Paris, late December 1894. Alphonse Mucha, 34, is alone at the Lemercier print shop on December 26th, a public holiday, when the director Maurice de Brunhoff bursts in alarmed. Sarah Bernhardt, who has been playing Gismonda at the Théâtre de la Renaissance since November, has just demanded a new poster for January 1st. All the in-house poster artists are on holiday. Mucha, a young Czech who arrived in Paris in 1887 to study at the Académie Julian and gets by on illustrations for Le Petit Français illustré, is the only one available. He accepts without having seen the play. He delivers the poster in eight days. On the night of December 31st, Sarah Bernhardt sees the plate and signs immediately a six-year contract with him. Art Nouveau has just been born.

The poster is 216 centimeters tall, an oversized vertical format for its time. Sarah Bernhardt appears full-length in the Byzantine costume of Gismonda, Easter palm in hand, stylized golden halo behind her head. The composition is radically new. No scene, no theatrical backdrop, no anecdotal staging. Only the monumentalized portrait, isolated against an ornamental geometric ground. The vertical format, almost a Byzantine panel, gives the actress the stature of a religious icon. The palette is also unusual: muted tones, beige, old gold, water-green, not a single cabaret red. Paris discovers it on January 1st 1895 on the Morris columns. Passers-by pull it down through the night and take it home.

The "Mucha style" settles in

Between 1895 and 1904, Mucha keeps coming. The Four Seasons (1896), a series of four decorative panels sold as lithographs for interiors, lock in his vocabulary: one young woman per season, draped in antique fabric, surrounded by botanical attributes (cherry blossoms for spring, wheat for summer, vines for autumn, bare branches for winter). The Four Flowers (1898), The Four Arts (1898), The Stars (1902) follow the same format. Sarah Bernhardt keeps commissioning posters from him: Lorenzaccio (1896), La Dame aux Camélias (1896), Médée (1898), Hamlet (1899), Tosca (1899). All signed with a recognizable Art Nouveau cartouche, all printed by Champenois, the second Paris lithographer after Lemercier.

Mucha's method is rigorous. He starts with a very precise pencil drawing at 1:1 scale on kraft paper. The ornamental grounds are drawn with ruler, compass, sometimes superimposed tracings for repeated motifs. Color comes last, laid in gouache over a finished drawing. The transfer to the lithographic stone is left to the craftsmen at Champenois, but Mucha watches the print run and the color match. Four to six stones per poster, sometimes seven for the most ambitious decorative panels. The grain of the stone shows in the finished material, especially in the gold areas he likes to set in the grounds. It is that tactile quality that makes his posters hard to reproduce correctly today: it takes a thick, matte paper that recalls the grain of the original lithograph.

The return to Prague and the great work

1904. Mucha leaves for the United States with his wife Maruška, where he teaches for six years in Chicago and New York. He meets there the Slavic-American industrialist Charles Crane, who funds a project he has been carrying for ten years: a monumental cycle on the history of the Slavic peoples. Mucha returns in 1910 to his native country, settles in the castle of Zbiroh near Prague, and spends twenty years painting twenty canvases six meters tall each. The Slav Epic (Slovanská epopej) is finished in 1928, for the tenth anniversary of independent Czechoslovakia. It is his great work. He has dropped the Art Nouveau style for a darker, more political Symbolist history painting. The Gestapo arrests him in Prague in March 1939 after the Nazi invasion. Released, sick, he dies in July 1939.

"The goal of art is not beauty," Mucha wrote in 1900. "The goal of art is the beauty of the soul."

Living with a Mucha on the wall

A Mucha poster wants a light wall. The opposite of Toulouse-Lautrec, whose saturated palettes call for dark grounds. The Mucha palette, made of muted tones and gold areas, is smothered by a black or deep wall. Pick a wall in beige, ivory, pearl gray, even pale green. The frame: light oak to support the decorative dimension and keep the gold tones warm. Matte black also works but hardens the composition, which can be wanted for a more contemporary read. The vertical format of most Mucha posters calls for a narrow wall: between two windows, beside a door, in a stairwell. Ideal rooms: a bedroom, a hallway, a boudoir. Not a kitchen, not an open space, not a living-room wall dominated by a low sofa.

Mucha pairs well with objects from the same period: a 1900 secretary desk, a Tiffany lamp, a velvet armchair in old gold. He also pairs with very contemporary interiors, as long as you set a single piece, without clutter. The mix with Art Deco works less well: the two styles share the love of ornament but not the palette. A room holding both a 1930 Cassandre and a 1896 Mucha needs a lot of neutral wall between them to keep both readable.

Three threads

  • One of the Four Seasons (1896) in a narrow vertical format. The most accessible, the most immediately recognizable.
  • A Sarah Bernhardt poster (Gismonda, Lorenzaccio, La Dame aux Camélias). Oversized format, best in a stairwell or a clear narrow wall.
  • A contemporary tribute to Mucha's language, in a vintage collection that gathers Belle Époque and Art Nouveau.

At Montmartre Poster, the Belle Époque tributes live in the vintage collection. To understand how Art Nouveau hardened into Art Deco around the First World War, see our article Art Deco, the birth of a total style, which describes the transition between Mucha's plant grammar and Cassandre's geometry.