Alfonse Maria Mucha (24 July 1860 - 14 July 1939) was a Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist, most well known for his images of women. He produced many paintings, illustrations, advertisements and designs. He was born in Moravia, Czech Republic. He was very infuatial for many artist after him andhe is still big inspiration nowadays.
Mucha produced a flurry of paintings, posters, advertisements, and book illustrations, as well as designs for jewellery, carpets, wallpaper, and theatre sets in what was initially called the Mucha Style but became known as Art Nouveau.
He spent many years working on what he considered his fine art masterpiece, The Slav Epic (Slovanská epopej), a series of twenty huge paintings depicting the history of the Czech and the Slavic peoples in general, bestowed to the city of Prague in 1928. He had dreamt of completing a series such as this, a celebration of Slavic history, since he was young. Since 1963 the series has been on display in the
chateau at Moravsky Krumlovat the South Moravian Region in the Czech Republic.
By the time of his death, Mucha‘s style was considered outdated. However, his son, author Jiri Mucha, devoted much of his life to writing about him and bringing attention to his art. Interest in Mucha‘s distinctive style experienced a strong revival in the 1960s.
In Czech Republic, the new authorities were not interested in Mucha. His Slav Epic was stored for twenty-five years before being shown in Moravsky Krumlov and only recently has been Mucha museum established in Prague, run by his grandson, John Mucha.
ARTWORK:
Zodiac (1896), on the cover, is a prototypical work from Mucha‘s finest period; it was the first lithograph he made under contract with his printer F. Champenois and originally designed as an in-house calendar for the company. It became so popular that it had to be issued in a variety of formats, with and without text, with and without the calendar in the decorative panel at the bottom, and with and without Mucha‘s printed signature so that the public might collect and display it as they wished.
The floral and celestial elements are symmetrically arranged around a central exotic image, the head of a queen-like woman. The signs of the Zodiac are incorporated in a halo-like disc behind the woman‘s head, one of Mucha‘s customary motifs. Not only is she in placed in the center of a pair of concentric circles, but each of the ten visible Zodiac signs gets its own smaller disc.
The lithograph is printed in eleven colors: pink, light red, carmine red, beige, turquoise, brownish violet, ocher, dark brown, gray olive, silver, and gold. Some proofs before the edition were printed on satin instead of paper. Zodiac has previously appeared on the cover of at least one other medical journal.
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