Alphonse Mucha
Alphonse Mucha was an Art Nouveau painter. He was born on July 24th, 1860, in Ivančice, Moravia (Czech Republic) and he died on July 14th, 1939 in Prague, Czech Republic.
Synopsis
Mucha was famous for his commercial posters, which had a wide audience, but he also worked in a variety of other media, including furniture, jewelry, and theatrical sets. He mostly worked in Vienna and Paris, but was also in Chicago, where he taught at the Art Institute, from 1904 to 1910. There, he introduced his interpretation of the "new art" to a United States audience. The densely patterned posters epitomize the Art Nouveau interest in natural forms, decoration, and a rejection of the anonymity of mechanical production.
Key Ideas
Women were a common theme in Mucha's work (and in Art Nouveau art in general). The femme nouvelle or "new woman" type was a favorite subject, since it served both allegorical and decorative purposes. Indeed, Mucha and his peers celebrated femininity as the antidote to an overly-industrialized, impersonal, "masculine" world.
Mucha worked in a variety of media that were accessible to a wide audience, and so the reach of his art extended beyond the borders of "high art." Everything could be a work of art, encompassing a person's daily experience, from wallpaper to furniture to clothing to promotional posters around the city.
Although Mucha is most associated with his Art Nouveau posters, he spent the latter of half of his career focused on projects of a nationalist character. Stirred by a pride in his country and an interest in its artistic traditions, Mucha sought to celebrate the history and mores of Czech culture.
Biography
Childhood and Education
Mucha was raised in the shadow of two powerful cultural forces: The Catholic Church and the Slav's desire for independence from the Austrian Empire. Excited by light and color, Mucha's earliest memory was of Christmas tree lights. A baroque fresco in his local church piqued his interest in art, and he moved to Vienna, where he took an apprenticeship as a stage set painter. Surrounded by the explosion of art in the Austrian capital, he learned of and greatly admired the work of Hans Makart, among others.
To make a living he executed portrait commissions. This led him to an important mentor, Count Khuen-Belasi, who hired him to paint murals in Emmahof Castle. Mucha's own poverty and popularity was brought into sharper clarity while he worked in the castle. His poverty was such that his one and only pair of trousers grew so shabby that a group of society girls bought him a new pair. Count Khuen-Belasi paid for Mucha's training in fine art in Munich, where he continued to work as an illustrator, most notably for Krokodil magazine, where he developed his distinctive calligraphic style.
By 1887, he was in Paris studying at the Academie Julian and Academie Colarossi. Here, artists such as Vuillard and Bonnard were becoming prominent. Along with these artists came new ideas about what art could do. Art came to be seen as a pursuit that that could reveal greater mysteries, and as something to incorporate into everyday life and objects. These ideas began to develop into what would become the Art Nouveau conception of art in daily life.
Early Training
Mucha scraped together a living illustrating magazines and advertisements. He and Paul Gauguin shared a studio on the Rue Grande Chaumiere. Mucha rigged the studio so that when the door opened beautiful music played. An interviewer in 1900 called the studio, "simply marvelous." It was full of exotic objects and bohemian writers, artists, and musicians who came to work and play. An infamous photograph of Gauguin playing the Harmonium with no trousers on captures the playful and free-spirited mood of their studio. It was here that Mucha first explored his interest in the occult with August Strindberg, and engaged in hypnotic and psychic experiments with Albert de Rochas and the astronomer Camille Flammarion.
Legacy
Under Nazi occupation the Slav Epic was hidden underground, and under Communism his art continued to be viewed as decadent and bourgeois and did not receive public display. His son Jiri Mucha, devoted much of his life to reviving his father's reputation. The 1960s Art Nouveau revival saw Mucha's style much-copied on British posters for Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band. And in the USA, one poster for a 1966 San Francisco 'happening' was a direct copy of Mucha's Job Cigarette Paper (1896). Mucha has also been acknowledged as an influence by the Stuckist painter Paul Harvey and also on cartoon and fantasy art, as that of Japanese Manga artists like Naoko Takeuchi.
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Quotes by Alphonse Mucha
To talk in my own way to the spirit of the nation, to its eyes which carry thoughts most quickly to the consciousness.
The purpose of my work was never to destroy but always to create, to construct bridges, because we must live in the hope that humankind will draw together and that the better we understand each other the easier this will become.
I was happy to be involved in an art for the people and not for private drawing rooms. It was inexpensive, accessible to the general public, and it found a home in poor families as well as in more affluent circles.
Every nation has a palladium of its own embodying past and future history. Ever since my boyhood I felt and saw in the architectural lines of St. Vitus Cathedral built so close to the castle, a powerful interpretation of our national symbol.
His art is a sumptuous art, floral, astral, feminine; it reflects with tender nonchalance the fluid beauty of form and the delicately veiled secrets of the soul.
Art exists only to communicate a spiritual message.
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Paintings by Alphonse Mucha
