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 Stephen Dushan (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.
