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| Mucha,selfportrait |
Alfons Maria Mucha 24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939, known internationally as
Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator and graphic artist, living in Paris during the Art Noveau period, best known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters . His illustrations, decorative panels, and
designs, became among the best-known images of the period.
Alphonse Mucha was born in the small town of Ivancíce in Moravia, now a region of the Czech republic. He showed an early talent for drawing. His father was a court usher, his mother a miller's daughter. In 1871 Mucha became a chorister at the cathedral of
Brno, where he received his secondary school education. His singing abilities allowed him to continue his musical education at the Gymnázium Brno in the Moravian capital of Brno, but his true ambition was to become an artist, and in 1878
he applied without success to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, but
was rejected and advised "to find a different career".
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| The Slav Epic. King Premysl Ottokar of Bohemia |
In 1880 he travelled to Vienna and found employment as a scenery painter for Vienna theaters. Here he
discovered the museums, churches, palaces and especially theaters and also Hans Makart, who created murals for
palaces and government buildings in Vienna. His style turned
Mucha in that artistic direction and influenced his later work. He also began experimenting with photography, which became an important tool in his later work.
Later in 1881 he went by train to Mikulov in southern Moravia, and began making portraits, decorative art and lettering for tombstones.
His work was appreciated, and he was commissioned by Count Eduard
Khuen Belasi, a local landlord and nobleman, to paint a series of murals
for his residence at Emmahof Castle, and at his ancestral home in
the Tyrol,
Gandegg Castle. The paintings at Emmahof were destroyed by fire in
1948, but his early versions in small format exist and are now on display at
the museum in Brno. He showed his skill at mythological themes, the
female form, and lush vegetal decoration.
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From Museum in
Prague |
Count Belasi decided to bring Mucha to Munich for formal training, and paid his tuition and cost of living at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He moved there in September 1885. He became friends with a number of notable Slavic artists there, including
the Czechs Karel Vitezslav Masek, Ludek Marold and the Russian Leonid Pasternak, father of the famous novellist Boris Pasternak. He founded a Czech students' club, and contributed political
illustrations to nationalist publications in Prague. In 1886 he received
a notable commission for a painting of the Czech patron Saints Cyril and Methodius, from a group of Czech emigrants, including some of his relatives, who had founded a Roman Catholic church in the town of Oisek, North Dakota. He was happy with the artistic environment of Munich, but found he could not remain there forever; the Bavarian
authorities imposed increasing restrictions upon foreign students and
residents. With Count Belasi's financial support, he decided in 1887 to move to
Paris.In Paris, in 1888, he enrolled in the Academie Julian - and the following year, 1889, Academie Colarossi. His first professors at the Academie Julian were Jules Lefebre, who specialized in female nudes and allegorical paintings, and Jean Paul Laurens, whose specialties were historical and religious paintings in a realistic and dramatic style. At the end of 1889, as he approached the age of thirty, his patron,
Count Belasi, decided that Mucha had received enough education and ended
his subsidies.
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| Museum: Prophetess |
In Paris, Mucha found shelter with the help of
the large Slavic community. He lived in a boarding house called the
Crémerie at 13 rue de la Grand Chaumerie, whose owner, Charlotte Caron,
was famous for sheltering struggling artists; when needed she accepted
paintings or drawings in place of rent. Mucha decided to follow the
path of another Czech painter he knew from Munich, Ludek Marold,
who had made a successful career as an illustrator for magazines. In
1890 and 1891, he began providing illustrations for the weekly magazine
La Vie popular, which published novels in weekly segments. His illustration for a novel by Guy de Maupassant, called
The Useless Beauty, was on the cover of the 22 May 1890 edition.
His illustrations began to give him a regular income. He was able to buy a harmonium to continue his musical interests and a camera, which used
glass-plate negatives. He took pictures of himself and his friends, and
also regularly used it to compose his drawings. He became friends with Paul Gauguin, and shared a studio with him for a time when Gauguin returned from Tahiti in the summer of 1893. In late autumn 1894 he also became friends with the playwright August Strindberg, with whom he had a common interest in philosophy and mysticism. Four of his illustrations, including one depicting the death of Frederic Barbarossa, were chosen for display at the 1894 Paris Salon of Artists. He received a medal of honor, his first official recognition.
At the end of 1894 his career took a dramatic and unexpected turn when he began to work for French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt.
As Mucha later described it, on 26 December Bernhardt made a telephone
call to Maurice de Brunhoff, the manager of the publishing firm
Lemercier which printed her theatrical posters, ordering a new poster
for the continuation of the play Gismonda. The play, by Victorien Sardou, had already opened with great success on 31 October 1894 at the Theatre de la Renaissance,
on the Boulevard Saint-Martin. Bernardt decided to have a poster made
to advertise the prolongation of the theatrical run after the Christmas
break and insisting it be ready by 1 January 1897.
When Bernhardt called, Mucha happened to be at the publishing
house correcting proofs. He already had experience painting Bernhardt;
he had made a series of illustrations of her performing in
Cleopatra for
Costume au Théâtre in 1890. When
Gismonda opened in October 1894, Mucha had been commissioned by the magazine
Le Gaulois
to make a series of illustrations of Bernhardt in the role for a
special Christmas supplement, which was published at Christmas 1894, for
the high price of fifty centimes a copy.
Brunhoff asked Mucha to quickly design the new poster for
Bernhardt. The poster was more than life-size; a little more than two
meters high, with Bernhardt in the costume of a Byzantine noblewoman,
dressed in an orchid headdress and floral stole, and holding a palm
branch in the Easter procession near the end of the play. One of the
innovative features of the posters was the ornate rainbow-shaped arch
behind the head, almost like a halo, which focused attention on her
face; this feature appeared in all of his future theater posters.
Probably because of a shortage of time, some areas of the background
were left blank instead of his usual decoration. The only background
decoration were the Byzantine
mosaic tiles behind her head. The poster featured extremely fine
draftsmanship and delicate pastel colors, unlike the typical
brightly-colored posters of the time. The top of the poster, with the
title, was richly composed and ornamented, and balanced the bottom,
where the essential information was given in the shortest possible form;
just the name of the theater.
The poster appeared on the streets of Paris on 1 January 1895 and
caused an immediate sensation. Bernhardt was pleased by the reaction;
she ordered four thousand copies of the poster in 1895 and 1896, and
gave Mucha a six-year contract to produce more. With his posters all
over the city, Mucha found himself famous quite suddenly.
Following
Gismonda, Bernardt switched to a different
printer, F. Champenois, who, like Mucha, was
put under contract to work
for Bernhardt for six years. Champenois had a large printing house on
Boulevard Saint Michel which employed three hundred workers, with twenty
steam presses. He gave Mucha a generous monthly salary in exchange for
the rights to publish all his works. With his increased income, Mucha
was able to move to a three-bedroom apartment with a large studio inside
a large historic house at 6 rue du Val-de-Grace originally built by Francois Mansart.
Mucha designed posters for each successive Bernhardt play, beginning with a reprise of one of her
La Tosca.
In addition to posters, he designed theatrical programs, sets,
costumes, and jewelry for Bernhardt. The enterprising Bernhardt set
aside a certain number of printed posters of each play to sell to
collectors.
Early great successes, la Dame aux Camelias (September 1896), followed by Lorenzaccio (1896); Medea (1898);la Tosca (1898) and Hamlet (1899).
The
success of the Bernhardt posters brought Mucha commissions for
advertising posters. He designed posters for JOB cigarette papers,
Ruinart Champagne, Lefèvre-Utile biscuits, Nestlé baby food, Idéal
Chocolate, the Beers of the Meuse, Moët-Chandon champagne, Trappestine
brandy, and Waverly and Perfect bicycles. With Champenois, he also created a new kind of product, a decorative
panel, a poster without text, purely for decoration. They were published
in large print runs for a modest price. The first series was
The Seasons,
published in 1896, depicting four different women in extremely
decorative floral settings representing the seasons of the year. In 1897
he produced an individual decorative panel of a young woman in a floral
setting, called
Reverie, for Champenois.
He also designed a
calendar with a woman's head surrounded by the signs of the zodiac.
The Seasons series was followed by
The Flowers The Arts (1898),
The Times of Day (1899),
Precious Stones (1900), and
The Moon and the Stars (1902).
Between 1896 and 1904 Mucha created over one hundred poster designs
for Champenois. These were sold in various formats, ranging from
expensive versions printed on Japanese paper or vellum, to less
expensive versions which combined multiple images, to calendars and
postcards. His posters focused almost entirely on beautiful women in lavish
settings with their hair usually curling in arabesque forms and filling
the frame.
His poster for the railway line between Paris and
Monaco-Monte-Carlo (1897) did not show a train or any identifiable scene
of Monaco or Monte-Carlo; it showed a beautiful young woman in a kind
of reverie, surrounded by swirling floral images, which suggested the
turning wheels of a train.
The magazine
La Plume
made a special edition devoted to his work, and his exhibition traveled
to Vienna, Prague, Munich, Brussels, London, and New York, giving him
an international reputation.
The Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, famous as the first grand showcase of the Art Noveau,
gave Mucha an opportunity to move in an entirely different direction,
toward the large-scale historical paintings which he had admired in
Vienna. It also allowed him to express his Czech patriotism. His
foreign name had caused much speculation in the French press, which
distressed him. Sarah Bernhardt stood up on his behalf, declaring in
La France that Mucha was "a Czech from Moravia not only by birth and origin, but also by feeling, by conviction and by patriotism."
He applied to the Austrian government and received a commission to create murals for the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina
at the Exposition.
The temporary building built for the Exposition had three large halls
with two levels, with a ceiling more than twelve meters high, and with
natural light from skylights. His experience in theater decoration gave
him the ability to paint large-scale paintings in a short period of
time.
Mucha's original concept was a group of murals depicting the
suffering of the Slavic inhabitants of the region caused by the
occupation by foreign powers. The sponsors of the exhibit, the Austrian
government, the new occupier of the region, declared that this was a
little pessimistic for a World's Fair. He changed his project to depict a
future society in the Balkans where Catholic and Orthodox Christians
and Muslims lived in harmony together; this was accepted, and he began
work. Mucha immediately departed for the Balkans to make sketches of
Balkan costumes, ceremonies and architecture which he put into his new
work. His decoration included one large allegorical painting,
Bosnia Offers Her Products to the Universal Exposition,
plus an additional set of murals on three walls, showing the history
and cultural development of the region. He did discreetly include some
images of the sufferings of the Bosnians under foreign rule which appear
in the arched band at the top of the mural
.
As he had done with his theater work, he often took photographs of
posed models, and painted from them, simplifying the forms. While the
work depicted dramatic events, the overall impression given by the work
was one of serenity and harmony. In addition to the murals, Mucha also designed a menu for the restaurant of the Bosnia Pavilion. His work appeared in many forms at the Exposition. He designed
the posters for the official Austrian participation in the Exposition,
the menu for the restaurant at the Bosnian pavilion, and menu for the
official opening banquet. He produced displays for the jeweler Georges Fouquet and the perfume maker Houbigant,
with statuettes and panels of women depicting the scents of rose,
orange blossom, violet and buttercup. His more serious art works,
including his drawings for
Le Pater, were shown in the Austrian Pavilion and in the Austrian section of the grand palais.
His work at the Exposition earned him the title of Knight of the
Order of Franz Joseph I from the Austrian government, the Legion of
Honor from the French Government. During the course of the Exposition,
Mucha proposed another unusual project. The Government of France
planned to take down the Eiffel Tower,
built especially for the Exposition, as soon as the Exposition ended.
Mucha proposed that, after the Exposition, the top of the tower should
be replaced by a sculptural monument to humanity be constructed on the
pedestal. The tower proved to be popular with both tourists and
Parisians, and the Eiffel Tower remained after the Exhibit end.
Mucha's many interests included jewelry. His 1902 book,
Documents Decoratifs,
contained plates of elaborate designs for brooches and other pieces,
with swirling arabesques and vegetal forms, with incrustations of enamel
and colored stones. In 1899 he collaborated with the jeweler Georges Fouquet
to make a bracelet for Sarah Bernhardt in the form of a serpent, made
of gold and enamel, similar to the costume jewelry Bernhardt wore in
Medea.
The Cascade pendant designed for Fouquet by Mucha )1900) is in the
form of a waterfall, composed of gold, enamel, opals, tiny diamonds,
paillons, and a
barocco or misshapen pearl.
After the 1900
Exposition, Fouquet decided to open a new shop at 6 Rue Royale, across
the street from the restaurant Maxim's. He asked Mucha to design the
interior. The centerpieces of the design were two peacocks, the traditional
symbol of luxury, made of bronze and wood with colored glass
decoration. To the side was a shell-shaped fountain, with three
gargoyles spouting water into basins, surrounding the statue of a nude
woman. The salon was further decorated with carved moldings and stained
glass, thin columents with vegetal designs, and a ceiling with molded
floral and vegetal elements. It marked a summit of Art Nouveau
decoration. The Salon opened in 1901, just as tastes were beginning to
change, moving away from Art Nouveau to more naturalistic patterns. It
was taken apart in 1923, and replaced by a more traditional shop
design. Fortunately most of the original decoration was preserved, and
was donated in 1914 and 1949 to the carnavalet museum in Paris, where it can be seen today.
Mucha's next project was a series of seventy-two printed plates of watercolors of designs, titled
Documents Decoratifs,
which were published in 1902 by the Librarie central des beaux-arts.
They represented ways that floral, vegetal and natural forms could be
used in decoration and decorative objects. In about 1900 he had begun
to teach at the Academy Colarossi,
where he himself had been a student when he first arrived in Paris.
In
March 1904 he sailed for New York and the beginning of his first visit to
the United States. His intent was to find funding for his grand project,
The Slav Epic, which he had conceived during the 1900 Exposition.
He had letters of introduction from Baroness Salomon de Rothschild.
When he landed in New York, he was already a celebrity in the United
States; his posters had been widely displayed during Sarah Bernhardt's
annual American tours since 1896. He rented a studio near Central Park, made portraits, and gave interviews and lectures. . At one Pan-Slavic banquet
in New York City, he met Charles Richard Crane, who commissioned Mucha to make a portrait of his daughter in a
traditional Slavic style, and he shared Mucha's enthusiasm
for a series of monumental paintings on Slavic history. He became
Mucha's most important patron. When Mucha designed the Czechoslovak bills, he used his portrait of Crane's daughter as the model for Slavia for the 100 koruna bill.
He still had commissions to complete in France, and returned to
Paris at the end of May 1904. In 1906, he returned
to New York with his new wife, (Marie/Maria) Chytilová, whom he had
married on 10 June 1906, in Prague. He remained in the U.S. until 1909.
Their first child, Jaroslava, was born in New York in 1909. His principal income in the United States came from teaching; he
taught illustration and design at the New York School of Applied Design
for Women, at the Philadelphia School of Art for five weeks, and became a
visiting professor at the Art institute of Chicago.
In 1908 he also undertook one large decoration project, for the
interior of the German Theater of New York; he produced three large
allegorical murals, in the Art Nouveau style, representing Tragedy,
Comedy and Truth. Besides the decoration, he made graphic designs, stage
and costume designs.
Artistically, the trip was not a success; portrait painting was
not his strong point, and the German Theater closed in 1909, one year
after it opened. He made posters for the American actress mrs Leslie Carter (known as 'The American Sarah Bernhardt') and the Broadway star Maude Adams,
but they were largely echoes of his Bernhardt posters. His finest work
in America is often considered to be his portrait of Josephine Crane
Bradley, the daughter of his patron, in the character of Slavia, in
Slavic costume and surrounded by symbols from Slavic folklore and art.
His contact with Crane made possible his most ambitious artistic
project, the Slav Epic.
Mucha made a considerable income from his theatrical and advertising
work, but he wished even more to be recognized as a serious artist and
philosopher. He was a devoted Catholic, but also was interested in
mysticism. In January 1898 he joined the Paris masonic lodge of the
Grand Orient de France. . The
Pater Noster (Lord's Prayer): why not give the words a pictorial expression?". He
considered
Le Pater to be his printed masterpiece, and referred to it in the New York Sun of 5 January 1900 as a work into which he had "put his soul".
In the second part of his career, at the age of 43, he returned
to his homeland of Bohemia-Moravia region in Austria and devoted himself
to painting a series of twenty monumental canvases known as The Slav Epic, depicting the history of all the slavic peoples of the world,
which he painted between 1912 and 1926. In 1928, on the 10th
anniversary of the independence of Czechoslovakia, he presented the
series to the Czech nation. He considered it his most important work.
It is now on display in Brno.
During his long stay in Paris, Mucha had never given up his dream of
being a history painter, and to illustrate accomplishments of the Slavic
peoples of Europe. He completed his plans for the Slav Epic in 1908
and 1909, and in February 1910, Charles Crane agreed to fund the
project. In 1909, he had been offered a commission to paint murals on
the interior of the new City Hall of Prague.
He made the decision to return to his old country, still then part of
the Austrian Empire.His first project in 1910 was the decoration of the reception room of the Mayor of Prague.
This quickly became controversial, because local Prague artists
resented the work being given to an artist they considered an outsider.
A compromise was reached, whereby he decorated the Lord Mayor's Hall,
while the other artists decorated the other rooms. He designed and
created a series of large-scale murals for the domed ceiling and walls
with athletic figures in heroic poses, depicting the contributions of
Slavs to European history over the centuries, and the theme of Slavic
unity. These paintings on the ceiling and walls were in sharp contrast
to his Parisian work, and were designed to send a patriotic message.
The Lord Mayor's Hall was finished in 1911, and Mucha was able to
devote his attention to what he considered his most important work;
"The Slav Epic", a series of large painting illustrating the
achievements of the Slavic peoples over history. The series had twenty
paintings, half devoted to the history of the Czechs, and ten to other
Slavic peoples. The canvases were enormous; the finished works measured
six by eight meters. To paint them he rented an apartment and a studio
in the Zbiroh Castle in western Bohemia, where he lived and worked
until 1928.
While living in Paris Mucha had imagined the series as "light
shining into the souls of all people with its clear ideals and burning
warnings." To prepare the project he traveled to all the Slavic
countries, from Russia and Poland to the Balkans, making sketches and
taking photographs. He used costumed models and still and motion picture
cameras to set the scenes, often encouraging the models to create their
own poses. He used egg tempera paint, which, according to his research,
was quicker-drying and more luminous, and would last longer.
He created the twenty canvases between 1912 and 1926. He worked throughout the First World War,
when the Austrian Empire was at war with France, despite wartime
restrictions, which made canvas hard to obtain. He continued his work
after the war ended, when the new Republic of Czechoslovkia was created.
The cycle was completed in 1928 in time for the tenth anniversary of
the proclamation of the Czechoslovak Republic.
Under the conditions of his contract he donated his work to the
city of Prague in 1928. The Epic was shown in Prague twice in his
lifetime, in 1919 and 1928. After 1928 it was rolled up and put into
storage. From 1963 until 2012 the series was on display in the chateau in Moravsky Krumlov in the South Moravian region in the Czech Republic. Since 2012 the series has been on display at the National Gallery's Veletrzni Palace in Prague.
While he was working on the Slavic Epic, he also did work for the Czech government. In 1918, he
Jeu de Paume museum, with 139 works, including three canvases from the Slav Epic.
Hitler and Nazi Germany
began to threaten Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Mucha began work on a
new series, a triptych depicting the Age of Reason, the Age of Wisdom
and the Age of Love, which he worked on from 1936 to 1938, but never
completed. On 15 March 1939, the German army paraded through Prague, and
Hitler, at Prague castle, declared lands of the former Czechoslovakia
to be part of the Greater German Reich as the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . Mucha's role as a Slav nationalist and freemason made him a prime target.
He was arrested, interrogated for several days, and released. By then
his health was broken. He contracted pneumonia and died on 14 July
1939, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. Though public gatherings were banned, a huge crowd attended his interment in the slavin Monument of Vysehrad cemetery, reserved for notable figures in Czech culture.
Mucha was and remains best known for his Art Noveau work, which frustrated him. According to his son and biographer, Jiri Mucha , he did not think much of Art Nouveau. "What is it,
Art Nouveau?" he asked. "...Art can never be new." He took the greatest pride in his work as a history painter.
Although it enjoys great popularity today, at the time of his death Mucha's style was considered outdated. His son, author Jiri Mucha,
devoted much of his life to writing about him and bringing attention to
his artwork. In his own country, the new authorities were not
interested in Mucha.
The Slav Epic was rolled and stored for twenty-five years before being shown in Moravský Krumlov. The National Gallery in Prague now displays the Slav Epic, and has the major collection of his work.
Mucha is also credited with restoring the movement of Czech Freemasonry.
One of the largest collections of Mucha's works is in the possession of former world no.1 professional tennis player Ivan Lendl,
who started collecting his works upon meeting Jiří Mucha in 1982. His
collection was exhibited publicly for the first time in 2013 in Prague.
