Alphonse Mucha

Alfons Maria Mucha (Czech: [ˈalfons ˈmuxa] ; 24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939), known in English as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylised and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, as well as designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.

In the second part of his career, at the age of 57, he returned to his homeland and devoted himself to a series of twenty monumental symbolist 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.

Mucha was born on 24 July 1860 in the small town of Ivančice in southern Moravia, then a province of the Austrian Empire (present-day a region of the Czech Republic). His family had a very modest income; his father Ondřej was a court usher, and his mother Amálie was a miller's daughter. Alphonse was the eldest of six children, all with names starting with "A".

Mucha showed an early talent for drawing; a local merchant impressed by his work gave him a gift of paper, at the time a luxury item. In the preschool period, he drew exclusively with his left hand. He had a talent for music: he was an alto singer and violin player. After completing Volksschule, he wanted to continue with his studies, but his family was not able to fund them, as they were already funding the studies of his three step-siblings.

His music teacher sent him to Pavel Křížkovský, choirmaster of St Thomas's Abbey in Brno, to be admitted to the choir and to have his studies funded by the monastery. Křížovský was impressed by his talent, but he was not able to admit and fund him, as he had just admitted another talented young musician, Leoš Janáček.

Křížovský sent him to a choirmaster of the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, who admitted him as a chorister and funded his studies at the gymnasium in Brno, where he received his secondary school education. After his voice broke, he gave up his chorister position, but played as a violinist during masses.

He became devoutly religious, and wrote later, "For me, the notions of painting, going to church, and music are so closely knit that often I cannot decide whether I like church for its music, or music for its place in the mystery which it accompanies." He grew up in an environment of intense Czech nationalism in all the arts, from music to literature and painting. He designed flyers and posters for patriotic rallies.

Count Belasi decided to bring Mucha to Munich for formal training, and paid his tuition fees and living expenses at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He moved there in September 1885. It is not clear how Mucha actually studied at the Munich Academy; there is no record of his being enrolled as a student there. However, he did become friends with a number of notable Slavic artists there, including the Czechs Karel Vítězslav Mašek and Ludek Marold and the Russian Leonid Pasternak, father of the famous poet and novelist 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 Pisek in the U.S. He was very happy with the artistic environment of Munich: he wrote to friends, "Here I am in my new element, painting. I cross all sorts of currents, but without effort, and even with joy. Here, for the first time, I can find the objectives to reach which used to seem inaccessible." However, he found he could not remain forever in Munich; the Bavarian authorities imposed increasing restrictions upon foreign students and residents. Count Belasi suggested that he travel either to Rome or to Paris. With Belasi's financial support, he decided in 1887 to move to Paris.

Mucha moved to Paris in 1888 where he enrolled in the Académie Julian and the following year, 1889, Académie Colarossi. The two schools taught a wide variety of different styles. His first professors at the Académie Julian were Jules Lefebvre who specialised 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.

When he arrived 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 Grande Chaumière, 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 populaire, which published novels in weekly segments. His illustration for a novel by Guy de Maupassant, called The Useless Beauty, was on the cover of 22 May 1890 edition. He also made illustrations for Le Petit Français illustré, which published stories for young people in both magazine and book form. For this magazine he provided dramatic scenes of battles and other historic events, including a cover illustration of a scene from the Franco-Prussian War which was on the cover of the 23 January 1892 edition.

His illustrations began to give him a regular income. He was able to buy a harmonium to continue his musical interests, and his first 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 common interests in philosophy and mysticism.

His magazine illustrations led to book illustration; he was commissioned to provide illustrations for Scenes and Episodes of German History by the historian Charles Seignobos. 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 honour, his first official recognition.

Mucha added another important client in the early 1890s; the Central Library of Fine Arts, which specialised in the publication of books about art, architecture, and the decorative arts. It later launched a new magazine in 1897 called Art et Decoration, which played an early and important role in publicising the Art Nouveau style. Mucha continued to publish illustrations for his other clients, including for a children's book of poetry by Eugène Manuel and for a magazine of the theatre arts called La Costume au théâtre.

At the end of 1894, Mucha's career took a dramatic and unexpected turn when he began to work for the 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 Théâtre de la Renaissance on the Boulevard Saint-Martin. Bernhardt decided to have a poster made to advertise the prolongation of the theatrical run after the Christmas break, insisting it be ready by 1 January 1895. Because of the holidays, none of the regular Lemercier artists was available.

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 Le 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 per 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 a floral stole, and holding a palm branch in the Easter procession near the end of the play. One of the innovative features of the poster 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 Mucha's future theatre posters. Probably because of a shortage of time, some areas of the background were left blank, without his usual decoration. The only background decoration was the Byzantine mosaic tiles behind her head. The poster featured extremely fine draftsmanship and delicate pastel colours, unlike the typical brightly coloured 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 theatre.

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 quite suddenly famous.

Following Gismonda, Bernhardt 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 that 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-Grâce originally built by François Mansart.

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, La Trappistine brandy, and Waverly and Perfect bicycles. 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.

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 (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 Rêverie, for Champenois. He also designed a calendar with a woman's head surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. The rights were resold to Léon Deschamps, the editor of the arts review La Plume, who brought it out with great success in 1897. The Seasons (1896) series was followed by The Flowers (1898), 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.

The fame of his posters led to success in the art world; he was invited by Deschamps to show his work in the Salon des Cent exhibition in 1896, and then, in 1897, to have a major retrospective in the same gallery showing 448 works. The magazine La Plume made a special edition devoted to his work, and his exhibition travelled to Vienna, Prague, Munich, Brussels, London, and New York, giving him an international reputation.

Mucha made a considerable income from his theatrical and advertising work, but he wished even more to be recognised 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. Shortly before the 1900 Exposition Universelle, as he wrote in his memoirs, "I had not found any real satisfaction in my old kind of work. I saw that my way was to be found elsewhere, little bit higher. I sought a way to spread the light which reached further into even the darkest corners. I didn't have to look for very long. The Pater Noster (Lord's Prayer): why not give the words a pictorial expression?". He approached his publisher, Henri Piazza, and proposed the book, in these words: "First a cover page with symbolist ornament; then the same ornament developed in a kind a variation on each line of the prayer; a page explaining each line in a calligraphic form; and a page rendering the idea of each line in the form of an image."

Le Pater was published on 20 December 1899, only 510 copies were printed. The original watercolour paintings of the page were displayed in the Austrian pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. 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". Critic Charles Masson, who reviewed it for Art et Decoration, wrote: "There is in that man a visionary; it is the work of an imagination not suspected by those who only know his talent for the agreeable and charming."

The Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, famous as the first grand showcase of the Art Nouveau, 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 & Herzegovina (then under Austro-Hungarian rule) at the Exposition. This pavilion displayed examples of industry, agriculture, and culture of these provinces, which in 1878, by the Treaty of Berlin, had been taken away from Turkey and put under the tutorship of Austria. 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. Mucha's experience in theatre 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, and 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 theatre work, he often took photographs of posed models and painted from them, simplifying the forms. Whereas the work depicted dramatic events, the overall impression that it gave was one of serenity and harmony. In addition to the murals, Mucha also designed a menu for the restaurant of the Bosnia & Herzegovina Pavilion.

His work appeared in many forms at the Exposition. Besides the posters for the official Austrian participation in the Exposition and the menu for the restaurant at the Bosnian pavilion and for the official opening banquet, he also produced displays for the jeweller 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 artworks, 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 from the Austrian government, and he was named to the Legion of Honour by the French government. During the course of the Exposition, Mucha proposed another unusual project. The French Government planned to take down the Eiffel Tower, built especially for the Exposition, as soon as the event ended. Mucha proposed that, after the Exposition, the top of the tower should be replaced by a sculptural monument to humanity constructed on the pedestal. However, the tower proved to be popular with both tourists and Parisians, and it was left in its original form after the Exhibit ended.

Mucha's many interests included jewellery. Around 1900 he had begun to teach at the Academy Colarossi, where he himself had been a student when he first arrived in Paris. His course was precisely described in the catalogue: "The object of the Mucha course is to permit the student to have the necessary knowledge for artistic decoration, applied to decorative panels, windows, porcelain, enamels, furniture, jewellery, posters, etc." In 1899, he collaborated with the jeweller Georges Fouquet to make a bracelet for Sarah Bernhardt in the form of a serpent, made of gold and enamel, similar to the costume jewellery Bernhardt had worn in Medea. According to Jiří Mucha, this bracelet was created to conceal Bernhardt's arthritic wrist. The spiralling design of the snake is a nod to Mucha's swirling Art Nouveau painting style. The Cascade pendant designed for Fouquet (1900) is in the form of a waterfall, composed of gold, enamel, opals, tiny diamonds, paillons, and a barocco (misshapen pearl). After the 1900 Exposition, Fouquet decided to open a new shop at 6 Rue Royale. He asked Mucha to design the interior.

The centrepieces of the design were two peacocks, the traditional symbol of luxury, made of bronze and wood with coloured 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 mouldings and stained glass, thin columns with vegetal designs, and a ceiling with moulded floral and vegetal elements. It marked a summit of Art Nouveau decoration.

The shop 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 a 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 in watercolour, titled Documents Decoratifs, which were published as a book in 1902 by the Central Library of Fine Arts. The plates contained elaborate designs for brooches and other pieces, with swirling arabesques and vegetal forms, and incrustations of enamel and coloured stones. They represented ways that floral, vegetal and natural forms could be used in decoration and decorative objects.