Very few of our artists can be said to have achieved real global recognition. And Alfons Mucha remains one of the most signi cant to this day. This July will see the seventyfth anniversary of his death, and so it would be a great shame not to commemorate this inimitable master of the Art Nouveau.
Alfons Mucha was born on 24 July 1860 in Ivancice. He studied at the Slavonic Grammar School in Brno. Having failed the entrance exams at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, he went to Vienna to work as a painter of stage sets. In 1885 he was accepted at the academy in Munich, and two years later he transferred to the Academy Julian in Paris. He became famous quite literally overnight thanks to the theatre poster Gismonda, which the Parisian actress Sarah Bernhardt had ordered from him. This was the start of the most famous period of his career, when Mucha remained and worked in Paris for several years. In 1906 he married Marie Chytilová and went to the USA, where he was welcomed as the world’s greatest decorative artist, but in spite of this Mucha longed to return home. He designed the rst stamps and banknotes of the independent Czechoslovak Republic. In addition to painting and graphic design, his work also included the design of interiors, dishware and jewellery, and also the design of a window in the cathedral of Saint Vitus in Prague (1931). Alfons Mucha was a great patriot, and throughout his life he dreamed of painting a series of large canvasses, the Slav Epic, in which he wanted to summarise the history of the Slav people. Mucha painted the series of large canvases between 1910–1928 and donated his work to Prague. The most famous Czech painter and master of the Art Nouveau died of pneumonia on 14 July 1939 following questioning by the Gestapo. He is buried at Vyšehrad.
Marcela Kohoutová
Nesouhlas se zpracováním Vašich osobních údajů byl zaznamenán.
Váš záznam bude z databáze Vydavatelstvím KAM po Česku s.r.o. vymazán neprodleně, nejpozději však v zákonné lhůtě.
