Alphonse Mucha E-Book

Patrick Bade

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 107

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910s, marking a return to the simplicity of natural forms, and changing the world of art and design forever. In fact, Art Nouveau was known to insiders as the “Mucha style” for the legions of imitators who adapted the master’s celebrated tableaux. Today, his distinctive depictions of lithe young women in classical dress have become a pop cultural touchstone, inspiring album covers, comic books, and everything in between. Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles offer readers an inspiring survey of Mucha’s career, illustrated with over one hundred lustrous images, from early Parisian advertisements and posters for Sandra Bernhardt, to the famous historical murals painted just before his death, at the age of 78, in 1939.

Leseprobe

Author(s):

Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles

Layout:

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bade, Patrick, author.

   [Mucha (1860-1939)]

   Alphonse Mucha / Patrick Bade [author] and Victoria Charles [editor].

      pages cm

   "Revised and enhanced edition. Patrick Bade and Jean Lahor, authors"--Provided by publisher.

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   1. Mucha, Alphonse, 1860-1939. I. Lahor, Jean, 1840-1909, author. II. Charles, Victoria, editor. III. Title.

      N6834.5.M8B33 2013

      709.2--dc23

           2013033094

©Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

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All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN:

Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles

Contents

Art Nouveau

The Origins of Art Nouveau

England: Cradle of Art Nouveau

Belgium: The Flowering of Art Nouveau

France: A Passion for Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris

The French Pavilion

The English Pavilion

The American Pavilion

The Belgian Pavilion

The German Pavilion

The Austrian Pavilion

The Hungarian Pavilion

The Dutch Pavilion

The Danish Pavilion

The Swedish and Norwegian Pavilions

The Russian Pavilion

The Finnish Pavilion

The Romanian Pavilion

The Swiss Pavilion

Mucha

Mucha and Art Nouveau

Mucha and Art Nouveau

Conclusion

Works

Graphic Works

Biography

Bibliography

Mucha in his studio,rue du Val-de-Grâce,Paris, c. 1898.

Biscuits Champagne Lefèvre-Utile, 1896.

Colour lithograph, 52.1x35.2cm.

The Origins of Art Nouveau

“One can argue the merits and the future of the new decorative art movement, but there is no denying it currently reigns triumphant over all Europe and in every English-speaking country outside Europe; all it needs now is management, and this is up to men of taste.” (Jean Lahor, Paris 1901)

Art Nouveau sprang from a major movement in the decorative arts that first appeared in Western Europe in 1892, but its birth was not quite as spontaneous as is commonly believed. Decorative ornament and furniture underwent many changes between the waning of the Empire style around 1815 and the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. For example, there were distinct revivals of Restoration, Louis-Philippe, and Napoleon III furnishings still on display at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Tradition (or rather imitation) played too large a role in the creation of these different period styles for a single trend to emerge and assume a unique mantle. Nevertheless, there were some artists during this period that sought to distinguish themselves from their predecessors by expressing their own decorative ideal.

What then did the new decorative art movement stand for in 1900? In France, as elsewhere, it meant that people were tired of the usual repetitive forms and methods, the same old decorative clichés and banalities, the eternal imitation of furniture from the reigns of monarchs named Louis (Louis XIII to XVI), and furniture from the Renaissance and Gothic periods. It meant designers finally asserted the art of their own time as their own. Up until 1789 (the end of the Ancien Régime), style had advanced by reign; this era wanted its own style. And (at least outside of France) there was a yearning for something more: to no longer be slaves to foreign fashion, taste, and art. It was an urge inherent in the era’s awakening nationalism, as each country tried to assert independence in literature and in art.

In short, there was a push everywhere towards a new art that was neither a servile copy of the past nor an imitation of foreign taste.

There was also a real need to recreate decorative art, simply because there had been none since the turn of the century. In each preceding era, decorative art had not merely existed; it had flourished gloriously. In the past, everything from people’s clothing and weapons, right down to the slightest domestic object – from andirons, bellows, and chimney backs, to a drinking cup – were duly decorated: each object had its own ornamentation and finishing touches, its own elegance and beauty. But the 19th century had concerned itself with little other than function; ornament, finishing touches, elegance, and beauty were superfluous. At once both grand and miserable, the 19th century was as “deeply divided” as Pascal’s human soul. The century that ended so lamentably in brutal disdain for justice among peoples had opened in complete indifference to decorative beauty and elegance, maintaining for the greater part of one hundred years a singular paralysis when it came to aesthetic feeling and taste.

Gismonda, 1894.

Colour lithograph, 216x74.2cm.

Mucha Museum,Prague.

Cassan Fils (print shop), 1895.

Colour lithograph, 174.7x68.4cm.

The Seasons: Summer, 1900.

Colour lithograph, 73x32cm.

The Mucha Trust Collection.

La Dame aux camélias, 1896.

Colour lithograph, 207.3x72.5cm.

The return of once-abolished aesthetic feeling and taste also helped bring about Art Nouveau. France had come to see through the absurdity of the situation and was demanding imagination from its stucco and fine plaster artists, its decorators, furniture makers, and even architects, asking all these artists to show some creativity and fantasy, a little novelty and authenticity. And so there arose new decoration in response to the new needs of new generations.

The definitive trends capable of producing a new art would not materialise until the 1889 Universal Exposition. There the English asserted their own taste in furniture; American silversmiths Graham and Augustus Tiffany applied new ornament to items produced by their workshops; and Louis Comfort Tiffany revolutionised the art of stained glass with his glassmaking. An elite corps of French artists and manufacturers exhibited works that likewise showed noticeable progress: Emile Gallé sent furniture of his own design and decoration, as well as coloured glass vases in which he obtained brilliant effects through firing; Clément Massier, Albert Dammouse, and Auguste Delaherche exhibited flambé stoneware in new forms and colours; and Henri Vever, Boucheron and Lucien Falize exhibited silver and jewellery that showed new refinements. The trend in ornamentation was so advanced that Falize even showed everyday silverware decorated with embossed kitchen herbs.

The examples offered by the 1889 Universal Exposition quickly bore fruit; everything was culminating into a decorative revolution. Free from the prejudice of high art, artists sought new forms of expression. In 1891 the French Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts established a decorative arts division which, although negligible in its first year, was significant by the Salon of 1892, when works in pewter by Jules Desbois, Alexandre Charpentier, and Jean Baffier were exhibited for the first time. And the Société des Artistes Français, initially resistant to decorative art, was forced to allow the inclusion of a special section devoted to decorative art objects in the Salon of 1895.

It was on 22nd December that same year that Siegfried Bing, returning from an assignment in the United States, opened a shop named Art Nouveau in his townhouse on Rue Chauchat, which Louis Bonnier had adapted to contemporary taste. The rise of Art Nouveau was no less remarkable abroad. In England, Liberty shops, Essex wallpaper, and the workshops of Merton-Abbey and the Kelmscott-Press under the direction of William Morris (for whom Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Crane provided designs) were extremely popular. The trend even spread to London’s Grand Bazaar (Maple & Co), which offered Art Nouveau to its clientele as its own designs were going out of fashion.

L’Estampe Moderne: Salomé (detail), 1897.

Colour lithograph, 40.6x30.7cm.

Poster for Salon des Cent: 20th Exposition (detail), 1896.

Colour lithograph, 63x43cm.

Poster for «The Cigarette Poster Job», 1896.

Colour lithograph, 66.7x46.4cm.

The Mucha Trust Collection.

Sarah Bernhardt as Princess Lointaine:Poster for the magazine La Plume, 1897.

Colour lithograph, 69x51cm.

The Mucha Trust Collection.

In Brussels, the first exhibition of La Libre Esthétique opened in February 1894, reserving a large space for decorative displays, and in December of the same year, the Maison d’art (established in the former townhouse of prominent Belgian lawyer Edmond Picard) opened its doors to buyers in Brussels, gathering the whole of European decorative art under one roof, as produced by celebrated artists and humble backwater workshops alike. More or less simultaneous movements in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Denmark (including Royal Copenhagen porcelain) had won over the most discriminating collectors well before 1895.

The expression “Art Nouveau” was henceforth part of the contemporary vocabulary, but the two words failed to designate a uniform trend capable of giving birth to a specific style. In reality, Art Nouveau varied by country and prevailing taste.

As we shall see, the revolution started in England where, at the outset, it truly was a national movement. Indeed, nationalism and cosmopolitanism are two aspects of the trend that we will discuss at length. Both are evident and in conflict in the arts, and while both are justifiable trends, they both fail when they become too absolute and exclusive. For example, what would have happened to Japanese art if it had not remained national? And yet Gallé and Tiffany were equally correct to completely break with tradition.

England: Cradle of Art Nouveau

In the architecture of its palaces, churches, and homes, England was overrun with the neoclassical style based on Greek, Roman, and Italianate models. Some thought it absurd to reproduce the Latin dome of Rome’s Saint Peter’s Cathedral in the outline of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, its Protestant counterpart in smoky, foggy London, along with colonnades and pediments after Greece and Rome, and eventually England revolted, happily returning to English art.

The revolution occurred thanks to its architects, first to A.W.N. Pugin, who contributed to the design of the Houses of Parliament, and later to a whole group of mostly Pre-Raphaelite artists who more or less favoured pre-pagan art of the 16th

Spring (from the Seasons series),1896.

Colour lithograph, 103x54cm.

The Mucha Trust Collection.

Summer (from the Seasons series),1896.

Colour lithograph, 103x54cm.

The main proponents of the new decorative art movement were John Ruskin and William Morris: Ruskin, for whom art and beauty were a passionate religion, and Morris, of great heart and mind, by turns and simultaneously an admirable artist and poet, who made so many things and so well, whose wallpapers and fabrics transformed wall decoration (leading him to establish a production house) and who was also the head of his country’s Socialist Party.

With Ruskin and Morris among the originators, let’s not forget the leaders of the new movement: Philip Webb, architect, and Walter Crane, the period’s most creative and appealing decorator, who was capable of exquisite imagination, fantasy, and elegance. Around them and following them arose and was formed a whole generation of amazing designers, illustrators, and decorators who, as in a pantheistic dream, married a wise and charming fugue to a delicate melody of lines composed of decorative caprices of flora and fauna, both animal and human.

In their art and technique of ornamentation, tracery, composition, and arabesques, as well as through their cleverness and boundless ingenuity, the English Art Nouveau designers recall the exuberant and marvellous master ornamentalists of the Renaissance. No doubt they knew the Renaissance ornamentalists and closely studied them, as they studied the contemporaneous School of Munich, in all the 15th and 16th century engravings that we undervalue today, and in all the Munich school’s niello, copper, and woodcrafts. Although they often transposed the work of the past, the English Art Nouveau designers never copied it with a timid and servile hand, but truly infused it with feeling and the joy of new creation.

If you need convincing, look at old art magazines, such as Studio, Artist, or the Magazine of Art, where you will find (in issues of Studio especially) designs for decorative bookplates, bindings, and all manner of decoration. Note in the competitions sponsored by Studio and SouthKensington