Many important cultural events will take place in EU member states to accompany the Czech presidency of the EU in 2009. Among the most remarkable of them will be an exhibition of the very best of the lifetime work of Alphonse Mucha at the Museum of Fine Arts between March 20 and June 7, 2009, during the Budapest Spring Festival.
The exhibition entitled In Praise of Women - Alphonse Mucha, Czech Master of the Art Nouveau, will feature a collection of the best posters, paintings, drawings and photographs from the artist’s Parisian, American and Czech periods.
Alfons Maria Mucha was born in the town of Ivan?ice to Moravian parents in 1860. In line with the customs of the time, he received artistic training in Vienna, Munich and Paris. He won an award at the Salon exhibition in Paris in 1894. Mucha had his first success with a poster that showed the actress Sarah Bernhardt in the style of a Byzantine icon. He had a seven-year contract with Bernhardt, who was considered the best actress of the period, and during this time he prepared a whole series of posters. The Bernhardt posters and his advertising work feature young, attractive, vivacious, joyful and unambiguously sensual women with long golden hair, directly associated with the products advertised. Special and distinctive within Mucha’s lifework are his pastel and charcoal drawings, created during his Parisian period.
In the early part of the 20th century, he lived for six years in the U.S. At the time of his arrival on the American continent, Mucha was heralded as the leading exponent of Art Nouveau, despite the fact that he did not identify with its principles and his views were more closely associated with Symbolism. The Art Nouveau style was made famous in the USA by Mucha’s theatre posters for Sarah Bernhardt, promoting her many American tours. Mucha started to work on portraits of high-society ladies in New York. However, these oil paintings lacked both the spontaneity and vividness of his pastel portraits done in Europe.
He returned to the Czech Republic in 2010. His most important work created in this period was a series of twenty paintings entitled The Slav Epic. Female personifications with Slavic features first appeared in Mucha´s posters and paintings in 1897. On the poster promoting his second solo exhibition in Paris, Mucha chose to depict a girl with distinctly Slavic features and a Moravian crown of daisies, to be followed by a number of similar female figures. These works were eventually developed into The Slav Epic. When Czechoslovakia won its independence after World War I, Mucha designed the new postage stamps, banknotes, and other government documents for the new state. After German troops marched into Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, Mucha was among the first people to be arrested by the Gestapo. Though eventually released, he never fully recovered from pneumonia he had contracted while in prison and he died in 1939 at age 69.
Mucha was an extremely diverse artist who illustrated numerous books, designed stamps, calendars, wallpaper, furniture, carpets, glass windows, theatre sets, jewellery and even a jewellery shop. His style was characterised by winding offshoots, stylised plant motifs, lascivious line drawings and attractive female figures. He always focused his works on the depiction of the female figure and combined decorativeness with anatomic precision. In addition to presenting full-bosomed and voluptuous female figures that were the ideals of the age, he showed faces that were often passionate and at times radiating peacefulness. Sometimes they were wild and dangerous, at other times virgin-like. He presented vulnerable females with slender figures and softly falling hair but also demonic figures impossible to approach, just like he had experienced in the real world.
