Mucha and Art Nouveau - The pope of posters

Alfons Mucha, who was born in 1860 in the Czech Republic (more precisely in South Moravia) and died just before the Second World War, was a dominant figure of the Art Nouveau. He began his successful career with stage sets, but supported by a local notable, he went to study in Munich and Paris. This is where he meets success and makes strong friendships, especially with Paul Gauguin, whose workshop he shares. At the end of the nineteenth century, Paris is an essential and abundant crossroads for artists, and Mucha will be enriched by all the meetings he makes there. He is far from the career of clerk he had wanted to flee: his father, bailiff, had predestined him before inciting him to become a singer in the church.

A skilled graphic designer, he began in Paris to illustrate books for Armand Colin. He began to appear in the poster world, and luckily smiled on him: in 1884 he drew Gismonda's for Sarah Bernhardt at the height of his art. Paris is covered with his huge posters, and the artist signs a six-year contract with him: he will produce particular for her the posters of Lorenzaccio, Hamlet, or the Lady with Camellias. He likes volutes, soft forms, naturalism and the representation of plants in his works; the insects, the trees, the animals inspire him, and his style becomes so inseparable from this artistic revolution that the Art Nouveau appellation is used as much as the Mucha style.

Feeling still Slavic in heart, he went to the United States in search of funding to make a series of twenty monumental paintings of the Slavic epic; it is also the time of the recognition of an independent Czechoslovakia, and Mucha wants to exalt the roots of his country. He changes his style and abandons his narrative sensuality for a more realistic expression. He died in Prague in 1939 just after being interrogated by the Gestapo: the man is a freemason, so suspicious, his cosmopolitanism and his fame worried. His body is thrown to the common grave, but his legend survives him, thanks to his superb posters that make so good the innovative, liberated and playful spirit of the time. We are excited this week to offer you some great pieces: they are rare and exceptional.

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