Alphonse Mucha and artworks

By Patrick Bade

Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910s, marking a return to the simplicity of natural forms, and changing the world of art and design forever. In fact, Art Nouveau was known to insiders as the “Mucha style” for the legions of imitators who adapted the master’s celebrated tableaux. Today, his distinctive depictions of lithe young women in classical dress have become a pop cultural touchstone, inspiring album covers, comic books, and everything in between. Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles offer readers an inspiring survey of Mucha’s career, illustrated with over one hundred lustrous images, from early Parisian advertisements and posters for Sandra Bernhardt, to the famous historical murals painted just before his death, at the age of 78, in 1939.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781781609798

Book preview

Photographic portrait of Alphonse Mucha

Biography

1860:

Alphonse Mucha is born on 24 July in Ivancice, Moravia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He is the son of a court usher and is brought up in keeping with the virtues of nationalism. He begins to draw at a young age.

1871:

Mucha is a chorister at St Peter’s Cathedral in Brno, where he receives his secondary school education. It is there that he has his first revelation, in front of the richness of Baroque art. During the four years of studying there, he forms a friendship with Leoš Janácek who would become the greatest Czech composer of his generation.

1877:

He fails to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

1879:

Mucha finds work as an auxiliary in a firm of theatre designers in Vienna.

1881:

Following a fire which ravages the Ringtheater (the main client of the firm where he works), Mucha is dismissed from his job as a designer. He settles in the small town of Mikulov where he draws portraits. There he meets his first patron, Count Khuen, who invites him to decorate his castle with painted murals.

1884:

Mucha studies art in Munich whilst carrying out work for Count Egon, brother of Count Khuen, in