Alphonse Maria Mucha (known in English as Alphonse Mucha) is most often remembered for the prominent role he played in shaping the aesthetics of French Art Nouveau at the turn of the century. Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 in Ivancice, Moravia, which is near the city of Brno in the modern Czech Republic. Though Mucha is supposed to have started drawing before he was walking, his early years were spent as a choirboy and amateur musician. As a struggling and relatively unknown artist of Czech origin living in Paris, Mucha achieved immediate fame when, in December 1894, he accepted a commission to create a poster for one of the greatest actresses of this time, Sarah Bernhardt..He formed a commercial love alliance with Sarah Bernhardt, when he designed the poster for the play Gismonda, perhaps the greatest theatre poster ever created - along with Lautrec's Aristide Bruant dans son Cabaret - and thereafter designed all her posters, together with costumes, sets and personal knick knacks. But Mucha needed the heady airs of Parisian cosmopolitanism: once he retreated to Bohemia in 1910 and became a Czech nationalist he fizzled out wastefully, rather like Sargent when he took up municipal wall decoration in Boston.Mucha developed a very distinct style that came to grouped with the Art Nouveau movement, which peaked at around 1900.
alphonse mucha artMucha travelled from provincial obscurity to international fame. It was his conviction that his life had been shaped by the direct intervention of Fate. At three crucial stages in his life, his future was determined by chance encounters--in a country church, a small market town and a Paris printing shop.