He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, and designs, which became among the best-known images of the period. In the second part of his career, at the age of 50, he returned to his homeland of Bohemia region in Austria and devoted himself to painting a series of twenty monumental canvases known as The Slav Epic, depicting the history of all the Slavic peoples of the world, which he painted between and In , on the 10th anniversary of the independence of Czechoslovakia, he presented the series to the Czech nation.
He considered it his most important work. It is now on display in Prague. Story Alphons Mucha - Italia Liberty. Artists Alphonse Mucha. The magazine La Plume made a special edition devoted to his work, and his retrospective exhibition traveled to Vienna, Prague, Munich, Brussels, London, and New York, lending him an international reputation.
This kind of amazes me, because the prior obscurantist mystification first sensed in circuitous Art Nouveau when it really was new finally springs into a widespread cultural movement, not through one of its initial theorists-practitioners, like Hortsa, but by this newbie. At the start of his career, Mucha created and exploited this complimentary, mind-bending, complex cloisonnist graphic style based on gravity-defying whorls.
Yet, after making a considerable income from his theatrical and advertising work in this style, Mucha wished even more to be recognized as a serious artist and philosopher. The book, as displayed in the show, is heavy with symbolist ornament and features a mystical protecting goddess among other esoteric occult themes.
Because he is so closely associated with that hippy style, subsequent generations may have found him difficult to take entirely seriously.
But believe me that his smoky stylishness slotted in perfectly around to the political-cultural shifts in a counter-cultural mood that combined feminism, passivism, racial idealism, hedonism, and economic optimism. This kind of high daydream art whimsical lines, fluid shapes amalgamating one into another, female figures with flowers and different ornamental detailing on their hair and bodies, the whole mood playful and yet aesthetically beautiful accompanied hip folk, fueled by trippy LSD, hashish and especially marijuana, as they dipped into buddhism, paganism, mysticism, tarot cards, meditation, vegetarianism, the I Ching , the Bhagavad Gita , and The Golden Bough.
Alphonse Mucha. In March , Mucha sailed for New York City, the start of his first visit to the United States where he would live on and off for years. His original intention for going to the States was to find funding for his previously mentioned grand project, The Slav Epic , which he achieved: from the anti-Semitic, Hitler sympathizer, Chicago connoisseur of Arab culture and noted Arabist Charles Richard Crane.
Mucha also took in some income from teaching illustration and design at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, at the Philadelphia School of Art, and at the Art Institute of Chicago, while conceptualizing this nationalistic project to depict the history and civilization of the Czech and Slavic peoples.
In , imbued with masonic philosophy, Mucha moved back to the land of his birth that would become Czechoslovakia eight years hence to execute The Slav Epic project.
It would occupy the last thirty years of his career and lead him to produce the bevy of bad behemoths that were mercifully excluded from the current show. Madonna of the Lilies Alphonse Mucha Age of Wisdom Alphonse Mucha Age of Reason Alphonse Mucha Age of Love Alphonse Mucha Woman with a Burning Candle Alphonse Mucha Portrait of Jaroslava Alphonse Mucha The Slav Epic Alphonse Mucha Holy Mount Athos Alphonse Mucha The Apotheosis of the Slavs Alphonse Mucha Portrait of Jiri Alphonse Mucha Related Artists.
Jacek Malczewski - Charles Maurin - Fernand Khnopff - Jan Toorop - Theophile Steinlen - Vardges Sureniants - Louis Wain - Gustav Klimt -
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