Long Unseen Mucha Posters Sold at Auction

Oh, how I love Mucha. And how I wish I had oodles and oodles of money so that I could have bought some of his work last week at the Swan Galleries sale in New York.

Frankly, the prices weren't too shabby. Most of them were downright affordable. There was a particular print, hand-tipped and signed by the artist that went for several hundred thousand dollars, but for the most part, the majority of the works went for under 10K. Of course, that being said, these were posters, not the originals. But oh, how beautiful they are!

For those of you not familliar with his work, Alfons Mucha, born in Moravia (previously part of the Czech Republic) is the cornerstone of the Art Nouveau movement.

His work was prodigious, including commercial art, posters, advertisements, wallpaper patterns, jewelry designs, book illustrations, furniture and theater set designs, etc. In 1894, he produced the artwork for a lithographed poster advertising Sarah Bernhardt at the Theatre de la Renaissance. Mucha's lush stylized poster art won him fame and numerous commissions. But, Mucha was frustrated. While his art nouveau style was often imitated it was a style that Mucha attempted to distance himself from throughout his life; he insisted always that, rather than adhering to any fashionable stylistic form, his paintings came purely from within. He declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message, and nothing more; hence his frustration at the fame he gained through commercial art, when he wanted always to concentrate on more lofty projects that would ennoble art and his birthplace.

Mucha lived all over the world, from Prague to Paris, teaching at the Applied Arts College for Women in New York City, art schools in Chicago and Philadelphia and later at Whistler's Acadame in Vienna.

And, while he might be considered now as a "commercial artist" he certainly was not during his lifetime. He shared a studio with Gaughuin, trucked with the theosophoical circle of De Rochas and Flammarion, and accompanied Rodin to Prague and Moravia at the time of the Rodin exhibition as his friend and companion.

Sadly, Mucha was among the first to be arrested by the Gestapo when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. He was questioned and allowed to return home but his health was greatly impaired by the ordeal. On 14th July, Mucha died in Prague. He is buried at Vysehrad cemetery. Despite the Nazis banning the public from his funeral, over 100,000 Czechs attended.

History hasn't been kind to either Mucha or to the Czechs - as the current unrest in the area at the turn of this century shows. Mucha's bequest to his country was received with unkindly cold shoulders. The geopolitical world ten years after World War I was very different from the one in which Mucha had begun his project. Moravia was now a part of a new nation, Czechoslovakia (Mucha offered to help the new country by designing its postage stamps and bank notes).

The art world was just as changed. And just as the proponents of "Modern Art" cast their slings and arrows at the oh-so 19th century style, varying political groups brought out their personal arsenals of vitriolic prejudice in damning one aspect or other of Mucha's work. The public seemed to appreciate them, but political agendas seldom give much weight to public opinion. Only recently have they been made available again. They are on permanent display in the castle at Morovsky Krumlov.