Enchanting women, streaming hair, flowing fabrics - these are the attributes one associates with Alfons Mucha's artistic aeuvre.
Alfons Mucha was one of the most fascinating artistic personalities of the turn of the century. His work is indissolubly linked with the style whose name was at the same time its programme: Art Nouveau. In line with the new movement's demands for a comprehensiveness of design, Mucha paid homage to the ideal of artistic versatility. He was not only a painter and graphic artist, but also took an interest in sculpture, jewellery, interior decorating and utilitarian art. His particular talents, however, lay in decorative graphics. This was the basis of his fame, and remains so today.
Largely as a result of the already highly advanced reproduction techniques of the time, his posters, panneaux decoratifs, calendars, occasional prints, magazine titles and book illustrations reached an extremely broad public and attained enormous popularity. Above all, however, with their catchily decorative motifs, their inexhaustible abundance of ornamental pictorial elements, and the terseness of their cal-ligraphically drawn lines, these compositions had in them the strength to shape a style. As the typical embodiment of the artistic endeavours of the years around 1900, the "Style Mucha" became the pattern for a whole generation of graphic artists and draughtsmen. His hallmark was the idealized, stylized figure of the beautiful or girlishly graceful woman, loosely but inseparably framed in an ornamental system of flowers and foliage, symbols and arabesques. As this was one of the most widespread pictorial motifs of the turn of the century, the "Style Mucha" came for a while to be regarded as synonymous with the whole Art Nouveau movement.