The Eternal Pilgrim's Online Art Gallery: The Art of Alphonse Mucha. A selection of paintings by the Czech painter and designer, the best known exponent of the Art Nouveau movement, brought by BookSplendour, the Brisbane online sellers of rare used books and fine art.

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Alphonse (Alfons) Mucha (1860 - 1939)

Having had his application to study at the Prague Academy of Arts rejected, the Czech born Mucha journeyed to Vienna, where he attended an evening class in drawing, and later to Munich, where between 1885 - 87 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to Paris in the late 1880s. When in 1890 he held his first one man show in Paris he was able to display well over 400 works. Though for a while in Paris he shared studio with another of our favourite painters, Paul Gauguine, it soon became obvious that Mucha’s art will develop differently to that of his older companion. While Paris was at the grip of Impressionism and the budding Expressionism, Mucha obviously always saw himself more as a designer rather than an innovative artist. That is not to say that he was not original. His originality lies in the way he was able to marry the ornamental design with the figurative painting, creating something that in his time was referred to as “Le Style Mucha”, before it became known as Art Nouveau (Mucha himself did not like the term, insisting that art was eternal and therefore could not be new).

Mucha's art, when he was at the peak of his creative powers around 1900, above all else is an apotheoses of womanhood. While his women are always extremely beautiful and often even voluptuous, one would hesitate to say that the artist saw them as “sex objects”, to use the present-day terminology. While their femininity is always strongly accentuated, there is something about them, perhaps their innocence, that reminds one of the idealistic Pre-Raphaelite painters.

There is something else that lies underneath Mucha’s art. Not looking much for inspiration in the works of his contemporaries, nevertheless he could not escape the influence of the occult revival that had hit Paris just before his arrival. It was to inspire not only the visual artists of his and the next generation, but perhaps even more so the people in other fields of art, such as musical composers, architects, etc. Almost everything in Mucha’s art is about cycles, which to him are closely associated with the evolution of the human spirit.

The theatre posters that he designed for Sara Bernhardt for the play Gismonda became a sensation in Paris in December 1894. Virtually overnight, Mucha found himself famous.

In 1900, when the World Fair was held in Paris, Mucha received the prestigious commission to decorate the Austrian pavilion. Mucha stayed in Paris till 1906, when he went for several years to America, where he taught art at New York and Chicago. After 1910 he lived more or less permanently in Prague, but frequently travelled to America.

Mucha was a very versatile artist. He worked on advertisements for various products and on ornamental panels, he had his hand in architectural design, he made a large number of book illustrations, he designed jewellery, he even made some sculptures. From the age of 50 or so, after returning to his homeland, he became much preoccupied with an enormous project he named the Slav Epic, a cycle of monumental paintings illustrating the history of the Slavs, on which he worked intermittently until his death.

   Mucha in front of the Sarah Bernhardt poster.        A woman moddeling for Mucha.

Incidentally, the name Mucha (or moucha) in Czech means the fly. A fly on the wall... these pictures certainly could evoke such an image in one's mind... And one more thing: Mucha's name is nearly always mispronounced. The French are mainly to blame for this. Properly, the "ch" in his name should sound close to how the Scots would pronounce the "ch" in Loch Ness.

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