Painting

Mucha completed the four-panel series The Arts, comprising Painting, Poetry, Music and Dance, in 1898, at the peak of his celebrity in Paris. He had exploded onto the European poster scene in January 1895 with his lithograph for Sarah Bernhardt's Gismonda, commissioned almost by accident when no other artist was available at the printer during the Christmas holiday. The success of that sheet made him the most sought-after decorative designer in the French capital and led to a sustained collaboration with the printing house Champenois, which published The Arts series as decorative panels for the bourgeois interior. By 1898 Mucha had refined his vocabulary to its most confident expression: the whiplash organic contour, the circular mandorla behind the head, the mosaic-like border ornament, and the allegorical female figure posed with emblematic attributes. Painting carries her red flower as the painter's emblem of sensory beauty, the thing observed before it is transcribed onto canvas. The series circulated widely as chromolithographs and established the visual language of the Belle Epoque interior across Europe and North America, influencing graphic design, typography and architectural ornament well into the following decade.