RP206 Alphonse Mucha

 RP206 Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha wanted to be a serious painter. Well, first he wanted to be a serious singer, but when his voice broke, he turned to visual art. Born in 1860, he started working for a firm that made stage sets in 1879. Meanwhile, he practiced painting and applied to art schools. However, his stage and theater design experience would be far more useful than his art training.

Mucha finally got into art school in 1884. He painted portraits and other scenes, but painting wasn't a very good way to earn a living. To earn more money, Mucha made illustrations for books, magazines, and advertisements. In 1894, he made history with a poster.

Mucha got the poster job, an advertisement for the show Gismonda, unexpectedly. There was an emergency, and he volunteered to create the poster quickly. What he made turned the advertising world upside down. Mucha created a dramatic, vertically elongated poster with pastel colors, draping and floral details, and little text. This was a change from earlier, plainer, text-based posters. From then on, Mucha was in demand. His signature style came to define Art Nouveau: stylized figures, elongated shapes, natural curves, and plant imagery. Mucha's work often featured beautiful women in flowing robes.

For the next twenty years, Mucha made posters, illustrations, decorative panels, and even designed the facade and interior of a building. Most of these designs included natural symbols and patterns. Many were influenced by Asian silk-screen paintings.

For all his success, Mucha longed for respect as an academic painter. He began The Slav Epic around 1910. The twenty enormous paintings told the story of his native Czechoslovakia (formerly Moravia). He eventually gave this masterpiece to his country, which put it in storage for decades.

Mucha produced paintings after his success as an illustrator and designer, but they were never as popular as his other work. Still, his influence is far-reaching and long-lasting, lingering in every music or movie poster we see today.