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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. For a while in Paris he shared studio with
another of our favourite painters, Paul
Gauguine. Though the two artists
had a great deal in common (for instance the desire to explore some of the
darker corners of occultism by attending spiritualistic séances), it
very soon became obvious that
Mucha’s art was going to develop quite 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 more of the
idealistic Pre-Raphaelite painters rather than Mucha's contemporary, the Viennese
painter Gustav
Klimt, whose portraits, while equally glamorous, are far
more sensuous.
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.
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, but the English speakers don't fall far
behind. Properly pronounced, the "ch" in his
name should sound close to how the Scots would pronounce the "ch" in
Loch Ness.
Mucha in front of the Sarah Bernhardt
poster
A woman modelling for Mucha
Go
to the gallery of Alphonse Mucha's art
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