Mr. Art Nouveau: Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha - Creator of Art Nouveau

Alphonse (Alfons) Maria Mucha is the artist who came to personify the art nouveau movement, yet he didn't like to be associated with it. His style is based on a strong composition where every part is a decorative element serving the totality. There are flowing curves derived from nature, and fairly muted colors. The pictures often feature nubile young women dressed in Neoclassical-style robes.

Mucha himself saw his work as a means of communicating a spiritual message, and was frustrated that he got his great fame primarily from the commercial art, such as art nouveau posters which he produced in quantity.

Born in 1860 in a small town in Moravia (now part of the Czech republic) Alphonse Mucha was very interested in drawing even as a child, but his father hoped that he would get a respectable job as a court clerk. Mucha resisted these plans, and after finishing high school he moved to Vienna where he worked for a company doing theatrical designs.

Later, Mucha was hired by a Count Khuen to decorate the Count's Moravian castle with murals. The Count also sponsored Mucha's studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1887 Mucha moved to Paris - at this time the cultural center of the world. The first few years in that great city were lean years for Alphonse Mucha. He studied at art academies and made a meagre living by doing low-paid illustrations for popular magazines. For a while, he shared a studio with the then unknown painter Gauguin.

His ticket to fame arrived when one day in December 1894 he happened to visit a print shop, and heard that they urgently needed a poster advertising a play starring Sarah Bernhardth, the most famous actress in Paris. Mucha offered to make a lithographed poster quickly, and by January 1st the poster appeared as advertisement for the play all over Paris.

This poster was an overnight success for Alphonse Mucha, and marked the beginning of a new artistic style: art nouveau - initially called the "Mucha Style"! The style was soon wery widely imitated and Mucha got tired of being associated with it.

Sarah Bernhardth was thrilled with Mucha's poster, and it brought him a 6 years contract. During the following years, Mucha did all manner of costumes, stage decorations, book cover designs... and many posters, for Ms. Bernhardth and others. The 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris helped spread the fame of Alphonse Mucha worldwide. He decorated the Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavilion and collaborated on the Austrian one.

Mucha married in 1906, and with his wife he then spent several years in the U.S., where he met the millionaire Charles Crane who became Mucha's supporter and sponsor.

In 1910 Mucha and his family returned to Moravia and settled in Prague, where Mucha spent much of his later years working on a series of huge paintings depicting scenes from the history of the Czech and other Slavic peoples; the "Slav Epic".

After the end of World War I in 1918, when Czechoslovakia became an independent nation, Alphonse Mucha designed the new postage stamps banknotes, etc., needed for the new government.

In a prelude to World War II, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia early in 1939, whereupon Mucha was arrested and interrogated by the Germans. He was later released, but had contracted a lung infection which lead to his death on July 14, 1939.

At the time of his death, Alphonse Mucha's art nouveau style was considered outdated. However, it has recieved renewed interest later and especially during the late 1960's, when it fit in nicely with the "Flower Power" movement. The art nouveau "Mucha style" is particularly evident in psychedelic posters made for rock groups such as Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.