Alphonse Mucha Book Views
Synopsis:Among graphic artists and commercial designers, Alphonse Maria Mucha (1860-1939) is praised for his innovative style books that pioneered the use of Art Nouveau in commercial packaging, design, and ornament. The most important of these style books was DOCUMENTS DECORATIFS, published in 1901, and carefully reproduced here. Includes 18 plates in full color, 54 in two or more colors.
Of the three media in which he excelled, only the swirling sensuality of his decorative Art Nouveau panels is commonly known of Alphonse Mucha today. Yet this Czech-born artist, whose international popularity reached its zenith in the poster work he produced for actress Sarah Bernhardt in Paris in the late 1800s, also worked in oil painting, pastels, and in a host of related endeavors including motifs for jewelry and furniture, richly illustrated art books, even interior design. Alphonse Mucha, released in association with The Mucha Foundation in Prague, Czechoslovakia, presents a diverse sampling of Mucha's achievements, not only of the beloved graphics of the 'Mucha Woman' in all her guises, but of the less well-known works that form a glimpse into the well-roundedness of the artist: a different, more serious side, dark at times, and lit with a steady flame of nationalistic fervor.
Within the graphic design medium, Alphonse Mucha reveals the artist as a tireless and protean designer, with a capacity almost limitless in scope and application. From the decorative 'Mucha Woman' panels and Bernhardt posters, the survey of Mucha's graphic work goes on to include a widely varied selection -- fantastically ornamented pages from two of his illustrated books, Le Pater (M. Piazza et Cie: Paris: 1899) and Ilsee, Princess of Tripoli (L'Edition de Art, H. Piazza et Cie, Paris: 1897); Belle Epoque jewelry design and a boutique interior done for jeweler Georges Fouquet; and illustrations from Documents decoratifs (1902), Mucha's self-published handbook of designs for artists, itself a compendium of graphic motifs, botanic studies, and designs for articles of jewelry, tableware, and furniture, much of these imbued with a fantastical element of hypnotic line and neo-Egyptian ornament.
But straining at the focus of this intent is a second impulse, the impulse to show as many examples of the artist's varied bodies of work and bits of personal biographical additions as possible. It is this which renders Alphonse Mucha a kaleidoscope of samples, bright with color, marvelous in their variety, yet seeming to shift restlessly from one topic to another. The sections melt into one another somewhat confusingly, despite their opening annotations by Wittlich, et al., and with a little bite here, a little bite there, one is left wanting a bit more of everything. And, with a focus on the Parisian period for nearly half the book, Alphonse Mucha ends up including much that, though it may be evidence of the artist's talent, is 'merely decorative.' Mucha was a working professional, and though much of the Parisian material evokes that mystical combination of beauty and goodness described by Wittlich, a good deal of it is simply competent graphic design.
Alphonse Mucha Book Images
