Flower

Mucha created Flower in 1897 as part of the celebrated four-panel series The Flowers, which also includes Rose, Carnation, and Iris. The series arrived at the height of his productivity in Paris, in the years immediately following his overnight fame from the 1895 Sarah Bernhardt poster Gismonda. By 1897 Mucha had fully codified the visual grammar that would come to define Art nouveau: the byzantine halo-disc replaced by an arched architectural frame, the female figure as both subject and ornament, botanical motifs woven through hair and border alike, and a palette that married the chalky pastels of the lithographic stone to the jewelled saturation of stained glass. The Flowers series was among the most commercially successful decorative panels of the decade, reproduced widely across Europe and collected as interior furnishings by a bourgeois public newly convinced that affordable graphic art could be a legitimate form of domestic decoration. Mucha's contribution was to make the poster into a category of applied art, dissolving the boundary between the easel painting and the printed sheet, a position the Vienna Secession and the Glasgow Style would consolidate in the years that followed.