which

often become the distinguishing characteristics of the work of different
peoples and the progenitors of long lines of distinctions in national
decorative conceptions.
In addition to this apparently limitless capacity for expression, lovers of
textile illumination have the whole series of extraordinary resources
furnished by expedients not essential to ordinary construction, the
character and scope of which have been dwelt upon to some extent in
the preceding section.
I have already spoken of color in a general way, as to its necessary
presence in art, its artificial application to fabrics and fabric materials,
its symbolic characters, and its importance to esthetic progress. My
object in this section is to indicate the part it takes in textile design, its
methods of expression, the processes by which it advances in
elaboration, and the part it takes in all geometric decoration.
It will be necessary, in the first place, to examine briefly the normal
tendencies of color combination while still under the direct domination
of constructive elaboration. In the way of illustration, let us take first a
series of filaments, say in the natural color of the material, and pass
through them in the simplest interlaced style a second