Salon of the Hundred / Twentieth Exhibition

Alphonse Mucha’s poster advertises an art exhibition at the gallery of La Plume, the noted Parisian art and literary journal. Mucha seizes the viewer’s attention with his image of a woman, whose semi-nude body and mass of disheveled hair partially obscure the text. With eyes closed, chin cupped in her right hand, white sheet covering her lower torso and arm slung around the starred finial of her chair, this beauty strikes a revealing pose. In her left hand, she holds a plume pen and paintbrush, emblems of literature and art. Mucha’s ambition to join artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, James Ensor and Theophile Steinlen as a member of La Plume’s prestigious Hundred was realized with this poster, which Léon Deschamps, the journal’s publisher, proclaimed “a masterpiece.”