Mucha’s Come to Town

Timeless Mucha: the Magic Line opened last week at the New Mexico Museum of Art and will continue through September 20. The exhibition tour started at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. and will go on to the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Nelson Atkins Museum and finally the Museo Kaluz in Mexico City.

I obviously do a lot of research online and was getting frustrated with information I could not find, ending up going around in circles. Then in my online search I found some of what I was looking for in Missives from the Art World, a Missive I had written 6 years ago at the time of a tour of a previous Mucha show and had totally forgotten! 

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2019/07/alphonse-mucha.html

Alphonse Mucha (Czech 1860-1939) spent much of his professional life in Paris. He became a major exponent of the Art Nouveau style. In 1992 after the death of Mucha’s son, Jiri, his wife Geraldine and their son John formed the Mucha Foundation to preserve his estate, gather more of his work and promote his memory by establishing a museum in Prague and organizing international exhibitions.

"Self-Portrait" by Mucha

Mucha honed his graphic skill through classical training in Vienna, Munich and Paris, and was influenced by other artists of the period in France including Gaugin. His work, in turn, influenced artists in the later 20th century.

This exhibition is comprised of drawings, posters and photographs demonstrating the artist’s incredible draughtsmanship as well as his eye for detail, composition and color. In this pencil on cardboard study of a man in an evening coat, you get an idea of his formative classical training and meticulous work.

Photography at the time was mainly used for documentation but for Mucha it served as an initial step in his artistic process. He made sketches from photographs of nudes he posed in his studio, adding flowing garments and elaborate backgrounds, or staged fully costumed vignettes as in this example of his late work for Hearst’s International Magazine, July 1922. 

As a struggling illustrator, his big break came when he created a poster for Sarah Bernhardt. Fortuitously, he had stopped in a frame shop where he learned that the superstar of her day wanted a new poster within two weeks to rekindle interest in her play Gismonda. He took on the project and rushed to the theater where she was performing to sketch her there. Breaking with the conventional format for publicity posters he created elongated vertical images that were plastered all over Paris. The posters were not only successful as publicity for Ms. Bernhardt, they became instant collectors’ items bringing the artist to the fore and gaining the actress additional acclaim. Bernhardt signed him to a six-year contract and several of the monumental posters he designed for her subsequent plays form the core of the current exhibition, standing as indisputable masterpieces of graphic art.

Mucha went on to commissions for commercial advertising and product packaging that are included in the exhibition. Though his Art Nouveau style had fallen out of fashion by the time of his death, the show concludes with a section of psychedelic rock posters and album covers that testify to the revival of his influence in the 1960’s and 70’s. Here is one example.

Mucha’s imagery may be overly familiar from reproduction, but it goes without saying that it is always best to see a work of art in the original where you can appreciate the detail and feel the spirit that the artist wished to convey.