Art Nouveau Prints
Mucha's Paris panels and Klimt's Vienna gold: the whorled lines and flat ornament of the style that ruled Europe from 1890 to the First World War.
30 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
The new art
Art Nouveau took its name from a Paris gallery of 1895 and its forms from plants: tendrils, stems, the curve of hair and smoke. Alphonse Mucha, a Czech in Paris, defined the look with a poster for Sarah Bernhardt in January 1895 and then with the decorative panels, printed in colour lithography and sold in sets to hang in ordinary homes. In Vienna the Secession, founded in 1897 under Gustav Klimt, gave the style its gold leaf and its geometry.
The works in this collection
Mucha's great series: The Seasons, The Flowers, The Arts, The Times of the Day, The Precious Stones and The Moon and the Stars, together with the Zodiac, Reverie, the Byzantine Heads, Fruit and the Salon des Cent and Monaco Monte-Carlo posters. From Vienna, Klimt's The Kiss, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Emilie Flöge.
Hanging Mucha
The panels were designed as sets, and that is still how they look best: the four Seasons or the four Flowers in a row, matched frames, 12×18 or 16×24. The tall narrow panels, The Moon and the Stars, suit the exhibition-poster edition, which gives them a sheet to stand on. Klimt belongs anywhere gold does.