Crimson & Lemon & Violet

Crimson is the organic border — the deep vivid cool-red of the stylized organic borders that frame Mucha's most celebrated poster compositions. Mucha's poster borders (in the most celebrated series: the 'Seasons' series of 1896, the 'Precious Stones' series of 1900, the 'Times of Day' series of 1899, and the commercial posters for Nestlé's Food, Champenois, and Job cigarette papers) use a complex system of organic decorative frames — stylized plant forms, flowers, jewels, and geometric elements — that create the rich decorative border typical of the Art Nouveau style. The specific deep red-to-crimson in Mucha's borders appears most prominently in the poppy (Papaver somniferum) motifs — the crimson-to-scarlet poppy, a recurring botanical element in Mucha's most elaborate borders, creating the most vivid warm accent in the otherwise pale-to-violet palette. Lemon is the aura — the vivid pale lemon-yellow of the characteristic Mucha 'aura' or 'halo' — the large circular or semicircular field of pale golden light that appears behind or around the central female figure in virtually every Mucha poster. The Mucha aura ranges from a vivid warm gold in some works to a pale lemon-yellow in others, but its most characteristic quality is its luminosity — the aura is always the lightest and most luminous element of the composition, creating the maximum contrast with the more saturated and darker decorative border and figure. The Mucha aura derives from Byzantine and early Renaissance religious icon tradition — the gold nimbus (halo) of sacred figures — secularized and converted into a decorative device that creates the same luminous and spiritual quality without explicit religious content. Violet is the iris and wisteria — the vivid electric violet-to-deep-blue-violet of the iris (Iris germanica and related species) and the wisteria (Wisteria sinensis and Wisteria floribunda) that are the most characteristic botanical elements of the Art Nouveau and Mucha decorative vocabulary. The iris and wisteria were both extremely important botanical motifs in the Art Nouveau movement because of their specific visual qualities: both flowers have long, hanging or arching flower clusters that create the sinuous, flowing linear forms most characteristic of Art Nouveau design; both have a specific deep blue-violet color that creates the most dramatically cool accent in the warm Art Nouveau palette; and both have complex petal forms that allow extremely detailed botanical representation.