From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Lithography is all about grease repelling water. The artist uses a fat or oil-based medium to draw on to the stone, which is then treated with an acidified gum arabic solution. Greasy ink sticks to the greasy drawing while water keeps the treated negative space free from pigment. There’s something magical about the way the stone remembers the image without the need for the sharp tools used to create woodblocks or etchings; there’s something mysterious about the painterly print the process creates. In terms of printing history, lithography, invented in 1796, is a relatively recent technique, and chromolithography – printing in multiple colours – was conceived several decades later. When Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 to a court usher and a miller’s daughter in a small town in southern Moravia, it was still a fledgling method. But by the end of the century, it would change his life.
Mucha started his artistic career as a scenery painter for the theatres of Vienna. After a fire destroyed the Ring Theatre, one of his employer’s largest clients, he returned to Moravia to work as a portraitist and decorative artist. A count became his patron, arranged schooling in Munich and, in 1887, funded a move to Paris. There, Mucha illustrated magazines, enrolled as a student of Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and shared a studio with Paul Gauguin. On St Stephen’s Day in 1894, he was doing a friend a favour, correcting proofs in Lemercier’s print shop. Printing studios are usually full of the noise of rolling machinery and squelching ink, but it must have been quiet that day as most of the regulars were off for the holiday. When Sarah Bernhardt called to request a new advertisement for her production of Gismonda, Mucha was in the right place at the right time.
Three colour lithograph posters designed by Alphonse Mucha for productions starring Sarah Bernhardt: Gismonda (1894), La Dame aux Camélias (1896) and Médée (1898). Photos: © Mucha Trust 2024
Gismonda was Mucha’s first poster, but it catapulted him to fame almost overnight. Bernhardt loved it – ‘you have made me immortal,’ she said – and contracted him for her promotional needs for the next six years. Mucha’s design was revolutionary. He placed two sheets of paper end to end for a longer, thinner format; Bernhardt stands tall, statuesque, regal. Tomoko Sato, curator of the Mucha Foundation and the brains behind the new Mucha Museum in Prague, sees the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) in Mucha’s style. That influence is on full display in Gismonda, from the thin shape to the floral motifs and unusual perspective: Bernhardt is depicted as though she is on stage and the viewers are in the audience below. But it was the way that Mucha combined the ‘Japonisme’ sweeping Europe with motifs from his own Slavic heritage that made his work such a sensation. Bernhardt is draped in a richly embroidered cloth and framed by a mosaic arch over a Byzantine cross. The poster almost looks like a religious icon. Immortal, indeed!
There is already a museum dedicated to Mucha in Prague, and this new museum is, slightly confusingly, located around the corner from it. Although the new museum’s website declares it ‘the only official museum dedicated to the artist Alphonse Mucha approved by the Mucha Foundation and endorsed by the Mucha family’, the old museum is still open and operational. The family have severed ties with that museum and all family-owned pieces have since been replaced in its collections. The new museum is in the Savarin Palace, a baroque building in Prague’s centre which the Czech property developer Crestyl is currently renovating to the tune of €25m. The exhibition, designed by Eva Jiřičná, occupies three historic rooms at the front of the palace – four, if you count the gift shop, which is laden with Mucha-printed tea towels, totes, tchotchkes, champagne. The rest of the site will be home to umpteen shops and restaurants. If, as the artist’s grandson says, the goal of this museum is partly to ‘dynamite’ the idea that Mucha was just a poster artist, a pen for hire, then a shopping mall seems like a strange place to do so.
Reproduction of The Slav Epic I – The Slavs in Their Original Homeland Between the Turanian Whip and the Sword of the Goths (between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD) (1912), by Alphonse Mucha. Collection of the City Gallery Prague. Photo: © Mucha Trust 2024
Nor does the collection inside impress upon visitors the full gamut of Mucha’s work. Organised in four sections – Mucha and his Homeland, ‘Le Style Mucha’ and Art Nouveau, Visionary Mucha, and The Slav Epic – the exhibition begins with a handful of family portraits and publication designs, before giving way to the advertisements and posters that make up most of the pieces on display. In the final room hang four reproductions of Mucha’s magnum opus, The Slav Epic (1910–28), a cycle of 20 massive canvases depicting Czech and Slavic history and mythology. One canvas shows a sea of white-clad pilgrims who, on their way to the temple of Svantovít, the Slavic pagan god of abundance and war, seem not to notice the battling gods above them. To the right, figures wearing traditional Moravian embroidery face off against the armoured enemy, who is led by a pack of snarling wolves. The scene represents the destruction of the temple by the Danes in 1168. The real canvases are hung in a castle in Moravský Krumlov, a couple of hours outside Prague. There is a plan for a Thomas Heatherwick-designed permanent space for the entire cycle in the underground portion of the Savarin development, but that’s a long way off.
The ceiling of the Mayor’s Hall, decorated by Mucha in the 1910s, in the Municipal House in Prague. Courtesy Prague City Tourism; © Archiv Obecní Dům
While visitors would get a better understanding of the artist’s range at the Mayor’s Hall in Prague’s Municipal House, which features murals, lighting fixtures and opulently embroidered curtains all by Mucha, or Mucha House – the family’s residence by Prague Castle, set up in the 1950s to resemble his Paris atelier and stuffed with his paintings and belongings – neither of these are open to spur-of-the-moment visitors. And despite its shortcomings, the new museum does give a sense of Mucha’s strongly held beliefs. He died in 1939, shortly after the Gestapo interrogated him. His nationalist, pan-Slavist ideals made him a target, as did his ties to the Freemasons and his Jewish wife. Masonic and Moravian symbols, such as the linden leaf, abound in his designs. In a poster designed to promote a lottery raising money for Czech schools in Moravia, Čechie, the symbolic national matriarch, is slumped on a dead tree, weeping, while a dejected red-haired girl clutching books and pens stares out. The colour palette is uncharacteristically dour for Mucha, but the figures portrayed could have walked straight out of almost any of the other lithographs displayed nearby – Princess Hyacinth, for example, with her auburn curls and cream-coloured robe.
The museum also hints at one answer to the question of what made Mucha’s posters so special. Among the most fascinating items here are early sketches for printed matter such as invitations and magazine covers. Mucha had a deep understanding of the printing process – a result of having spent a lot of time in print shops – and worked closely with lithographers to ensure that the prints matched his artistic vision. It was important to him that even his commercial pieces were executed to a high standard because it was those pieces, the ones pasted all over Parisian hoardings, that would be seen by the most people. And, as he did in all his work, he infused those pieces with Slavic motifs, placing his beloved homeland centre stage.
Princess Hyacinth (1911), Alphonse Mucha. Photo: © Mucha Trust 2024
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.