Winter

The artistic current known as "Art Noveau" emerged as a reaction to the academicism, eclecticism, and historicism of the XIX century architecture and decoration. It found inspiration in the asymmetrical forms of nature exposed in new creations full of movement that exploited the (then) new materials available.

Besides the well-known works of architecture and other decorative arts, the Art Noveau bloomed in a relatively new discipline, illustration and printing, sometimes used to market the incipient goods of consume of an industrialized society.

One of these new graphic artists, the Czech Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), became very well known for his illustrations, especially those made for theatre, opera, and also for commercial companies. In 1896, he created a new type of product based on his previous commercial illustrations. This new product consisted of large-scale prints without text that were sold for affordable prices and made in huge runs. The first series of these decorative prints was The Seasons, which depicted four different women with floral attires that represented the different seasons of the year. The aesthetic of these portrayals soon became a classic and an immortal influence that has been present in many artistic trends afterward.

Our bust, the fourth and last of a series of four on "The Seasons" subject, gets inspiration on these fantastic works and many other more from the same period. The fantastic sculpting and painting work by Pedro Fernández and Pepa Saavedra respectively has a certain ethereal and feminine look that suits perfectly the subject.