Alfons Mucha (1860–1939)
often known in English and French as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist, known best for his distinct style. He produced many paintings, illustrations, advertisements, postcards, and designs.
The stylized combination of vegetation and beautiful women was an expression of his joyful vision of life, one greatly appreciated by the viewer at the time.
He was Friend with Paul Gauguin and once in lived in Vienna, Paris, New York during his lifetime.
Commissioned to design a stained glass window for St virus cathedral, Prague and in 1896 first decorative panels the four seasons are printed, which made him famous.
The Seasons (1896)
Artwork description & Analysis: The first of Mucha’s much-copied pânneaux décoratifs(decorative panels), The Seasons (1896), shows the harmonious cycles of nature.
His Revolutionized change in poster design- the subtle pastel colors and the stillness of the best life size figure afforded a note of dignity and so sobriety which were quite startling.
Mucha then signed a six year contracts for stage and costume designs as well as posters. And posters created in Paris in the 1890s form the best known and internationally most renowned part of his work — obviously, Paris still as the center of art around the world.
The Slav Epic (1911–1926)
He offered to the mayor of Prague in 1909 donate to the city a series of twenty monumental paintings. Spent 20 years, he depicted beauty in war scene. They are moved out of the city for ww 2 and there were numerous problems finding a proper place to display his work because of the scale. However, the sequence of the twenty paintings are bit confusing for me.
The museum did a good job at first showing the timeline and then sections of the his works by materials / style. I was also thinking what made a museum special? One would say its Collections. But contemporary art can be replicated very easily. Like this one, it could already be hard to know whether the work is a replicate or an original one.
