Alfons Mucha, 1885

Enchanting women, streaming hair, flowing fabrics - these are the attributes one associates with Alfons Mucha's artistic ceuvre.
Alfons Mucha was one of the most fascinating artistic personalities of the turn of the century. His work is indissol-ubly linked with the style whose name was at the same time its programme: Art Nouveau. In line with the new movement's demands for a comprehensiveness of design, Mucha paid homage to the ideal of artistic versatility. He was not only a painter and graphic artist, but also took an interest in sculpture, jewellery, interior decorating and utilitarian art. His particular talents, however, lay in decorative graphics. This was the basis of his fame, and remains so today.

Largely as a result of the already highly advanced reproduction techniques of the time, his posters, panneaux decoratifs, calendars, occasional prints, magazine titles and book illustrations reached an extremely broad public and attained enormous popularity. Above all, however, with their catchily decorative motifs, their inexhaustible abundance of ornamental pictorial elements, and the terseness of their cal-ligraphically drawn lines, these compositions had in them the strength to shape a style. As the typical embodiment of the artistic endeavours of the years around 1900, the "Style Mucha" became the pattern for a whole generation of graphic artists and draughtsmen. His hallmark was the idealized, stylized figure of the beautiful or girlishly graceful woman, loosely but inseparably framed in an ornamental system of flowers and foliage, symbols and arabesques. As this was one of the most widespread pictorial motifs of the turn of the century, the "Style Mucha" came for a while to be regarded as synonymous with the whole Art Nouveau movement.

Although Moravian by birth and descent, Mucha experienced his greatest successes in Paris. His work documents the vital atmosphere of the city at a time when it was not just the capital of France, but the glittering cultural capital of the world; it captures the vitality of the fin de siecle and the belle epoque with all their worldliness and decadence, all their predilections and yearnings. He was positively showered with commissions, ranging from large-scale contracts such as the decoration of the Bosnia-Herzegovina pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition, the design of a number of theatre and exhibition poster, to advertisements for champagne, soap and confectionery. In 1900 his name was synonymous with fame, while critical opinion of his work in the years leading up to the Great War became increasingly controversial. In view of all this, it seems almost tragic that Mucha himself did not appreciate his outstanding talent as a genius of decoration and a virtuoso of form, and for a time was, if anything, worried about his reputation as the artist of a decorative style. He wanted above all to depict history, and in particular the history of his nation. It was to this task, which he viewed as a social mission, that he dedicated his entire artistic energy in the years after 1910. In the twenty monumental canvases which constitute his Slav Epic, he created a panorama of the history of the Slavs.