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 selfconfidence 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).
