?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
ALPHONSE MUCHA (1860-1939) SALON DES CENTS / XXEME EXPOSITION. 1896. 25x17 inches. F. Champenois, Paris. Condition A. Matted and framed. This poster represents the start of a long collaboration between Mucha and La Plume, the influential magazine with the associated exhibition hall that played such a prominent role in the poster scene in fin-de-siècle Paris. One year after he designed this poster, the magazine dedicated an entire issue to Mucha and gave him a one-man show. While Mucha was designing this poster, Leon Deschamps, La Plume's publisher, went to visit the artist at his studio. Deschamps recalls that the poster design he saw at that time featured "a half-nude woman, her inclined head resting nonchalantly on one hand, her golden hair curling like a halo in rich arabesques - those famous 'macaroni' which tomorrow would be celebrated and copied by all the apes of art -- a divine languor lingering over the clean outlines of her face, the whole emanating an indefinable charm." Mucha protested that the poster wasn't finished but Deschamps, self-aggrandizingly insisted "print it as it is and you will produce a masterpiece of the illustrative decorative poster" (La Plume-Mucha Special Issue, 1897, p.4). Rennert / Weill 12.
