Alphonse Mucha: The Father of Art Nouveau in 7 Works

Alphonse Mucha is undoubtedly one of the most widely recognized artists who ever lived. Despite his lack of formal artistic education, he gave rise to a distinctive and one-of-a-kind art style of Art Nouveau. His artistic legacy is extensive and complex. His work was conventionally beautiful, produced with great skill, and well-liked by the public. Read on to explore the oeuvre and innovative mind of Alphonse Mucha.

Although the unique style of Alphonse Mucha is almost universally recognizable, his personality never achieved the same legendary status as many of his colleagues and friends like Vincent van Gogh, with whom Mucha shared a room in Paris. Unlike others, he hardly ever played into the myth of a tortured, misunderstood artist. His works celebrated the joy of life and the beauty of nature and often represented a specific character of Mucha’s Woman—an ethereally beautiful being.

Alphonse Maria Mucha was born in Moravia (present-day Czech Republic). From an early age, he demonstrated talents in drawing and theater, acting, and designing stage sets for performances in his Catholic School. He could hardly afford an art education but he did end up trying to enroll in the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. He was not only rejected but strongly advised to find a different career for his future.

Mucha Cherished His Slavic Roots

Mucha’s art was inspired by his Czech identity and his nation’s striving for independence. In his non-commercial works, he often addressed Slavic mythology and legends. The culmination of this interest was the monumental Slav Epic—a collection of 20 large canvases representing the fictionalized history of Slavic people, heavily influenced by Western spiritualism.

Mucha continued his work as a theater set designer. He was even invited to work in Vienna’s Ringtheater. However, a year later, the theater suffered a terrible accident. The fire caused by a gas lamp explosion destroyed the building and killed around 400 people. The incident, for the first time in history, triggered the emergence of fire safety regulations in public venues.

For years, Mucha worked as a poster designer, gradually developing his unique style. Unfortunately, the artist never signed the majority of his commercial works produced in his early years, so art historians can only assume things about the evolution of his skill and preference. At the time of Mucha’s artistic activity, rejecting some ideas of the Industrial Revolution was common among the creatives. The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Arts & Crafts movement protested against mass production, believing it was killing creativity and artistic skill.

During the last decades of the 19th century, an international style of Art Nouveau emerged, valuing high artistic skill and nature as the principal inspiration. Apart from soulless industrialization, Art Nouveau artists attacked academism and intellectualism in art institutions by creating visually pleasing and almost universally admired compositions. Mucha, with his non-academic background and set design experience, was the perfect man to set the standards for the new movement.

Even during Alphonse Mucha’s lifetime, he was known as the leading Art Nouveau artist. However, Mucha was anything but proud of that title and he actively opposed the name of Art Nouveau which translates as New Art. He believed there could be no old or new art, only eternal and consistent artistic expression that lasted through centuries transforming only visually, but retaining its essence. For example, in his works, he referenced art of the Middle Ages, natural forms, and ancient symbols.

Gismonda and Sarah Bernhardt: Alphonse Mucha’s Rise to Fame

A sharp turn in Mucha’s career happened in 1887 when he moved to Paris to study art properly with the financial help of one of his Czech patrons. However, less than a year later, his patron committed suicide and the broke Mucha was forced to drop out of the art academy. Devastated, he returned to poster and advertisement design.

In December 1894, he received a commission for a theater poster for the play Gismonda starring the great and famous Sarah Bernhardt. Mucha was not his client’s first choice, however. He was actually the only printmaker still working during the Christmas holidays since he could not afford to visit his family back home. The poster he made had unusual proportions, being over 6 feet high but narrow. It featured elements that would make Mucha famous like arched decorations behind the figure’s head and excessive detailing. Mucha’s changes in proportions made the poster stand out among other advertisements and created an illusion of Bernhardt’s character standing among the crowd.

The final result was so impressive and loved by the public. Some Parisians were even stealing posters from the streets. Because of this, Bernhardt offered Mucha a six-year contract. So, Mucha designed dozens of posters featuring Sarah Bernhardt and printed thousands of them, becoming a Parisian celebrity and earning the job of the chief decorator in Bernhardt’s theater company.

Posters and prints of Alphonse Mucha can be commonly seen in galleries and at art auctions, yet there is one work that is rarely publicly displayed. In the late 1890s, Mucha gradually became dissatisfied with how commercial his art had become. He was more ambitious than that. To prove his skill and realize the ideas he nurtured for years, he conceived a project radically different from his widely popular work.

A devout Catholic and a freemason, Mucha created a visual retelling of the Lord’s Prayer, the quintessential prayer taught by Jesus in the New Testament. Mucha illustrated each line with a watercolor image, which strived far away from the literal text towards the domain of Symbolist allegories. Unlike Mucha’s Art Nouveau works dominated by feminine figures, Le Pater presented either distinctively male or androgynous figures.

In December of 1899, Mucha’s publishing company printed and published only 510 copies of Le Pater, destroying the plates immediately after. Therefore, according to Mucha’s wish, no more copies of the work could be produced ever again. The project was enormously expensive and demanding, given the extremely complicated multi-layered printing, but it was still completed within one day. Today, Le Pater copies are barely accessible to the public and rarely mentioned in Mucha exhibitions, leaving passionate art collectors to dream of acquiring at least one print from the set.

Alphonse Mucha and Jewelry Design

Among the most famous works of Alphonse Mucha were the advertisements for cigarettes, perfumes, soaps, and chocolate. His status as the product designer was so high that some products were sold out only because they had a package or ad campaign designed by Mucha, regardless of their consumer value. However, Mucha also tried his hand at designing jewelry.

According to the legend, it all started with Sarah Bernhardt, who noticed a remarkable necklace painted by Mucha on one of his posters. Bernhardt trusted the artist’s good taste so much that she often commissioned costumes for her performances based on Mucha’s drawings and not vice versa. She admired the necklace and ordered a real-life copy from a jeweler. In collaboration with the famous Art Nouveau jeweler Goerges Fouquet, Mucha designed dozens of exquisite jewelry pieces. Not all of them included precious stones and metals. One of the central ideas of Art Nouveau jewelry was the priority of skill over the value of the material. Thus, the jewelers often used horns, sea shells, and even artificially made materials.

Spiritual seances and all forms of occultism were a common hobby among educated and cultured Europeans. Mucha was no exception. He frequently attended mediums and kept a library of occult literature. He also found a way to incorporate it into his artistic practice and improve his art.

His contemporaries often criticized Mucha for his insufficient work on human emotions. Despite his obvious talent, portrait painting was not his strongest domain. He could barely capture emotion, feeling, and true likeness, instead preferring to equate his models to ideals.

As a reserved and inexpressive person, he hardly understood human emotion. In order to work on his artistic practice, he used to take a camera with him to the spiritualist seances and take photographs of mediums’ faces distorted in trance. These photographs would later become the basis for dramatic facial expressions of tragic heroines in his works. This can be noticed in the poster for Medea, starring Sarah Bernhardt.

Mucha was a freemason, a member of one of the Parisian lodges, and the founder of the first Czech-speaking lodge in Prague. He was also the designer of their insignia and typography. In a way, his life ended because of his high position in the masonic ranks. In 1939, the Nazis captured Prague, immediately starting the prosecution of Slavic nationalists and freemasons. Mucha, already in his late seventies, was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated for several days. Upon his release, he could never fully recover from mental and physical torture and he died a few months later, before the outbreak of World War II.