Image: Alphonse Mucha, Monaco, Monte Carlo, 1897, color lithograph on paper, 29.25 x 42.25 inches.
The 2017 special exhibition season concludes with the Art Nouveau designs of Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939).
Drawn from one of the finest private collections of Mucha’s work in the United States, this exhibition features 75 works by the celebrated Czech master, whose varied, expressive, and seductive imagery helped form and later shape the aesthetics of French Art Nouveau at the turn of the 20th century. Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of the natural world, Art Nouveau influenced art and architecture, especially in graphic work and illustration, with its sinuous lines and whiplash curves. Through rare, original lithographs and proofs, paintings, drawings, and ephemera, this exhibition examines the broad range of Mucha’s work, largely created during the 1890s, at a time when the emphasis was on creating a new art fit for the new century.
