After a successful tour of the exhibition of Alphonse Mucha’s work in Japan and Hungary, organised by the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech visitors will be able to view a selection of the artist’s paintings and prints.Around a hundred key works will be on show, representing a cross-section of Mucha’s art: posters, drawings, pastels and watercolours, supplemented by photographs and preparatory sketches for Mucha’s decorative commissions.
The very fi rst Brno exhibition of Alphonse Mucha's posters was held in the Museum of Applied Arts while the artist was still alive, in October and November 1936. It was accompanied by a catalogue with texts by the artist and František Žákavec, a renowned Czech professor of art. After a long period in which Alphonse Mucha's importance was sidelined, interest in Mucha's posters and paintings was revived by the Brno art historian Jana Smejkalová, who organised an exhibition of his posters in the Moravian Gallery in 1979, and in the following year presented a selection of the artist's paintings. 14 July 2009 will mark seventy years since Alphonse Mucha's death. The exhibition of his work will be an opportunity to commemorate the signifi cance of this worldfamous artist, born in Ivančice, not far from Brno, who became, alongside Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the founder of the art nouveau art poster and a prime mover of the style termed, in relation to his aris work, "le style Mucha", in the art milieu of Paris at the turn of the 19th century. Mucha's muse was, as luck would have it, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, one of the fi rst icons of popular culture. Beyond doubt, Mucha's work from the period when the charismatic spirit of this femme fatale illuminated his Paris art will be among the high points of the show. The visitors will view, after a long absence, such unique Mucha works as Gismonda and La Dame aux Camelias, posters designed for theatre performances in which "the divine Sarah" demonstrated her art to European and American audiences. Mucha's posters for Bernhardt have preserved the magic of her personality to this day and still enchant thousands of avid admirers all over the globe. The exhibition is organised by the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague and the Alphonse Mucha Foundation.
