The posters that invented Art Nouveau, made in Paris by a Moravian who considered them commercial work and spent eighteen years on the epic he thought mattered.
The overnight success
On 26 December 1894, Alphonse Mucha was the only artist in a Paris print shop over the holidays when Sarah Bernhardt demanded a poster for Gismonda by New Year. He produced a tall, narrow, life-size lithograph in muted colours with the actress crowned in flowers — nothing like the loud commercial posters of the day.
It went up on 1 January 1895 and people cut them off the walls to keep. Bernhardt signed him to a six-year contract, and le style Mucha became Art Nouveau.
For the next decade he produced posters, decorative panels, biscuit tins, champagne advertisements, jewellery designs and a design manual, Documents Décoratifs, that spread the style across Europe.
What is in the museum
A private collection in a baroque palace, and it is compact — one floor, about an hour.
The posters: the Bernhardt series, the Seasons, the Flowers, the Precious Stones, and the commercial work for Job cigarette papers, Moët & Chandon and Nestlé.
Decorative panels, drawings, pastels and photographs — Mucha photographed his models constantly and the studio photographs beside the finished works show how much he worked from life.
Personal objects and a short film about his life, which is the part that reframes everything else.
The thing he actually cared about
Mucha regarded the posters as commercial work and was mildly embarrassed by his association with them. What he wanted to make was the Slav Epic: twenty canvases, several of them six by eight metres, telling the history of the Slavic peoples. He spent eighteen years on it, funded by an American industrialist, and gave it to the city of Prague in 1928.
The city has struggled with it ever since — it is enormous, it requires a purpose-built space, and it has been displayed in Moravský Krumlov, in Prague’s Veletržní Palace, and moved again amid legal disputes with Mucha’s heirs. Check where it currently is before planning around it.
If it is on show, go. It is a completely different artist from the one in this museum.
The context
Mucha returned to the new Czechoslovakia in 1918 and designed its first banknotes and stamps for nothing, as a patriotic gesture. He was among the first people arrested by the Gestapo when they entered Prague in 1939, interrogated, and died a few months later.
Elsewhere in the city
The Mucha window in St Vitus Cathedral.
The Municipal House (Obecní dům), where he decorated the Lord Mayor’s Hall — the finest Art Nouveau interior in Prague, seen on a guided tour.
Both are arguably better than the museum, and the museum is the best introduction to why they look like that.
More Museums
National Gallery — Veletržní Palace
Modern and contemporary art in a 1928 functionalist trade-fair building that Le Corbusier came to see and left rattled by.
Museum of Communism
Forty years of a system that shaped everyone here, told through a schoolroom, a shop with nothing in it, an interrogation room and the footage from November 1989.