How Did Alphonse Mucha Changed Art Nouveau

1146 Words3 Pages

Alphonse Mucha was a great man and artist. He singlehandedly changed Art Nouveau, a style of art that portrayed parts of the natural world such as plant life and humanity, and represented his entire culture with the series of murals he did known as The Slav Epic. However, in order to learn why that happened, one must examine the course of his life to understand why he paints as such. To do this, one should examine some of his better known posters such as Gismonda and Ruby. In addition, Mucha's particular style when compared to other artists of his time can truly show how he changed Art Nouveau and Slavic cultural expressionism for the better. All in all, Alphonse Mucha and his style changed with events that happened during his life, but these changes and world events that occurred over this time …show more content…

At the young age of 19, he started working as a theatrical scene painter. His talent was such that he was asked to decorate an Austrian castle before he had even attended a school of the arts! However, it was not until 1894 that Mucha began his experimentation with Art Nouveau with a piece called Gismonda. This piece was done to advertise a play for the Theatre De La Resistance, and after the play was a success, he was offered a job in which he completed more artwork, props, and costumes for plays done by this theater. As one can see in this original poster, his style definitely develops when compared to one of the last posters he did for the theater, La Tosca. In this poster, one can see that his palette has been thinned down and made slightly more bland, but that does not take away from the striking beauty of Sarah Bernhardt, the figure in these posters. However, his border for the poster is much more simple than it was for his first poster, which contained intricacies such as the crane in the upper right corner and the man peeking over the Theater De La Resistance

Open Document