Alfons Mucha
Master of the Art Nouveau poster.
Alphonse Mucha became famous overnight with a poster for Sarah Bernhardt. His women with flowing hair became the face of Art Nouveau.
Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 in Ivančice in Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary. He worked first as a theatre scene painter in Vienna and then studied at the academy of fine arts in Munich. In 1887 he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and supported himself as an illustrator.
His breakthrough came around Christmas 1894. The great actress Sarah Bernhardt urgently needed a new poster for the play Gismonda, and Mucha got the commission. The poster, showing Bernhardt full-length in a narrow, tall format, caused a sensation when it went up in January 1895. She gave him a six-year contract.
In the years that followed Mucha created posters, advertisements, jewellery and decorations. His style became so well known that in France it was called le style Mucha. Typical are young women with long, flowing hair, framed by flowers and circular haloes in soft pastel colours. In 1902 he also published the pattern book Documents décoratifs, which spread to designers all over the world. He was also a popular teacher and taught for some years in the United States, where he hoped to earn money for his larger projects.
Yet Mucha wanted to do more than advertising. From 1910 he worked on The Slav Epic, twenty enormous paintings on the history of the Slavic peoples, which he gave to the city of Prague. After Czechoslovakia gained independence in 1918 he designed the country’s first postage stamps and banknotes.
When Germany occupied the country in 1939 he was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated. He died shortly afterwards that same year. For a long time he was seen as old-fashioned, but in the 1960s his posters were rediscovered and inspired the psychedelic poster art of the period.