The Art Nouveau movement – the pursuit of “new art” – spread throughout Europe in the late 19th century as a reaction to conventional decorative orders and academic art, as well as to the social problems caused by rapid urbanization and over-industrialization. Many artists and designers looked to nature for inspiration; flowers and the intricate forms of plants and trees became the hallmarks of Art Nouveau. The influence of this movement was strongly manifested at the Paris World Exhibition of 1900 and also at the International Exhibition in Turin in 1902, where the style was also called the floral style (stile floreale), with many floral motifs in the architectural and design works presented at the exhibition.

Mucha, a poster maker in fin-de-siècle Paris, created an innovative graphic style that became known as “le style Mucha”. It was a compositional formula in which a graceful woman stands out, harmoniously arranged with flowers and other natural motifs, often placed in an architectural frame. Primarily refined for advertising posters, Mucha’s style evolved as a visual language for communicating with the wider public. Mucha later wrote: “External form is language […] Composition is speech”. In Mucha’s composition, then, the woman is the bearer of the artist’s message, while flowers and other natural motifs are meant to be “words” to be read by the audience. Exhibitions focusing on Mucha’s use of floral motifs explore Mucha’s floral worlds and their messages.

To illustrate the context of the use of floral motifs in the Art Nouveau style, all exhibitions within the Mucha Trail are accompanied by photographs of the facades of Art Nouveau buildings in Moravia and Slovakia by Professor Peter Schubert.

In Piešt’any, the exhibition is enriched by a special section devoted to Mucha’s connection to this internationally famous spa town in the early 1930s. The curator of the exhibition, Dr. Vladimír Krupa, presented a selection of rare archival documents and photographs of Mucha and his family, as well as a reproduction of Mucha’s painting Be Hailed, Blessed Well of Health (1932), the only large oil painting on a Slovak subject .