Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Maria Mucha was born on 24 July 1860 in Ivancice, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rejected by the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, he worked as a théâtre scene painter in Vienna, then as a draftsman in Mikulov. Count Khuen-Belasi, who spotted him, funded his studies in Munich (1885-1887) and at the Academie Julian in Paris. Mucha arrived in Paris at 27, broke, and survived by illustrating school manuals and almanacs.

The night of 26 December 1894 changed everything. Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in the world, urgently needed a poster for her new play Gismonda at the Theatre de la Renaissance. The Lemercier press called Mucha, the only illustrator available during the holidays. In two weeks he delivered a very long format poster (216 by 74 centimeters), Sarah Bernhardt as a Byzantine priestess, gold background, stylized palms. The bills went up on 1 January 1895. Paris tore through the poster: collectors bribed the bill-stickers to obtain a copy.

Sarah Bernhardt signed a six-year exclusive contract with Mucha. He designed her posters (La Dame aux Camelias, Medee, La Tosca, Hamlet, Lorenzaccio), her costumes, her sets, her jewelry. In parallel he carried the style into commercial work: Job cigarette papers (1896), Moet and Chandon (1899), Lefevre-Utile biscuits. His décorative series The Seasons (1896), then The Four Flowers (1898), The Precious Stones (1900), and The Stars (1902), invented a formula recognizable at a glance.

That formula is Art Nouveau: a central female figure, hair drawn in long arabesques, ornamented with floral motifs and gems, framed by a geometric device borrowed from Byzantine or Japanese sources. The style spread across Europe, from Lalique jewelry to Viennese posters. The Bosnia-Herzegovina pavilion at the 1900 Paris World Fair, for which Mucha designed every décoration, won him the Legion of Honour.

Mucha returned to Bohemia in 1910 to undertake his life's work, the Slav Epic, twenty large canvases on the history of the Slav peoples, completed in 1928 and donated to the city of Prague. The Nazis considered him a Czech nationalist and arrested him in March 1939, at 78. He died a few months later. A Mucha print belongs in a sober setting. The composition is dense, it needs air around it: a thin light oak frame, a cream or teal wall, and one work at a time on that wall.