Around the time of the Golden Age of Illustration, with illustrators such as Rackham, Sime, and Dulac making a name for themselves, a Czech artist was emerging with a style which would encompass all types of graphic art and help change the art world of Paris.
Alphonse Mucha was a leading exponent of Art Nouveau, a style which fancied itself as a reaction against some of the academic art which was popular toward the end of the nineteenth century. French for “New art,” this style got its name from a gallery in Paris which focused on modern art in the forms of decorative tapestries, modern furniture and other forms of design and art objects. Along with painters such as Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha helped to popularize the decorative style. Creating art which was often consumerist and borderline kitsch, the movement meant to make decorative art from anything and everything.
Like his illustrator contemporaries, Mucha had his art beginnings as an illustrator for cheap and popular magazines. His art appealed to the public in forms such as posters and advertisements for plays and consumer products. With an emphasis on decoration, his art was known for its sweeping contours and flowing lines of clothing with flowers or stars throughout the composition, which often included attractive young girls as centerpieces. Several of his works include four panels of a central theme such as Stars (seen above) and the Four Seasons.
Mucha never saw himself as a famous artist and rejected his fame. He was more interested in his Czech homeland. Considered his most important work, toward the end of his career he worked on the Slav Epic, a series of huge paintings depicting the history of the Slavic people. When Germany invaded his country in 1939 he was arrested and interrogated, making the artist very ill from which he never fully recovered. By the time of his death Art Nouveau had been considered outdated. However Jiri Mucha, Alphonse’s son, helped to draw attention to his father as he wrote about him.
In the 1960s a Mucha revival was seen in such examples as the posters of the artist duo Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, who designed posters for bands such as Pink Floyd. The editor in chief of Marvel Comics has used a Mucha style in designing covers and posters. Graphic artists of today could learn a thing or two about the advertisements and posters of Alphonse Mucha, from a day when everything was designed by hand without the help of a computer.
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