Alphonse Mucha was a Czech painter and designer, born on July 24, 1860, in Ivančice, a small Moravian town, who died in Prague on July 14, 1939. In 1895 a theater poster for the actress Sarah Bernhardt made him famous in Paris, and his women framed by flowers became the face of Art Nouveau, the decorative style of the turn of the century.
He hoped to be known for something else, the Slav Epic, twenty giant canvases on the history of the Slavic peoples. He died of pneumonia a few months after the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, had arrested and questioned him.
The world kept the posters: young women with a ring of stars or flowers behind their heads, like a saint's halo, and hair that curls across the paper like ribbons. He drew them for a theater star, for champagne, for cigarette papers. The canvases he cared about were hidden from the Nazis, then pushed aside by the Communists.
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His hometown, Ivančice, lay in Moravia, then a province of the Austrian empire and today the eastern part of the Czech Republic. Mucha was the eldest of six children, and his voice paid for his schooling: he sang well enough to join the cathedral choir in Brno, the main city of Moravia, which covered his secondary education.
Drawing was what he wanted. In 1878 he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, the leading art school of the Czech lands, and the academy turned him down, advising him to find a different career.
He went to Vienna instead, in 1880, and found work with a firm that painted theater scenery. Its most important client was the Ring Theatre, and when a fire destroyed that theater and killed hundreds of people, the firm let much of its staff go, Mucha included.
Penniless, he drifted to Mikulov, a small town in south Moravia, and sold portrait sketches of the local people. They sold well enough to bring a bigger commission: Count Karl Khuen Belasi, a landowner of the region, hired him to decorate his castle, Emmahof.
The count grew proud of his young painter and paid for his training, first at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and from 1887 in Paris, at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi, two private schools that took students outside the official system.
At the close of 1889 the count stopped paying, as a hard push toward independence. Mucha stayed in Paris and lived by illustration, drawing for magazines.
Gauguin, Strindberg and a poster due in six days
By 1893 he had a studio of his own on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, near his old school, and he invited the French painter Paul Gauguin, just back from Tahiti, to share it. Mucha photographed him there playing the harmonium, a small organ pumped with the feet.
His friends were artists, not clients. In late 1894 he also met the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, then living in Paris. Money was still short, and in the last days of that year Mucha spent his holidays at Lemercier, a large Paris printing house, checking proofs for a friend who was away.
What You'll Discover
Why a six-day deadline made him famous.
What six years with Bernhardt bought.
What gives a Mucha away.
Who paid for his real masterpiece.
Why the Gestapo came for him.