Tuesday 19 April 2011

Alphonse Mucha



Alphonse Mucha illustrations are remarkable, his beautiful lithographs feel way ahead of it's late 19th century time. The excruciatingly detailed women detailed in his paintings have influenced countless of pretenders, one of the most obvious contemporary artists off the top of my head is John Dyer Baizely, whose work I am a big admirer of, albeit Baizely has more of a fascination with flowers and dismemberment. It is the warm, perky, natural colours which enamour me to Mucha's work, and it complements the gorgeous subject matter. Amazingly, it is Alphonse Mucha, a name which I indeed love saying, no one's called Alphonse anymore, who was the pre-curser for the French art movement Art Nouveau, which you can read about on good ol'wiki: here.

Moreover, you can read up more on Alphonse Mucha: here. He is indeed an interesting fellow as it seemed he had an internal struggle between his fine art aspirations and his commercial successes.

Alphonse Mucha is a popular guy so you can:

Hit up his official site to read up on the man: here
See a comprehensive list of his works: here
If you feel really good about yourself you can buy his posters: here

After the jump a photograph of the man himself.




3 comments:

  1. is their something religious about his art??

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  2. Hmmm not in these lithographs I don't think. But, if you were to take a look at his La Pater works here's what said:

    "Mucha considered Le Pater his printed masterpiece, and referred to it in the January 5, 1900 issue of The Sun Newspaper (New York) as the thing he had "put [his] soul into". Printed on December 20, 1899, Le Pater was Mucha's occult examination of the themes of The Lord's Prayer and only 510 copies were produced."

    I'm guessing Alphonse had something of the occult about him.

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  3. Here's link to see La Pater:

    Part I: http://surfacefragments.blogspot.com/2010/03/alphonse-mucha-le-pater.html

    Part II: http://surfacefragments.blogspot.com/2010/11/alphonse-mucha-le-pater-part-ii.html

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