_____________________________
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
OF ALFONS MUCHA AND ART NOUVEAU
[This Liberal Studies lecture by Ian
Johnston, Emeritus Professor at Vancouver Island University, was first posted
in July 2004 and revised slightly in 2014. This document is in the public
domain and may be used by anyone, in whole or in part, without permission and
without charge, provided the source is acknowledged. For comments, questions,
corrections, and so on, please contact Ian Johnston]
SOME PRELIMINARY
OBSERVATIONS
“If anyone is destined to become an artist and follows
this career led by a mysterious and irresistible force, then it is Mucha. . . . He submits without argument, as he himself
says, to the commands of this watchful, protective force which propels him
through life as if he were sleepwalking, placing before his feet at decisive
moments the stops to success.” (Victor Champier,
quoted Mucha 95)
There is no doubt that of all modern Czech
visual artists Alfons Mucha (1860-1939)
enjoyed and continues to enjoy the most international recognition, influence, and
popularity (in marked contrast to his reputation within his own Czech
homeland). Those factors alone would be sufficient reason to make a study of
his work a central part of our studies in this course. However, many
details of this artist’s life also offer important insights into some of the
more complex issues facing Czech citizens generally, and artists in particular,
in the past century and a half, for he was inevitably caught up in and
influenced by many of the drastic changes which characterize the recent history
of the Czech people. While these details may not be necessary for study of his
artistic work (although some of them are extremely relevant), nonetheless they
are useful for our purposes, since one of our concerns in this course is to explore
as fully as we can in a very short time some of the cultural elements involved
in the emergence of the Czech Republic.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
The major details of Mucha’s early life can be summarized fairly quickly.
He was born in 1860 in Ivancice, a small town in
southern Moravia (near Brno), when what is now the Czech Republic was part of
the Austrian empire (which became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in
1867). His surroundings here were hardly cosmopolitan, for the area was,
in many ways, very traditional and, in comparison with large cities like Prague
or Vienna, behind the times. Hence, Mucha at
an early age was deeply influenced by traditional folk lore in a small
community, by eastern religious traditions, and by Slav nationalism (growing in
intensity under the determined efforts of the Habsburgs to “Germanize” the
Czech people, while at the same time permitting, or at least not repressing,
the rising expression of ethnic cultural interests, especially traditional
Bohemian and Moravian folklore). This environment helped develop in the
young Mucha an intense spirituality which
was to mark his character all his life (often in some decidedly unconventional
ways), along with an abiding commitment to Slav nationalism. Early on Mucha displayed a talent for music. The fact that he became
part of the cathedral choir in Brno indicates his considerable ability as a
young boy, at least until his voice broke.
Mucha also clearly had a great natural gift for art,
especially for drawing, his interest being aroused primarily by the art works
in the local churches. He was, however, rejected by Prague’s Academy of Fine
Arts, and so in 1881 he moved to Vienna in order to work professionally as a
scene painter in the theatre. Unfortunately his employer went bankrupt soon
after that, and Mucha lost his position. He
was, however, fortunate enough to attract the attention of a patron, Count
Carl Khen, who commissioned Mucha to work on his castle, restoring portraits and
decorating rooms with murals. Khen encouraged the
young artist to acquire some formal training and provided financial help, one
of the first of several truly lucky turns of fortune Mucha experienced
in his life.
Mucha’s first formal art training took place in Munich
(in the mid-1880’s) and from there he moved on to Paris (in 1887), taking
further training and trying to support himself as a working artist producing
magazine pictures, designs for costumes in operas and ballets, and book
illustrations. Count Khen’s financial help was
discontinued (in 1887) and, at 27 years old, Mucha was
left penniless in Paris, often with barely enough money to feed himself.
Mucha did, however, manage to survive these lean years
on income earned from his art work, none of which at this period was particularly
original or remarkable—he was a working artist taking small commissions to
support himself as best he could. His reputation was growing very slowly (at
least in Paris) and by the early 1890’s he had had some clear indications of
success, but there was nothing to indicate that his entire life was about to be
transformed by a single fortuitous event. Mucha’s son, Jiri, sums up this period of his father’s life as follows:
The poor, insignificant painter whom Gaugin had known at Madam Charlotte’s in
1891 was safely on the way to success when they met again two years later. He
still drew his main income from illustrations for Armand Colin, but he had
started on his first lithographs: an 1892 calendar published by Messrs Lorilleux, which consisted of twelve circular representations
of children playing with the symbols of the zodiac and twelve figural,
richly-decorated frames for the dates. He received 2,500 francs and a considerable
amount of publicity, as Lorilleux was an
important paint manufacturer and the calendar went to painters, art schools,
theatres, and periodicals. There was, however, nothing striking about the work.
The technique was traditional, using Renaissance motifs and a profusion of
allegorical figures. (54)
THE BERNHARDT CONNECTION
All this changed overnight in December 1894. Around
Christmas Mucha happened to drop into a
print shop where there was a sudden and unexpected demand for a new poster to
advertise a play starring Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in Paris. Mucha volunteered to produce a poster within two weeks,
and on January 1, 1895, the advertisement for Gismonda
appeared on the streets of the city. It was an overnight sensation and
announced that this hitherto largely unknown artist from a remote part of the
world had delivered a new artistic style to the citizens of Paris.
Today, when we are much more familiar with
designs like this, we may not sense the full impact of Mucha’s
poster, an effect heightened by Bernhardt’s shrewd business sense—the work
earned her a small fortune (Bernhardt always had a keen eye for business, even
though she later refused to sell her amputated leg to the famous show man
Barnum for 50,000 dollars):
Not until recently have posters attracted
the same critical attention as in the Paris of the eighties and nineties.
. . . Now, when Art Nouveau posters are a staple of fashionable interior
decoration, it is difficult to appreciate the impact of Mucha’s Gismonda, in
many ways the most impressive poster he ever produced. In 1895 its distinctive
shape, muted colouring and exquisitely
simplified draughtsmanship, allied to a Byzantine
richness of decoration, were completely novel. The poster’s obvious merit,
together with the publicity value of anything or anybody connected with
Bernhardt, ensured that within a week, Mucha was
the most talked about artist in Paris. (Henderson 10)
Anna Dvorak makes a similar observation:
. . . he succeeded in creating a poster so
different from others on the billboards, both in design and colouring, that from the beginning he was considered not a
follower but equal to the best artists of the period. For the life-size figures
of his Bernhardt posters Mucha chose an
extremely elongated shape, and in contrast to other poster designers he used
very pale colours—whites, beiges, mauves, dull
purples, reds and greens, with decorative touches of gold and silver. His
unusual posters were uniquely appropriate to the famous actress of whom Charles
Hiatt wrote that she had the ability to touch even a classical French drama
with the oriental, the strange and the exotic. (134)
The amazing success of this poster led to
a lucrative long-term contract with Bernhardt. He produced posters, costume designs, jeweliery and set designs—and his fame brought in an
enormous number of commissions. Under contract to the printer Campenois as well, Mucha produced
some of his best known works in the form of panneaux décoratifs—illustrated posters on high-quality paper or
fabric (like silk) used to decorate homes and stores. The popularity of these
designs led to the production of postcards and calendars. And he continued to
create advertising posters which have become famous and which remain today very
popular works of art (at least to judge from the number of internet sites devoted
to selling them). An important part of this remarkable achievement is Mucha’s work with lavishly illustrated books, Ilsée (1897) and Le Pater (1899), in which every page
is a carefully worked out artistic totality, there is virtually no empty space,
and everything has been brought into a dynamic linear harmony.
Looking at a selection of Mucha’s work from this period, one gets a sense of why
his art was so instantly popular. Rooted as it is in the folk traditions of his
home land, the style is very accessible, requiring little familiarity with artistic
traditions or modern conventions. The designs combine dynamic lines in the
geometric patterning with dramatic figures whose impact is heightened by the
way they emerge from or blend with that pattern. The colours
are generally understated, and the effect is carried by the superb linear
design and the harmony established between that and the human figure. Many of
the pictures radiate a sexual energy which emerges as wholly natural and
appropriate. Mucha’s portraits of women and
girls typically locate them in a design strongly evocative of nature or natural
patterning, and there is nothing about them of the high-society decadence which
we see, for example, in the work of his contemporary Gustav Klimt. Most of them
seem, by contrast, robust country girls, brimming with health and natural vigour and conveying an inborn self-confidence and directness
which has no malicious intent. It’s not surprising his designs
were so successful as advertisements for a largely urban population and
as decorative elements in the home (especially in an age with an increasingly
romantic view of nature).
This phase of Mucha’s career,
a period of extraordinary success with an enormous output, culminated in his contributions
to the Paris Exhibition of 1900, for which he designed and worked on the Boznia-Herzegovina Pavilion and contributed to other areas,
including his best-known sculpture. He also designed his most famous piece
of jewellery for Sarah Bernhardt.
When we consider this amazingly rapid and
wide spread success, we cannot attribute it simply to Mucha’s artistic
genius or to the commercial power of Sarah Bernhardt. For it’s clear that from
that first Bernhardt poster, which marked such a radical break with what he had
been doing before, Mucha had the supreme good fortune
to tap into the artistic spirit of the age—to be, as it were, the right man in
the right place at the right time. Although he himself constantly asserted that
he belonged to no artistic school and followed his own creative impulses, which
he saw as a natural evolution of traditional Czech art (Dvorak 135), there is
no doubt that his success was closely associated with the growing popularity of
the new trends in art sweeping across Europe, a movement that has come to be
called Art Nouveau. And so we need to interrupt our quick survey of Mucha’s artistic career to make a short excursion into
the wider artistic world of Art Nouveau.
ART NOUVEAU
Before attempting to clarify somewhat this
ambiguous term, I must establish two points. First, Mucha
never points associated himself with what was called Art Nouveau.
As Henderson points out, he disliked the name of the “movement,”
arguing that art was eternal and therefore could never be merely “noveau.” And he always insisted he followed his
own sense of the important spiritual purposes of art, deriving his main inspiration
from Czech traditions, rather than subscribing to the doctrines of any
particular school. So even though many others associated his work so closely
with Art Nouveau that they sometimes called it le style Mucha, that was not something which Mucha himself ever strove for or admitted.
Second, we must be careful in using the
term Art Nouveau not to overdetermine what
it means. The term is a useful way of indicating a spirit of reform, rebellion,
and freedom which swept through the art world at the end of the 19th century,
originating, as all such artistic changes do, in a strong reaction against the
prevailing styles in conventional art, especially as these were taught and practised in the schools, promoted in the Salons, and celebrated
in public architecture (in particular, the Historical Style, which made a great
deal of art and architecture rather tired, if often very grand, tributes to
earlier styles). But we must not expect the term to denote a carefully adhered
to specific program of action or clear rules for style among all those artists
we might want to place in this rubric. The “movement” contained artists whose
work at first glance seems entirely different, and in different countries the
changes were carried on under different banners with different
priorities.
These movements were all based on what was
fundamentally a common inspiration, though there were some striking differences
between individual artists and countries. Art Nouveau was at once homespun and
exotic, literary and plastic, mystical and erotic, futurist and traditional,
functional and fantastic. It was a perfect illustration of the Hegelian system
of contraries, extolled by Oscar Wilde, whereby an artistic truth is only valid
if its opposite is equally true. (Challié 9)
What these various movement did have in
common was a sense of trying something new, something which marked a decisive
break with the traditional style in art, in an atmosphere of giddy new freedoms,
a reinvigorating sense that art could and should matter—it should infuse the
often very decadent and tired emotional climate of the end of the 19th century
with a new sense of energy and spiritual purpose. In some places, the new art
movement went hand in hand with powerfully new political movements aimed at
doing away with an old, oppressive, and tired imperial order (this is especially
true in places where ethnic minorities were still under the thumb of the
German-speaking Austro-Hungarian empire—e.g. in Prague).
With these important caveats in mind, we
can discuss in summary form some of the more common elements running through
the Art Nouveau movement in its various manifestations.
The first important principle of the Art
Nouveau movement was a desire to get rid of the distinctions between high and
low art or major and minor arts. For many artists the essential thing was for
art to affect and unify the lives of the people, not just in expensive oil paintings
on rich people’s walls or in institutional salons, but in the essential objects
of their daily lives—their homes, furnishings, cups and saucers, advertisements,
wall hangings—everything from door handles to lamp posts and sewer gratings and
toilet seats. Even purely functional objects now largely machine made and mass
produced should be shaped by the decorative powers of art. Hence we see many
Art Nouveau artists, and Mucha in
particular, demonstrating an astonishingly wide range of artistic interests (in
his case from posters and paintings to lottery tickets, jewellery, police uniforms, designs for money, stamps, wall
hangings, and so on).
This emphasis on uniting beauty and
utility was at the heart of the most important social “message” of the new art
(something which earned it the name Art Social in some quarters).
It was inspired, in part, by a strong reaction against the ugliness of much of
the manufactured material which was increasingly dominating people’s lives and
making the very idea of the traditional artist-craftsmen obsolete (a response
very strong in the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the 1860’s, inspired by
John Ruskin and William Morris, who looked back with delight to the ideal guild
craftsmen of the Middle Ages).
Sometimes the social component of this
program was strongly emphasized, as in the project for an International
Exhibition of Art and Popular Hygiene, which would seek to link the most
mundane public institutions and facilities (railway stations, public houses, toilets,
and so on) with the spiritually energizing and healing powers of art. Not
surprisingly, in some places the new movement was quickly adopted by the socialists
and the free thinkers (Mucha 126) as a way of producing
a truly international style for all the people, while being fiercely opposed by
the Catholic Church and movements to preserve traditional morality.
A major formal inspiration for Art Nouveau
was the idea of nature as an endless source of design ideas, especially in its
flora and fauna and, above all, in its sinuosity, its development of asymmetric,
flowing lines which subvert attempts at static rectilinear structures (a feature
which brought it very close in some respects to aspects of Mucha’s inheritance from Moravian folklore).
The principal ornamental characteristic of
Art Nouveau is the aymmetrially undulating
line terminating in a whiplike, energy-laden movement.
. . . And yet this undulating line is only an external and limited aspect of
Art Nouveau. However fascinating the ornamentation may be, it contains a deeper
interest when seen in a larger context—in relation to an actual surface or to a
three-dimensional object. In the latter case the ornament may flame, grow,
coil, or nestle caressingly round the object. The style, in fact, has a
tendency to engulf and transform the object and its material, until this
material becomes an obedient mass in the thrall of linear rhythm. . . . The
ornamentation is always alive, restless, and at the same time balanced. . . .
Unlike the static ornamentation of nearly all other stylistic periods, in Art
Nouveau it is always at one and the same time moving and in a state of equilibrium.
Deep down there is a striving to subdue movement by means of well balanced
harmony. . . . (Madsen 15)
The term ‘flowering’ aptly describes an
art that was fundamentally inspired by nature. Hence, the cultivation of a
sense of intimacy in the second half of the nineteenth century by means
of sombre wall-hangings, curtains overladen with trimmings, heavy upholstery and indoor
gardens full of green plants, finally gave way to the need to observe the
outside world. All decoration was henceforth inspired by the forms of branches,
flowers and leaves. The straight line disappeared giving way to entanglements
of convolvulus an divy, to bouquets of iris
and cow-parsley. Sculptors responded joyfully by intermingling the female body
with forms of plant life and only tolerating a flat surface it if could be decorated
with marquetry, depicting a landscape or flowers
with the vividness of a painting. There was a sense of breaking free, of rejecting
all styles derived from the past, of renouncing tired formulas that had been practised for too long. A new type of furniture appeared,
like some mysterious plant springing up from the vegetation. Objects such as
lamps and vases assumed the forms of the tulip, cyclamen and iris. Fabrics
and wll-papers brought the colour
and gaiety of flowers into the interior of the house, newly opened to the light
of day. Such was the infatuation with nature that fashionable ladies were seen
to appear sporting complete gardens on their heads. . . . (Challié 7)
This emphasis on ornamentation and linear
patterning was not merely decorative. For many Art Nouveau artists the essence
of the style was the symbolic content in the pattern, which emerges as a visual
metaphor charged with spiritual energy and meaning:
Optimism and fatigue are symbolized by two
movements, an upward one and a downward one, which occur together in serpentine
sinusoids between two poles which attract alternately, thus formulating the profile
of the movement which can be seen in all structural and decorative elements.
The two mutually complementary poles are connected with specific human
destinies. Another aspect of this characteristic is Art Nouveau’s relationship
with music which acts as a catalyst of human experience. Music breeds rhythmic
movement and heartbeat. Art Nouveau is primarily a mimic art which evokes,
assumes, and in the end leads to a certain way of human behaviour.
(Franco Borsi, quoted Mucha 126)
How useful such a comment is for understanding
particular works is open to debate, but it is a reminder that, at least in the
eyes of its practitioners, Art Nouveau was never about mere decoration. Given
its sense of having an important social and political purpose and the emphasis
on symbols of spiritual energy, most Art Nouveau stands diametrically opposed
to the notion of Art for Art’s sake. It placed an enormous emphasis in the
possibilities for spiritual renewal through the new art and hence was for many
people, not simply a particular style, but a way of life. One of the most eloquent
and original embodiments of this vision is the Bilek
Villa in Prague, built in 1912 by the sculptor Frantisek Bilek according to a design based explicitly on the creator’s
very personal spiritual symbolism.
[Parenthetically, we should observe that,
for all his sturdy assertions of independence, Mucha,
along with other Art Nouveau artists, was very drawn to Henri Cazalis and his organization Societe
Internationale de l’Art Populaire, a group committed to infusing art with a strong
sense of social purpose. As Jiri Mucha observes, “Now, with . . . occultism on the one
hand and Lahor’s Art Social on the other, his
craving for ideal motives was at least partly satisfied” (123)]
As Madsen goes on to point out, this emphasis
on dynamic patterning of lines and natural shapes sometimes led to a very abstract
and structural-symbolic art, sometimes to a very floral and organic art (especially
in France) or to linear two-dimensional art, and sometimes to a constructive
and geometrical art (18-20), so that there is an enormous range included under
this one label. Art Nouveau furniture or glassware, for example, ranges
all the way from elaborately patterned and deliberately floral designs to much
sparer geometric forms, with no immediate reference to the sensuous particularity
of nature. And in architecture the term
Art Nouveau includes everything from the excessively dynamic designs
of the famous Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, who turned several buildings
in Barcelona into a showcase of his unique style, to the much “cleaner” Sezession-style buildings of Jan Kotera in
Prague (more about this later).
This new style was given many different
names and nicknames (often derogatory) in different places. The following is a
partial list (from Madsen and others): Paling stijl (eel
style), Schnörkelstil (scroll
style), Bandwurmstil (tape
worm style), gereizter Regenwurm (popping
up earthworm), Moderne Strumpfbanlinien (modern
suspender line), Jugenstil (young
style), Neu Stil (new
style), Neudeutsche Kunst
(new German art), Sezessionstil (secession
style), Stile floreale (floral
style), Stile Inglese (English
style), Liberty Style, Yachting Style, Style Métro, Noodle Style, Lilienstil (Lily style). The name Art Nouveau itself
derives from the name of a shop in Paris owned by Samuel Bing, who in 1895
renamed the store Art Nouveau. The popularity of the style and the store helped
to make the name apply more widely than originally intended (at least in
France). Bing commented later:
At its birth Art Nouveau had no pretensions
to being a generic term. It was simply the name of an establishment opened as a
rallying point for youth keen to show their modern approach.
(quoted Madsen 28)
This emphasis on the energetic and dynamic
patterning of lines was fuelled, too, by the revival of interest in Celtic art
and the passion throughout Europe and America for Japanese art, especially its
decorative elements, its exoticism, and its conception of space (see Madsen 58
ff)—all these seemed to offer artistic inspiration to those wishing to turn
away from conventional 19th century art and to find ways
of bringing fresh and exciting and
morally purposeful visual beauty into an age increasingly dominated by the
industrial city and the machine.
These various trends are well illustrated
in the way in which Art Nouveau pictured women—and portraits of women are astonishingly
frequent in the new art (especially in Mucha’s work).
Here again, there is a wide range of treatment, but one common image in
Art Nouveau is a single woman as the focus of the patterned lines, so that the
figure or the face is an integral part of the pattern and derives from it a
particular focus, strength, and intensity. Many of the best known paintings
from Art Nouveau (including Mucha’s work)
feature portraits of women
There is a often a powerful sense of
sexuality in these pictures—from Beardsley’s decadence in the illustrations for
Salome to the robust health and charm of Mucha’s country
girls to Klimt’s open eroticism. However much we might want to delve into the
psychological pressures promoting some of these visions of women, what I
find particularly interesting about many of these portraits is the directness
of the gaze and the confidence in the posture—these women are indeed sexual,
but they don’t strike me as mere playthings or objects, nor do they offer us
demure Victorian rectitude. They have about them a sense of themselves, of
their own passionate natures and their own power. The energy latent in the
patterning serves to charge them with a sometimes disturbing power and independence.
Klimt created an ideal type in his Viennese
woman: the modern female, slender as an ephebe—he
painted creatures of an enigmatic charm—the word ‘vamp’ was not yet known but
Klimt created the type of a Greta Garbo, a
Marlene Dietrich long before they existed in reality. (Bertha Zuckerkandl, quoted in Frodl 77)
Parenthetically, one might note here the
importance of these female illustrations in advertisements (a particularly
marked element in Mucha’s posters). Here,
for almost the first time we have major artists creating, as part of their most
lucrative and famous work, sexually charged portraits of women to sell market
commodities (from cigarettes and liquor to train tickets and bicycles). Again,
this is something we have grown accustomed to (depressingly so), but much
of Mucha’s popularity rested on the power
of these fresh images in his advertisements (a reminder of how capitalism can
simultaneously serve to liberate people from old ideas and traditional images
and attitudes, while at the same time creating new problems).
Another area where Art Nouveau had a direct
and lasting impact was in architecture, particularly in its tendency to develop
the structural elements in the construction (especially iron) so that they
served also as ornamentation for the building, an “architectural symbolism of
structure” (Madsen 104). In addition, in some Art Nouveau architecture,
especially with its most famous (or notorious) practitioner Gaudi, the body of
the building is developed as something very dynamic, sinuous, and rhythmic,
often with rounded corners and very non-traditional designs.
Art Nouveau architecture expresses a radical
division at the heart of the movement’s desire to reject conventional
historical models and return to nature, a paradox emerging out of
precisely what “appealing to nature” or “returning to reality” involved.
The interest of the modern movement in the
world of plants and nature in general had, without doubt, a deeper symbolic
meaning. It appears that this was an expression of the romanticism of the time,
a visual representation of the myth of nature as a paradise, which was seen as
a place of refuge by the same people who only a few years earlier dreamt about
the bygone world of the Prague Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque. . . . But the
wider contemporary concept of nature as “life” and “reality,” including the
reality of physical laws to which nature is subject and which modern architecture—albeit
timidly at first—tried to express, suggests also a different interpretation of
naturalism in the modern movement. Already in 1899, the critic K. B. Madl considered modern architecture to be a “realistic
architecture” that sought a precise form for “the support and weight, their
differences, transitions, and dimensions,” and whose decorative aspect, spare,
precise and atmospheric, “found its point of departure in the real
world.” It appears that the early modern attitude toward nature, or rather
toward reality, was characterized by a certain duality: in it romanticism
mingled with realism, dreams with actuality. (Svacha 61)
This perceptive observation helps to account
for the co-existence within Art Nouveau of some of the features we have mentioned
earlier, elaborately naturalistic floral designs together with increasingly
pure geometric form. And it enables one to understand how the reactions against
Art Nouveau, particularly the emphasis on certain forms of ornamentation, could
arise from the within the most cherished ideas of the “movement.” For
some of the harshest attacks on Art Nouveau were inspired by a strong reaction
against the way some forms of it promoted excessive ornamentation (which, in
turn, was often associated with sexual decadence). The following excerpt (which
may reveal more about the writer than about Art Nouveau) comes from a
well-known and often quoted essay (“Ornament and Crime”) by Czech-Austrian architect
Adolf Loos (b. 1870), who was determined to
show that anyone with “an inner urge to smear the walls with erotic symbols”
was hopelessly depraved:
It is natural that this instinct become
unleashed and evokes such displays of degeneracy mainly public facilities. We
can measure the culture of a nation according to the degree of wall scribbling
in the the lavatories. With children it is a natural
phenomenon, their first artistic expressions are erotic symbols scribbled on a
wall. But what is . . . normal with a child becomes a manifestation of
degeneracy in modern man. I have come to the following conclusion which I am
donating to mankind as a present: the development of culture is concurrent with
the removal of ornaments from objects of daily use. . . . the first
ornament born, the cross . . . is of erotic origin.
The horizontal line is a lying woman, the vertical one, a man penetrating
her . . . (Adolf Loos, quoted Mucha 128).
Madsen lists some other important features
of Art Nouveau architecture, as follows (in brief): an emphasis on asymmetry and flattened arches, a tendency to merge
one room into another, so as to create a more organic sense of the division of
space (which was accompanied by an organic principle in the ground plan—the
attempt to make the building seem to rise from the ground), and the use of
the façade as a decorative surface to celebrate the “symbolic value of
ornament.”
Prague is famous for its Art Nouveau architecture,
and many of the most important buildings from the turn of the century are
excellent tributes to the style. In some famous examples, the Art Nouveau elements
are combined with traditional historical styles to create florid dramatic
architectural statements, for example, the famous Municipal
House, in which new style serves to heighten the appearance of a design
still deeply rooted in the late Renaissance and baroque (see Svacha 39). The similarities between the new style and
some elements of the Gothic and the baroque made such combinations attractive
to those promoting developments in the prevailing historical styles, projects designed
to meet the demand for new buildings that would contribute to the rich architectural
traditions of the city.
A transition away from Art Nouveau was realized
in the work of Jan Kotera, who became Prague’s
most famous Art Nouveau architect and, at the same time, shifted the emphasis
from the natural lyricism most closely associated with the new style into
something that more obviously anticipated future directions in modernism.
Against the “aesthetic of impression” he
posed the demand for truthfulness. . . . Against excessive respect for
tradition and mere combining of historical features he posed the demand for
creativity, a characteristically modern argument, as the modernists did not
recognize the return to tradition as a creative act. Finally, against the
primary interest in the facade and its decoration, he articulated the need to
start with the purpose of the building, with the space and its constructive
expression. . . . In his analysis, Kotera described
architects’ work as “creation of space,” then “construction of space” based on
“the eternal natural theme of support and weight,” and, finally, he mentioned”
decoration, adornment,” the function of which was to articulate and enhance
“mass defined in clearly constructive terms.” (Svacha 48)
In Kotera’s work
and in the work of his pupils (as Svacha points
out) Art Nouveau architecture moved seamlessly from sensuous and ornamental
tributes to nature (at least in the exterior appearance of buildings) to “a
world of rationally abstracted tectonic forces, and the softly shaped silhouette
was replaced with a solid, geometrically defined body.”
It is not my concern here to trace the
history of Art Nouveau (since our main focus is on Mucha,
to whom we shall return in a moment). But it’s interesting that this explosive,
visionary, and widespread movement died off even more quickly than it had at
first appeared. By 1905, the popularity of the style was largely over in Paris.
The movement was kept alive by a few artists, at least until the outbreak of
war in 1914, but that ended it. Given its significant popularity in all sorts
of artistic fields, one might well wonder why Art Nouveau disappeared so
quickly.
Because Art Nouveau was highly individualist,
based above all on the artist, its practitioners could not solve the problem of
machines and the mass production of common consumer objects. Hence, Art Nouveau
style “never became a style for the masses, but remained an ‘artist’s’ style for
the select few . . . . To a large extent it was a jewellery style,
a deluxe furniture style, a style for connoisseurs of glassware and elegant
textiles” (Madsen 234). Once the initial artistic excitement and feeling of liberation
had passed, there emerged a sense that Art Nouveau artists had not really
jettisoned the traditional notions of ornament but had simply created a new
style of ornamentation—and a very expensive style at that.
This judgment is undoubted too severe, for Art Nouveau
made important contributions to the development of some areas of modern art and
architecture—particularly in its break with prevailing styles—and is historically
an important transition point in the development of modern art:
Even though the Art Nouveau style in
architecture and painting points the way to the twentieth century, this is not
where it belongs. Nor does it belong to the nineteenth century. Art Nouveau is
an independent transitional phenomenon, a separate style which had deep roots
in the nineteenth century as far as theory of art, art history, and the history
of style are concerned, but whose entire aim was to shake off its stylistic
heritage and create something completely new. Just as certainly as it had its
roots in Historicism, so Art Nouveau foreshadowed the Modern Movement. In many
respect, it led the way into the twentieth century, clearing the ground and
preparing for the artistic development we have all experienced. (Madsen 238)
It may be true also that Art Nouveau never
really resolved the central dilemma of form and content in its art and hence
was overtaken by the inevitable developments of artistic modernism, the trend
towards increasing abstraction in art and purism in architecture. The following
comment on the work of Gustav Klimt might well be applied to the entire
movement:
Torn between content and form, he embraced
the latter, only to find that it led him nowhere. Klimt was not able to
make the great leap: to perceive form as content and thereby
progress toward true abstraction. He was thus ultimately unable to solve the
riddle of fin-de-siecle art, for the
alternative path—content as form—would be explored not by him but by the Expressionists. The
great paradox of Klimt’s career was that, while he failed to
effectively link up with later modernism, he nonetheless anticipated its two
principal trends: abstraction and Expressionism. (Kallir 11)
Jiri Mucha suggests
also that the rapid decline of Art Nouveau had less to do with the artistic
style itself than with the “idealistic sermons and theosophical messianism” that often accompanied it. As the politics of
the early twentieth century became increasingly cruel and confused, people
turned away quickly from what seemed to many a strange, naïve, and ornamental
irrelevance.
MUCHA AND SLAV
NATIONALISM: THE SLAV EPIC
As mentioned above, Mucha did not see himself as a follower of Art
Nouveau, nor did he seem to take much interest in its theoretical principles.
However, his art was certainly influenced by the spirit of the time, a force
that fed his naturally passionate convictions about the vital spiritual purpose
of art, a belief that led him to devote considerable energy attempting to
promote reforms in the teaching of art in France and to publish books illustrating
his design principles.
What sets Mucha apart
from almost all other artists in the “movement,” however, is another passion
which increasingly dominated his personal and working life—his commitment to
Slavic culture. He was deeply convinced, no doubt on the basis of his own experience,
that art should not concern itself with what was merely new but should develop
itself out of old ethnic and national traditions: “The Ecole
Estienne,” he wrote (in his reform proposals for Paris art schools) “is
standing guard over a corpse . . . It is good to cultivate tradition in art,
but at the same time . . . the tradition must be that of the art of your
ancestors and one must wish to conserve life by helping forward its organic
evolution (quoted Mucha 181). Given such a
nationalistic view of art, Mucha had little
time for the notion of an art which sought to transcend ethnic and national
boundaries, “There is therefore no such thing as international art. Such art
can always only be the victory of the stronger and the absorption of the
weaker.”
In 1900, at the height of his fame as an internationally
known artist, Mucha decided to prepare for
his commission to create the Bosnia-Herzegovina pavilion for the
World Exhibition in Paris by touring the Balkans. On this trip Mucha was inspired to commit himself and his art to
his Slav heritage. The decision was accompanied by a sense of disillusionment
with the style which had made him famous and rich (perhaps the disillusionment
prompted the visionary insight). Upon returning to Paris he wrote to a friend
about what had happened:
It was midnight, and there I was all alone
in my studio in the rue du Val-de-Grace among my pictures, posters and panels.
I became very excited. I saw my work adorning the salons of the highest society
or flattering people of the great world with smiling and ennobled portraits. I
saw the books full of legendary scenes, floral garlands and drawings glorifying
the beauty and tenderness of women. This was what my time, my precious time,
was being spent on, when my nation . . . was left to quench its thirst on ditch
water. And in my spirit I saw myself sinfully misappropriating what belonged to
my people. . . . I was midnight and, as I stood there looking at all these
things, I swore a solemn promise that the remainder of my life would be filled
exclusively with work for the nation. (quoted Sayer 19)
While this experience did not lead to an
immediate change in Mucha’s artistic output
or style, the newly acquired commitment to his countrymen led Mucha to spend a major part of the rest of his life
concerned with Czech art, particularly because, in his eyes, it was being
dangerously corrupted by foreign, especially German influence. So he hurled his
energies into advancing the cause of art in his own country.
Here, however, he ran into a difficult
obstacle—the Czech people themselves, who, while justly proud of the fact that
one of their countrymen was the best known and most popular artist in Paris and
an international celebrity, regarded him as someone who had, in effect, “sold
out” by leaving the country and becoming famous elsewhere (another example of
what seems to be a pronounced tradition in Czech culture generally, up to and
including Milan Kundera). In addition, defenders
of what was Czech in Czech culture were often, as Jiri Mucha points out, hopelessly parochial in what they
required for art to qualify as some expression of their national character
(e.g., peasants in costume, sentimental images of Czech history):
This was the great paradox of Czech
nationalism. In its blindness and thinly-veiled chauvinism it branded every
demonstration of personality as non-Czech, since from the frog’s-eye view of
its own puddle such manifestations had certainly very little to do with Czech
reality. (198)
When Mucha visited
Prague (in 1902) he had to confront this attitude of his countrymen directly
(and not for the last time). The fact that many of them considered him a
Frenchman was a painful wound to someone with such faith in his Slavic identity
and such a desire to put his work into the service of his country. Later,
when Mucha was given the commission to
design the decorations for the New Municipal Building in Prague, there was an
outburst of public criticism at the choice, in spite of the fact that Mucha refused any payment for the work (other than his
immediate expenses).
There is a certain irony here in the fact
that an artist so committed to spiritual and nationalistic goals should have
become internationally famous largely on the basis of his advertisements,
posters, and decorative designs in the service of the market place. His
inspiration may have been, as he constantly asserted, themes and designs from
the folk lore of his Czech past, but that is not how all of his countrymen
viewed his work. This tension, it seems clear, affected Mucha himself and made him sensitive to the charge
that he was becoming far too commercial (as his comments quoted above appear to
indicate). What compounds this irony, of course, is that the more Mucha dedicated his talent to his country, the more
the quality of his art appeared to suffer, at least in the view of a number of
commentators (more about that later).
Given Mucha’s commitment
to the spiritual function of art and to the Slavic people, he found it relatively
easy to move on away from Paris into other projects. Hence, his career was not
adversely affected by the rapid loss of interest in Art Nouveau. His post-Paris
career began with one of many visits to America (in 1904) in search of inspiration
and (of course) more money—Mucha’s spending
habits left him in constant need of fresh commissions, and America seemed a
lucrative market.
Mucha did get work in America and, in fact, while
there said farewell to a purely Art Nouveau style—according to Jiri Mucha, the decoration
for the German theatre in New York was the last work he did in this style—and
committed himself to a single project that would take him most of his life to
complete—his series of monumental paintings on the history of the Slav people,
a work known as the Slav Epic. In America he also had another great
stroke of good fortune: he met the man who was prepared to provide the funding
for this massive project. This patron was the rather odd and (in some
people’s eyes) sinister American millionaire Charles R. Crane, who had made a
fortune in plumbing. He used his money to promote political upheavals and
revolutions around the world (among the Chinese, Kurds, and Turks, for
example). A meeting with Thomas Masaryk, a professor of philosophy at Charles
University (and later the first president of an independent Czechoslovakia) had
aroused Crane’s interest in promoting Slav nationalism. In Mucha he believed he had found an artist whose
passionate imagination could lend fire to the movement.
At any event, with Crane’s backing, Mucha returned to Prague in 1910 to work on his Slav
Epic paintings (the largest of which was eight metres
by six metres). While he continued to work on
portraits and posters and other commissions, this massive project remained the
centre of his creative life for over twenty years, and he often worked nine or
ten hours a day on the series (Mucha 277). The
paintings, some of which had been on display in America and Chicago earlier in
the 1920’s, were officially handed over the people of Czechoslovakia on 1
September 1928, a free gift from Mucha to
the newly independent Czech nation.
[The Slav Epic] has twenty
paintings, ten on Czech subjects, ten on broader Slavic themes. The
first depicts “The Slavs in Their Original Homeland . . .” and carries the
subtitle “Between the Knout of the Turks and the Sword of the Goths.” The
last is “The Apotheosis of the History of the Slavs.” In between this
somber beginning and translucent ending, Mucha paints
an odyssey that runs from paganism through “The Introduction of the Slavonic
Liturgy (Praise God in Thy Native Tongue)” . . . to “The Abolition of Serfdom
in Russia, 1861. . . .” He depicts the Bulgarian czar Simeon (888-927),
the coronation of the Serbian czar StephenDushan (1346),
and the defense of Sziget against the Turks
by the Croatian hero Nicholas Zrinsky (1566).
But it is his choice of Czech subjects which is most interesting. Six of the
canvases are on broadly Hussite themes
(“Jan Milic of Kromeriz 1372,”
“Master Jan Hus Treaching in the Bethlehem
Chapel 1412,” “The Meeting at Krizky 1419,”
“After the Battle of Vitkov 1420,” “Petr Chelcicky at Vodnany 1433,” and “The Hussite King Jiri z Podebrad 1462”).
Two more (“The Printing of the Kralicka Bible
at Ivancice 1578” and “Jan Amos Komensky--Last Days in Naarden 1670”)
invoke the legacy of the Union of Brethren and the tragedy of Czech Protestant
exiles after [the Battle of White Mountain]. Premysl Otakar II, perhaps the most famous the Premyslidkings, is also included for “Unity of the Slav Dynasties
1261.” (Sayer 152)
The reaction to the paintings was mixed
(and remains so up to the present time). Jiri Mucha comments that the press was generally receptive
and favourable but that the paintings did attract a
wide range of negative comments as well. To the socialists and communists, the
work was “a tool of the reaction . . . the banner of those who most impede and
prevent the development of art” (Rude pravo,
the official publication of the Communist Party, quoted Mucha 277), and the works were no more popular at the
other end of the political spectrum: J. R. Marek,
a writer for the extreme right-wing group commented on “an insoluble
contradiction between the beautiful and certainly ardently felt contents, and an
externally theatrical execution” (quoted Mucha277).
It’s important to remember the charged political
climate of the time, with Fascists, Communists, Social-Democrats, Slav Nationalists,
ethnic Germans and Czechs, among others, all competing for the political soul
of the new Czechoslovakia. Where one stood on the question of the
country’s most internationally famous artist and his vision of the national
soul was an important indication of one’s political convictions. And, of
course, for those experimenting in new styles in art in a new cosmopolitan and
international spirit, the Slav Epic was a useful example of
everything they considered wrong with traditional art, not merely in terms of
aesthetic style but also in its inspiring idea, Slav nationalism, which for
many was by now a sentimental illusion.
In modern times, the mixed response remains.
Jiri Mucha quotes
the following passage (written by Jana Brabcova in
1980):
The public of Mucha’s homeland
received the Epic with mixed emotions, one can even say with disfavor
for the most part. They looked at it as a work whose ideas and intentions
were out of tune with the time of its origin. But they were aware of the
sincerity and the honest effort that went into the creation of the whole
series. It came to be viewed as one of those controversial artistic errors
which make us feel both respect and pity for the amount of work expended on
it. (277)
Even Jiri Mucha himself, a tireless champion of his father’s
work (without whose intense efforts we might not know much about Alfons Mucha), expresses his
own reservations about some of his father’s later work (including, one assumes,
aspects of the Slav Epic):
A certain negative reaction which I share
to some of father’s later work cannot be ascribed to the message which he put
in it but to its insufficient artistic execution. Like Tolstoy, he sacrificed
form to didactic content. His professional skill was such that he no longer
needed to solve any problem of colour or line but
just keep pushing his fixed idea on the people: solidarity between nations
whose historic misfortunes had been the result of permanent discord. He
believed that the time had come for the Slavonic element to steer the course of
history. . . . He was, to me, a sinister warning against the mistake an artist
should never commit. But I must stress that I am speaking here only of one aspect—of
a few of his pictures from his later period. (286)
The final word here on these extraordinary
paintings should come from Derek Sayer’s perceptive
observations, which seek to place them in the grander narrative of modern Czech
culture:
That Mucha freely
mingles pagan, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant references in a paean to
Slavism is interesting. On one level his indiscriminate plundering testifies to
just how secularized religion had by then become. But it equally witnesses the
ascension of the national and the ethnic into the realm of the sacred. . . .
The paintings . . . are not historical illustrations but the exact opposite:
history serves in them as itself the illustration of the national and Slavonic
Idea that animates them. But Mucha paints
with such power and beauty that this space, and the idea which structures it,
becomes real; very much more real, in its immediate and imposing presence, than
the distant history it reorders (and disorders). . . . an ideal coherence
is hypostasized out of fragmented, fluid, and localized particulars, then
variously reified and compellingly re-presented. Henceforth it is only within
the semantic space thus reconstructed that these particulars—a girl’s dress, a
nursery rhyme, a legend, a date, a manner of speaking—come to signify at all.
(153)
In addition to this extraordinary gift to
the Czech people, Mucha worked tirelessly
and without commission on a large number of special projects for the newly
created government, designing everything from bank notes and stamps to the
national emblem and the police uniforms. One interesting tale from these
projects concerns the design of the new Czech money in 1918. The demand for a
design was so urgent that an earlier portrait of Mrs Josephine
Crane Bradley, representing the traditional figure Slavia,
was the main symbol on the 100 crown note (Mucha 236).
When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia and
divided the country up into Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia (in 1939) Mucha was one of the first of those arrested by the
Gestapo. He was released shortly afterwards, but became ill with pneumonia. He
died on July 14, 1939, just before his seventy-ninth birthday. In July 1939 his
countrymen gave him a hero’s funeral as a “a great Czech” (quoted Sayer 22) in a large public ceremony in Vysehrad Cemetery in Prague, where the most important
creative artists among the Czech people are buried. His eulogy, Sayer notes, was delivered by Max Svabinsky on behalf of the Czech Academy of Arts and
Science. It ended as follows:
Maestro! You have brought to an end a
great work and are departing to eternal sleep. The Czech nation and Prague are
burying you in the most sacred place, in Vysehrad,
in the most noble place, in the Slavin [burial
vault for great Czech artists]. In Vysehrad,
seat of the Princess Libuse [a mythical
Czech heroine], you will talk with Bedrich Smetana,
with Antonin Dvorak, with the great Mikolas Ales, with Jaroslav Vrchlicky, with Josef Myslbek,
with the young Jan Stursa and with the
whole company of our great minds. You will look at Hradcany and
Saint Vitus Cathedral. Dark autumn clouds
will scud above your head and winter will cover Slavin with
ermine snow, but spring will come again, the meadows and woods will flower in
the Czech land, in Vysehrad the lilac will
bloom and the honeysuckle will bloom on Ales’s grave.
In Vysehrad nightingales will sing. Rest
sweetly in eternal peace! The Czech nation has never forgotten its great
sons and never will forget them. Let it be so! (quoted Sayer 20)
The tribute here (as Sayer reminds us) is more a product of the historical
moment, however, than a tribute to the popularity or national significance
of Mucha’s art. For the funeral of Alfons Mucha was, first
and foremost, an assertion of the Czech identity in the early months of a
brutal Nazi occupation--a moment of popular passive resistance, an act of
defiance against the occupying authorities who had banned all public
demonstrations (22). Once the historical situation changed, the work of Alfons Mucha was shoved
aside, and no government officials after World War II bothered about finding a
suitable place to house his massive gift to the nation (it remained rolled up
in storage for more than twenty-five years, before being put on permanent display
in the remote town of Moravsky Krumlov, near Brno). To judge from the lack of interest in
exhibiting his work or celebrating his memory inside Czechoslovakia,
particularly in contrast to the frequent displays of and interest in his work
in the West, one would have to conclude that his impact on his countrymen’s
sense of themselves and their culture has been insignificant (see Sayer 249 ff). But then again, that may well be the
result of one more of the twisted ironies of Czech history rather than anything
to do with the formal properties of the works themselves:
The reasons why Alfons Mucha was all but obliterated from official national
memory after 1948 . . . cannot have been those for which his work was
criticized earlier by his more modernistic Czech contemporaries. . . .
the media through which art was made public were controlled by the state,
that is to say the Communist party of Czechoslovakia. . . . If an artist
of Mucha’s stature was “forgotten” it was
not by accident. Nor will it have had overly much to do with questions of
aesthetics. Alfons Mucha was
an incidental causality of a much wider war for the soul of the nation. (Sayer 257)
That “war for the soul of the nation” is
not over, of course, and, judging from the many unexpected turns of Czech
history, it would be unwise to declare any cultural door permanently closed. Mucha’s work is still extremely popular in the West
(especially with the renewed interest in Art Nouveau), and there is now a modest Mucha Museum in Prague itself (operated by the
artist’s grandson). His dream of Slav nationalism is long out of date, of
course (as it was at the time he donated his mythical re-interpretation of
Czech history to his countrymen). No doubt, there is much irony in the story so
far. Now that so many Slavic people have gained political and national
independence and the Czech Republic has become truly a Czech nation, Mucha’s vision of the emancipation and free expression
for Slav people is a reality in his own land. On the other hand, one does
wonder what he would think about the spiritual consequences of those trends propelling
his country more and more into the sphere of Western corporate capitalism, the
greatest homogenizing force the world has ever seen. With his own commercial
work in the service of that economic enterprise still very popular and
his Slav Epic an increasingly sought out tourist destination
for Western visitors, the ironies of Mucha’s position
in the history of modern Czech culture are evident enough.
WORKS CITED
Buffet-Challie, Laurence. The
Art Nouveau Style, Rizzoli, NY 1982
Dvorak, Anna. “Illustrations for Books and Periodicals.” In Alphonse Mucha: The Complete Graphic Works. Ed. Anne Bridges.
NY: Harmony, 1980.
Henderson, Anna. “‘Women and Flowers’: The Life and
Work of Alphonse Mucha.” In Alphonse Mucha: The Complete Graphic Works. Ed. Anne Bridges.
NY: Harmony, 1980.
Madsen, S. Tschudi. Art
Nouveau. Trans. R. I Christopherson.
NY: McGraw Hill, 1967.
Mucha, Jiri. Alphonse Mucha: His Life and Art. NY: St Martin’s Press, 1966.
Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998.
Svacha, Rostislav. The
Architecture of New Prague 1895-1945. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995.