The Golden Age of Art Nouveau with Alphonse Mucha

The text below is the excerpt of the book Alphonse Mucha (ISBN: 9781783100408), written by Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles, published by Parkstone International.

Since the Art Nouveau revival of the 1960s, when students around the world adorned their rooms with reproductions of Mucha posters of girls with tendril-like hair and the designers of record sleeves produced Mucha imitations in hallucinogenic colours, Alphonse Mucha’s name has been irrevocably associated with the Art Nouveau style and with the Parisian fin-de-siècle.

Artists rarely like to be categorised and Mucha would have resented the fact that he is almost exclusively remembered for a phase of his art that lasted barely ten years and that he was regarded as of lesser importance. As a passionate Czech patriot he would have also been unhappy to be regarded as a “Parisian” artist.

Mucha was born on 24 July, 1860 at Ivancice in Moravia, then a province of the vast Habsburg Empire. It was an empire that was already splitting apart at the seams under the pressures of the burgeoning nationalism of its multi-ethnic component parts. In the year before Mucha’s birth, nationalist aspirations throughout the Habsburg Empire were encouraged by the defeat of the Austrian army in Lombardy that preceded the unification of Italy.

In the first decade of Mucha’s life, Czech nationalism found expression in the orchestral tone poems of Bedrich Smetana that he collectively entitled “Ma Vlast” (My country) and in his great epic opera “Dalibor” (1868). It was symptomatic of the Czech nationalist struggle against the German cultural domination of Central Europe, in that the text of “Dalibor” had to be written in German and translated into Czech.

From his earliest days Mucha would have imbibed the heady and fervent atmosphere of Slav nationalism that pervades “Dalibor” and Smetana’s subsequent pageant of Czech history, “Libuse”, which was used to open the Czech National Theatre in 1881, and for which Mucha himself would later provide set and costume designs.

Mucha was born into relatively humble circumstances, as the son of a court usher. His own son, Jiri Mucha, would later proudly trace the presence of the Mucha family in the town of Ivancice back to the 15th century. If his family was poor, Mucha’s upbringing was nevertheless abundant with artistic stimulation and encouragement.

According to his son Jiri, “He drew even before he learnt to walk and his mother would tie a pencil round his neck with a coloured ribbon so that he could draw as he crawled on the floor. Each time he lost the pencil, he would start howling.” His first important aesthetic experience would have been in the Baroque church of St Peter in the local capital of Brno where, from the age of ten, he sang as a choir-boy in order to support his studies in the grammar school. During his four years as a chorister he came into frequent contact with Leoš Janácek, who would later come to be known as the greatest Czech composer of his generation with whom Mucha shared a passion to create a characteristically Czech art.

The luxurious theatricality of Central European Baroque with its lush curvilinear and natureinspired decoration undoubtedly coloured his imagination and inspired a taste for “smells and bells” and religious paraphernalia that remained with him throughout his life. At the height of his fame, his studio was described as being like a “secular chapel… screens placed here and there, that could well be confessionals; and then incense burning all the time. It’s more like the chapel of an oriental monk than a studio.” While earning a living as a clerk, Mucha continued to indulge his love of drawing and in 1877, he gathered together his self-taught body of work and attempted unsuccessfully to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

After two more years of drudgery as a civil servant, he lost his job, according to Jiri Mucha, because he drew the portraits of a picturesque family of gypsies instead of taking down their particulars. In 1879, he spotted an advertisement in a Viennese newspaper for the firm of Kautsky-Brioschi-Burghardt, makers of theatrical scenery who were looking for designers and craftsmen.

Mucha sent off examples of his work and this time he was successful and received an offer for a job. As a country boy who had been no further than the picturesque (but still provincial) Prague, Vienna in 1879 must have looked awesomely grand.

It had recently undergone what was, after Haussmann’s Paris, the most impressive scheme of urban renewal of the 19th century. Each of the great public buildings lining the Ringstrasse, which replaced the old ramparts that had encircled the medieval town centre, was built in a historical style, deemed appropriate to its purpose.

The result was a grandiose architectural fancy-dress ball. The Art Nouveau style, of which Mucha would later become one of the most famous representatives, reacted directly against this kind of pompous wedding cake historicism. For the moment though, Mucha was deeply influenced by the showy and decorative art of Hans Mackart, the most successful Viennese painter of the Ringstrasse period.

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