Art Attic #7: Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau

When I was seventeen or eighteen, I bought a print of Alphonse Mucha’s F. Champenois Imprimeur-Editeur, a stunning poster made to advertise his printer. Decades later, it’s framed and hanging in my dining room. Across from it hangs a large, framed print of The Seasons (1896). In my bedroom, the last thing I see when I go to bed is The Precious Stones (1900). 

It is safe to say that Alphonse Mucha is my favorite artist. 

Art Nouveau was an artistic backlash to the Industrial Revolution. Factories had powered a massive migration from farms to cities that were not prepared for the influx of people. This led to dark, overcrowded tenements; a complete loss of green spaces; and streets and rivers running rife with sewage. Coal-powered cities had dark, stinking skies. Without any regulations, it was easy to exploit workers, either with inhumane hours or an unsafe environment. 

Such horrific conditions (for the poor, this was inescapable) had people longing for the country. They imagined a simple life surrounded by cows and flowers, fresh bread and ripe berries.

Artists were embracing parts of new technologies (watercolor, for example) and rejecting others. Art Nouveau celebrated nature with floral motifs and fantasy with beautiful women with free-flowing romantic hair and gauzy gowns. Some poster artists insisted on hand lettering, which meant special plates had to be made to mimic their writing, but it would lend the mass-produced poster an air of being hand-made.

This complex space of mass consumption of the pastoral was Alphonse Mucha’s sweet spot. New advances in color and printing technology allowed for large, inexpensive prints to be sold for the first time. By the 1880s, posters became trendy decor. Mucha designed wine labels, tobacco ads, calendars, and famously posters. His commercial work meant that, unlike a lot of famous artists, he was able to make a living. While he considered his art to be a reflection of the folk art of his native Bohemia (now known as the Czech Republic) and not part of this new movement, time has firmly cemented him -- or rather his women -- as the face of Art Nouveau. 

But soon, these romantic designs disappeared. World War I snuffed out pastoral daydreams, replacing it with machine-loving Art Deco. Newer buildings -- Art Nouveau buildings --were destroyed in the war. The new style hadn't even made it to the United States before it fell out of favor. (There are some beautiful Art Nouveau buildings in Latin America.) Alphonse Mucha himself moved back to Czechoslovakia towards the end of his life. A famous supporter of Jews, he was investigated by the Gestapo multiple times before passing away right before World War II began. Eventually, Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Communist Party, who suppressed art they didn't think glorified the State. 

For a century, the art of Alphonse Mucha was rarely seen. Because of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the tireless work of Mucha’s son, Art Nouveau came roaring back in the 1990s, an impressionable decade for myself as an artist.

I have a few theories as to why this artist has had a grip on me for most of my life. 

• The unified color palette. Mucha's pieces are incredibly colorful, but no one color is pulling focus. Unified palettes can be created with any medium, but I think my watercolors would be the best at pulling off this softness.

• The gauzy clothes and creative use of headgear. The clothes were often just draped fabric held together with pins and ribbons. The headgear, repurposed jewelry. This approach removes the models from time and place.

• The contrast between the detailed faces and flat, fanciful hair. Mucha knew where concentrate his efforts: the face. His faces are soft and realistic while the hair is famously unrealistic -- macaroni, ropes, serpentine. This contrast frames the face, thus drawing even more focus to these ethereal women.

• I've always been a wordy person. I think I was reading by age three. The hand lettering in Art Nouveau has always drawn me in, each font meant to evoke something more than a message. (Compare this to the current ubiquitous bouncy cursive.) This will sound weird, but I prefer it when I can't read the text. The text is an ad, something I have enough of in life, thank you, but since I can't read French, it's always just been part of the art.

A few takeaways from my reading on Mucha:

• Use stencils and tracing paper. I'm always playing on hard-mode, trying to make everything from scratch. I need to utilize tracing paper and stencils more often to create deceptively geometric designs.

• Focus on the focus. I can get lost in details, and I've noticed a tendency to treat every inch of a piece like it needs the same type of rendering. But I need to step back and ask myself what the most important part of the piece is. Since I paint portraits, it's usually the face; that's where the story is. Making everything else stylized, gauzy or patterned will redirect the eye back to the face.

• The hands of Mucha’s women are never at rest. They are either holding something -- an advertised product or a symbolic plant -- or curled about a book, a chair, a cheek as a signal of repose. I need to stop overlooking the expressiveness of hands.

• Frame it. A frame makes the piece feel finished. It points the eye towards what's important, and breaking out of the frame makes even stillness feel dynamic.

I can't wait to see where this study takes me. For more on Alphonse Mucha, visit muchafoundation.org.