Developments in the 19th Century

 





Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map



 




Alphonse Mucha


 

 


Alfons Maria Mucha
born July 24, 1860, Ivančice, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now in Czech Republic]
died July 14, 1939, Prague, Czechoslovakia


original name Alfons Maria Mucha Art Nouveau illustrator and painter noted for his posters of idealized female figures.


After early education in Brno, Moravia, andwork for a theatre scene-painting firm in Vienna, Mucha studied art in Prague, Munich, and Paris in the 1880s. He first became prominent as the principal advertiser of the actress Sarah Bernhardt in Paris. He designed the posters for several theatrical productions featuring Bernhardt, beginning with Gismonda (1894), and he designed sets and costumes for her as well. Mucha designed many other posters and magazine illustrations, becoming one of the foremost designers in the Art Nouveau style. His supple, fluent draftsmanship is used to great effect in his posters featuring women. His fascination with the sensuous aspects of female beauty—luxuriantly flowing strands of hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and full-lipped mouths—as well as his presentation of the female image as ornamental, reveal the influence of the English Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic on Mucha, particularly the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The sensuous bravura of the draftsmanship, particularly the use of twining, whiplash lines, imparts a strange refinement to his female figures.

Between 1903 and 1922 Mucha made four trips to the United States, where he attracted the patronage of Charles Richard Crane, a Chicago industrialist and Slavophile, who subsidized Mucha's series of 20 large historical paintings illustrating the “Epic of the Slavic People” (1912–30). After 1922 Mucha lived in Czechoslovakia, and he donated his “Slavic Epic” paintings to the city of Prague.
 
 

 

 


 


A L F O N S



M U C H A



master of art nouveau



by Renate Ulmer
 


Alfons Mucha's is an art of seduction.
 
His graceful women, delicate colours and

decorative style add up to an unashamed act of temptation.
 

   



Mucha and the "Synthesis of Art"

 

 

  


Alfons Mucha

The association between Georges Fouquet and Alfons Mucha brought forth a further sensation: the frontage and fitting of Fouquet's jeweller's shop in the rue Royale in Paris. The Boutique Fouquet was the only commission of this type ever executed by Mucha. The result was a prime example of the synthesis of art as propagated by the protagonists of Art Nouveau, while at the same time providing a fitting, shrine-like, extravagant setting for the costly wares of the celebrated jeweller. The furniture rich in carvings and bronze fittings, tumid and sculptural in form, the coloured decorative glazing, the monumental murals and ornamental sculptures together created a theatrical and extravagant splendour in total accord with Mucha's stylistic predilections. Unfortunately this splendour was not to endure: as early as 1923, Georges Fouquet decided to refurbish his shop. All the decorative fittings were dismantled, some of them later finding their way to the Musee Carnavalet in Paris.
 

  

 

 


Study for the cover of Christmas and Easter Bells, c. 1900
Pencil on tracing paper

BOTTOM:
Photograph of a model taken by Mucha, which
he used for the magazine cover.

 


The Photographic Art
1903

 

Like many other Symbolist artists from Khnopff to Klimt, Mucha made substantial use of photography. A friend of Nadar and of other major Parisian photographers of the period, he depicted the large-format bellows camera designed for portrait photography that he used in the drawing The Photographic Art. Ingres had already remarked that photography "is very beautiful, but you mustn't say so", and at its invention, photography terrified artists; they threw down their brushes in despair at the perfection with which photographs captured reality. In the 1850s, the many painters who used photography for their work tended to conceal and even deny the fact. Others, like Delacroix, openly admitted using it. Mucha did not suffer the typical dichotomy of the 19th century artist who used photography but was anxious about its relation to art. He loved photography for itself, was a lifelong amateur photographer and made widespread use of photos in his work. For him, the camera was a useful toy that performed the task which Baudelaire scornfully attributed to it, that of documentation, note-book, and timesaver.

 

 

Alfons Mucha
Nude
(foto)

 

 

 


Alfons Mucha
Model Posing
(foto)

 



 

 


Alfons Mucha
Model Posing
(foto)

 

  

 

  


Photograph of a model for February, 1888          The Twelve Months: February

 
   
 


The Twelve Months: November
(for the magazine Cocorico)
1899
 

 

 

 


One of Mucha's favourite models for The Brunette


The Brunette

  
   
   

Photograph of model
Dibujo		  



 


Mucha's Studio