Wallpaper design

Asarum, a genus of flowering plants, native mainly to Eastern Asia, was Preissig’s inspiration for one of his first wallpaper designs, which he created in 1898 during his Paris sojourn. That same year, the design won a competition announced by the Volné směry art magazine. The highly stylised foliate tendrils and geometric flower forms herald Preissig’s treatment of ornament, which he arrived at through the study of organic details and their progressive abstraction all the way to elementary forms. Asarum presaged a large series of wallpaperdesigns from 1900–1903. (Most of them are kept in UPM, fragments are in the holdings of the Museum of National Literature and the National Gallery in Prague.) Together with his endpaper designs, this sheet attests to the outcome of Preissig’s endeavours to develop a comprehensive system of ornamentation.