Cover Essay

Zodiac (1896) by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

A
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n artist can create an aesthetic revolution, misunderstand it, and turn his back to
the very thing that made him famous in the first place. The motivation for such
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retrograde movement in aesthetic position during an artistic career is not

infrequently tied to external political pressures or an inner conviction that one’s central
beliefs are out of tune with the prevailing wisdom of the times. If the backward turn is
sufficiently dramatic it can result in financial ruination and intellectual ostracism;
a celebrated artist once central to the cultural milieu of his youth may become an
irrelevancy in old age. All of this and more happened to Alphonse Mucha (1860-
1939), an Art Nouveau illustrator and painter noted for his posters of idealized female
figures. The artistic movement of which he was a pioneer itself occupies a somewhat
anomalous position among other well-known artistic developments in the modern era;
Art Nouveau did not represent a fundamental change in the way in which we view the
natural world comparable to the perceptual revolutions created by Impressionism, Fauvism
or Cubism, and did not primarily influence the fine arts as much as it did applied arts in
the domestic environment. That Art Nouveau represents a link between nineteenth
century styles and twentieth century modernism is chiefly due to the fact that its
practitioners shared a philosophy that ran parallel to the English Arts and Crafts
Movement (c.1862-1900) of William Morris, a desire to erase the division between
art and its audience by applying a uniform pattern of high design to every aspect of
Michael Salcman, MD a person’s environment, the marriage of beauty and utility. As a result of this attempt to
Osher Institute, Towson University
Baltimore, Maryland create a total life experience, Art Nouveau became an international style with its chief
influence on architecture and applied arts such as glasswork and ceramics, jewelry and
furniture, textiles and household silver. Although Art Nouveau represented a reaction
to some tenets of academic art in the 19th century, enough characteristics remained to
make a fundamental change in painting and sculpture impossible. At the height of its
influence, roughly 1895 to 1905, Art Nouveau was inherently a conservative movement
in which a highly stylistic change in the content or subject matter of art took precedence
over any conceptual change in how content was presented to the viewer. As a result, while
Impressionism led to the Divisionism of Seurat, the Fauvism of Matisse, and the Cubism
of Braque and Picasso, Art Nouveau was succeeded by Art Deco, another innovative
but primarily decorative style in the applied arts.
The difference between Art Nouveau and Art Deco is easily described. The older
movement placed a premium on sensuous and sinuous natural forms, many of which were
derived from flowers and other plants, leaves and tendrils and vines, as first widely seen in
Mucha’s posters. The use of these forms in architecture and interior design, in jewelry
and silverware, in clothing and textiles, in theory, would make it possible to live in
a totally harmonious environment. Harmony, however, was not to be the legacy of
a century in which the major art movements valorized the right angle and the cube
rather than the curve, abstract form rather than shapes derived from nature, and a purist
view of art for art’s sake rather than the applied use of artworks for decoration or other
practical purposes. To a certain degree, even Art Deco, Art Nouveau’s daughter
movement if you will, rejected natural form for geometric shape in the built
environment and advocated a design ethos based on Cubist and Russian Constructivist
principles, ancient Mayan and Egyptian architecture, and industrial forms and materials
in its later American version, mid-century machine art. Nevertheless, despite its
conservative imagery, the ethos of Art Nouveau, with its emphasis on art’s seamless
integration into the everyday environment, is increasingly recognized as an important
link between the visual culture of the nineteenth century and the explosive develop-
ments of the twentieth.

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It should come as no surprise that the very name of the movement has a mercantile
origin consistent with the emphasis of Art Nouveau on household objects, architecture,
and other elements of interior design. In 1895, the year that Mucha’s art had its initial
impact, Siegfried Bing opened a modernist gallery in Paris that he called Maison de l’Art
Nouveau; at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Bing achieved a publicity coup of
sorts by erecting a coordinated installation of paintings, sculptures, modern furniture,
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and tapestries in his stall from both Europe and Japan. The name of Bing’s gallery was
then adopted as the name for the new style in French. It was in this same gallery that
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Edvard Munch made his Paris debut in 1896, the undulant line of Art Nouveau already
present in his infamous Madonna.1 As the Art Nouveau craze swept through Europe, it
was called by other names in other countries. As early as 1888, architectural exhibits at
an international fair in Barcelona emphasized the beginnings of Catalan Modernisme or
Modernismo in Spanish, an allied movement, whose greatest exponent was the
architect Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926). In the United States, Art Nouveau became
associated with a famous designer of art glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), and
was sometimes called “Tiffany Style.” The New Art in France was known in Germany
as Jugendstil or “youth style” after a Munich magazine, Die Jugend. The artists and
designers who worked in a comparable style in Austria were called the Vienna Secession
and so, through all the parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, variant words for
Secession became synonymous with the New Art. As a result, in Prague and the rest of
Bohemia the Czech word eventually used for Art Nouveau was secese. Before then,
however briefly, it had another name, The Mucha Style.
Alfons Maria Mucha, known in French and English as Alphonse Mucha, was born in
1860 in the town of Ivancice, Moravia, in the present Czech Republic. His father was
a court usher and his mother a governess in Vienna. He had a beautiful singing voice
but from his earliest days his favorite hobby was drawing. In high school (gymnasium)
he was a classmate of composer Leos Janácek.2 Mucha’s earliest influences came from
Czech folk art and Eastern religious traditions, including the images he saw in church
and the Byzantine icons he later loved and collected. Despite his natural gift as
a draughtsman, he was rejected for admission to the Prague Academy of Fine Arts.
Mucha took decorative painting jobs in Moravia, often working on theatrical sets; for 2
years he carried out similar projects for a theatrical design company in Vienna. After
formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Mucha moved to Paris in 1887
and continued his education at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi, two
important bastions of academic style and technique. Around 1893, Mucha shared an
apartment or studio with Paul Gauguin before the French artist left for Tahiti;
Gauguin’s synthetic style, and that of his friend Émil Bernard, would have an influence
on Art Nouveau. In addition to his formal studies, Mucha began commercial work on
magazine and advertising illustrations. For 5 years he played the part of the starving
Bohemian, living on lentils and borrowed money above a crémerie or dairy shop. Great
fame and fortune suddenly enveloped him through the accidental conjunction of his
talent with a fortuitous opportunity. Towards the end of 1894, Mucha walked into
a French print and poster shop where there was an unexpected and almost immediate
need for a poster to advertise the upcoming appearance of Sarah Bernhardt, the most
famous actress of the age, in Gismonda, a play by Victorien Sardou. The technology for
multi-color lithography had only recently been perfected and was already in artistic use
by Toulouse-Lautrec. As requested, Mucha somehow was able to produce the near life-
size lithograph within just 2 weeks and it was posted all over Paris on January 1, 1895.
It caused a sensation. It was one of the first advertising posters made in a narrow,
vertically elongated format and already had many of the cardinal features of Mucha
Style. Bernhardt is shown carrying a sheaf of palm fronds, her head haloed by a wreath
of orchids in pale pastel colors. She is portrayed as an exotic Byzantine noblewoman in
an extraordinary gown. The stillness of her figure gives the Divine Sarah an impressive
dignity and sobriety. The wonderful integration of text and image is a hallmark of
Mucha’s gifts as a designer; in the hands of Picasso and Braque, the intrusion of text

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into image would become a Cubist hallmark. Some of Mucha’s lettering has the
appearance of stained glass and Hector Guimard used similar designs and fonts for the
Paris Métro’s subway stations. People started cutting the poster down and saving it as
a unique art object. The poster was such a success and received so much attention that
Bernhardt entered into a 6-year contract with Mucha. He not only designed her
advertisements and posters but also her costumes and theatrical sets. When Bernhardt
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toured America in 1904, new English versions of the posters introduced Mucha’s art
into the United States.
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The early poster for Gismonda begins what in retrospect appears to be Mucha’s most
important and productive period, one in which he created a large number of paintings,
posters, advertisements, book illustrations, designs for jewelry, carpets, wallpaper, and
theater sets from 1896 to 1897. The majority of these works are painted or printed in
pale pastel colors and center on beautiful young women in flowing Neoclassical-looking
robes. Unlike Bernhardt’s dangling long tresses, the women in Mucha’s more typical
artworks wear a curvilinear hairstyle of his own design, their heads still surrounded by
lush bouquets of flowers, some of which create a halo effect. Relatively few of the
pictures are portraits of real women, they are usually goddesses or iconic figures
emblematic of a virtue or some other abstract concept like the seasons. Even the flowers
in the headdresses are decorative inventions of Mucha’s own design; many of the lilies
are otherwise unidentifiable. A series of four posters devoted to The Seasons were issued
as large decorative panels, panneaux decoratifs, and printed on silk cloth or stiff papers
for domestic installation as wall coverings or screens. Their vertical orientation and flat,
folding planes reflect the influence of the Japanese woodcut and the vogue for the
Japanese screen. Almost all the pictures from Mucha’s best period are clearly designed
for the male gaze but carry an unmistakable religious aura similar to the strategy
employed by the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their misogynistic academic contempo-
raries like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, an artist uniformly despised by the
Impressionists. In many of Mucha’s technically stunning pictures the draped gowns
and flowing robes are almost translucent, serving to accentuate the curvature of hip and
breast; in Mucha, Bouguereau and Alma-Tadema, this languid eroticized mood is
characteristic of painting in the 1890s.
Zodiac (1896), on the cover, is a prototypical work from Mucha’s finest period; it
was the first lithograph he made under contract with his printer F. Champenois and
originally designed as an in-house calendar for the company. It became so popular that
it had to be issued in a variety of formats, with and without text, with and without the
calendar in the decorative panel at the bottom, and with and without Mucha’s printed
signature so that the public might collect and display it as they wished. The image has
a great sense of scale despite its relatively small size, 24 and 7/8 by 18 and one half
inches (65.7 · 48.2 cm). The floral and celestial elements are symmetrically arranged
around a central exotic image, the head of a queen-like woman. The signs of the Zodiac
are incorporated in a halo-like disc behind the woman’s head, one of Mucha’s
customary motifs. Not only is she in placed in the center of a pair of concentric circles,
but each of the ten visible Zodiac signs gets its own smaller disc. Unlike the languid fall
of Bernhardt’s hair in Gismonda, the woman in this poster wears the famous hairstyle
invented by Mucha who initiates the use of double or parallel lines in very fast, whip-
smart curves, a characteristic feature of many of the artists who would follow in his
wake. Art Nouveau becomes the art of the arabesque. The undulating curvilinear
tendrils of hair echo the innumerable curves in the plant-like forms as well as the circles
containing the sun and the moon to lower left and right of the decorative panel. Note
the sunflower behind the symbol of the sun and the circle of poppies behind the moon.
These rondels are part of Mucha’s now standard use of a decorative border resembling
a Byzantine mosaic. As with Bernhardt in Gismonda, the Zodiac figure’s regal bearing
and elaborate jewelry further emphasize her majestic beauty; the queen-like headdress is
Moravian in design and studded with gems. The initial run of the calendar quickly
attracted the attention of Léon Deschamps, the founding editor of La Plume, a French

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 Cover Essay

literary and artistic review (1889-1914); he bought the rights to distribute Zodiac as the
magazine’s calendar for 1897. The image became one of Mucha’s most popular designs
and at least nine variants of the lithograph are known. The lithograph is printed in
eleven colors: pink, light red, carmine red, beige, turquoise, brownish violet, ocher,
dark brown, gray olive, silver, and gold. Some proofs before the edition were printed on
satin instead of paper. Zodiac has previously appeared on the cover of at least one other
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medical journal.3
Ironically, the severe stylization of Mucha’s voluptuous female figures imposed by his
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characteristic whip-smart drawing line and impeccable sense of design robs them of
their sexuality; we feel none of the heat so evident in the powerful work of his
contemporaries, Munch, Klimt and Schiele, and none of the bawdiness in Aubrey
Beardsley. Mucha’s women are not portraits of a living, breathing, identifiable person
and there is no attempt to probe their psychology. They are symbolic representations of
abstract virtues, of the Seasons, of philosophical concepts like Poetry or Fate. As Eric
Kandel would say, there is no Theory of Mind behind these faces; we never wonder
what they are thinking, as we so often do in a portrait by Rembrandt or in one by
Mucha’s contemporary, the American master Thomas Eakins. Barglow’s review of
Kandel’s book on the unconscious in art and science in Vienna is correct in pointing
out that even Klimt’s Art Nouveau style flattens out the subjectivity of the sitter: “the
style renders opaque whatever the sitter may be thinking or feeling.”4 I think it
significant that Mucha always draws Bernhardt in costume when she is portraying
someone other than herself. On the other hand, the repetition and standardization of
design elements in the most famous Mucha posters was perfect for advertising plays,
cigarettes, beer and biscuits, as he did at the height of his fame. Unlike the later original
prints of Picasso and Matisse, Mucha’s posters were issued in virtually unlimited
quantities and were usually unsigned. The tradition of hand-signing and numbering an
artificially limited run of prints essentially began with two of Mucha’s contemporaries,
Whistler and Toulouse-Lautrec.
In painting and sculpture, Mucha’s early work shares a number of stylistic tics with
the artists of other movements contemporary with Art Nouveau, like Symbolism in
France (Gauguin) and Scandinavia (Ferdinand Hodler) and the mid-century British
Pre-Raphaelites, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett
Millais. Striking similarities link Mucha’s art with paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites.
A Mermaid (1901), a late pre-Raphaelite painting by John William Waterhouse (1849-
1917), and his The Lady of Shalott (1888), based on a famous poem by Tennyson, were
discussed in these pages and are good examples of work considered “advanced art” in
the period when Art Nouveau was just starting to emerge.5 Anachronistic echoes of the
Pre-Raphaelite style in England exist as late as 1909, just after Fauvism and Cubism
had burst upon the scene elsewhere.6 The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood advocated
returning art to the content and style it had in pre-humanistic and Christian Europe
prior to the advent of post-Renaissance culture. The style became distinctive for its
blend of archaic, romantic, and moralistic qualities. The artists believed in realism and
truth to nature but often found their sources in the Bible, in medieval poetry, and in
legend. All of this would become increasingly true of Mucha’s late manner. By the close
of the nineteenth century, these artists were closely aligned with contemporary poets,
furniture makers, and illustrators just as the Art Nouveau artists would be. One of the
prime subjects in both movements was the eternal feminine in all her guises, as saint
and sinner, as virtuous victim of her own rectitude, as medieval sorceress, as femme
fatale or temptress. In her most typical presentation, in the sinuous tendrils of hair, the
curves of her body, her waving arms, and the plants and stems which surround her, one
finds the characteristic line of Art Nouveau making an early appearance; eventually, the
highly decorative spell of this organic or vegetal line receives contemporaneous
expression in chairs and silverware, in lamps and personal adornment. The Pre-
Raphaelites did not mind the decorative use of their ideas in practical ornament but
Mucha came to deeply resent it.

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At first, Mucha participated in the commercialization of Art Nouveau. In the same

year as Zodiac, Mucha created his first decorative panels and, in the next 2 or 3 years,
one success after another came his way. He had his first one-man show in a Paris gallery
and received the commission for the Austro-Hungarian exhibit at the Exposition
Universelle of 1900. By then, Mucha had begun his famous designs for the interior of
the Georges Fouquet jewelry shop and started producing his own jewelry designs,
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sculptures and other objets d’arts. Following his philosophical inclinations, Mucha
made a tactical blunder and gave all his secrets away in a pair of books he published in
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1902 and 1905; one of the books was specifically for craftsmen, with the unintended
result that his influence was widely spread through inferior copies made by other
artisans. Mucha felt that art was a higher calling, almost a religious one, and this put
him in conflict with the crass commercialization of the style he had helped initiate. He
was also deeply interested in the history of the Czech people and the eventual
independence of Moravia and Bohemia; indeed, the revival of Czech nationalism began
about the same time as Mucha’s birth. His decision to make a trip to the United States
(1906-1910) in order to raise funds for the promotion of Slavic nationalism proved to
be a fateful one. This first visit not only allowed him to escape the milieu which so
discomfited him, but had the additional and unfortunate effect of disconnecting him
from the latest developments in art; he had left the scene at the very moment Fauvism,
Cubism, and abstract art were roiling the salons of Paris. In America, Mucha
concentrated on painting conventional portraits, raised money, and helped promote
Bernhardt’s theatrical tour of the United States. When he returned to Prague in the
semi-official position of national artist, a posture that brought him much envy and
criticism, his painting style was already considered out of date. Nevertheless, he
decorated the Theatre of Fine Arts, painted the murals in the Mayor’s Room at the
Municipal House, executed many other commissions around the capital and once post-
war Czechoslovakia gained its independence, Mucha even designed the postage stamps,
banknotes and other official documents for the new country. In the early years of the
twentieth century, therefore, Mucha occupied approximately the same artistic position
in Czech life that Jacques-Louis David had occupied in Revolutionary and Napoleonic
France. He attempted to be an arbiter of taste and a distributor of rewards and respect.
Unfortunately, his own work was no longer considered cutting-age or influential. Not
only was Prague collecting cubist art, but one of his countrymen, Frantisek Kupka
(1871-1957), had left for Paris and in 1910 or 1911 painted one of the world’s first
completely abstract pictures. The Czech capital was busily developing its own cadre of
Surrealist writers, like Jaroslav Seifert, and visual artists, like Karel Teige, particularly
during the time of Devetsil, Prague’s own Dada-like movement.7
During this period of international creative ferment, Mucha spent almost 20 years
working in isolation on The Slav Epic, a cycle of twenty mural size paintings depicting
the history of the Czechs and other Slavic peoples (1910-1928); it was intended to be
his crowning achievement in the fine arts and a gift to the nation. Some of the money
raised in the United States went towards its creation. As groups of the paintings were
completed every few years, Mucha would donate them to the city of Prague where there
was no adequate space to display them nor much interest in their distinctly old-
fashioned pictorial style, one that hearkened back to the neo-classicism of the early
nineteenth century. It was as if Mucha believed that true art was the art of the
academies. Each panel was up to six meters tall by eight meters wide or 24 by 30 feet.
Some idea of their hortatory and religious orientation can be gained from titles like The
Introduction of the Slavonic Liturgy (Praise the Lord in Your Native Tongue), Master Jan
Hus Preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel (Truth Prevails), and Defense of Sziget Against the
Turks by Nicholas Zrinsky (The Shield of Christendom). In a city like Prague that had
always seen its population sharply divided by religion, language, and ethnicity, the Epic
was certain to contribute to further polarization. By the time Mucha completed the
cycle, his reputation had sharply declined.2 After Mucha’s death, the panels were kept
on permanent exhibition in a chateau in the South Moravian town of Moravský

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Krumlov and were not finally returned to Prague until 2012! One of Mucha’s final
masterpieces were the glorious new stained glass windows in the north part of the nave
of St. Vitus Cathedral (1931), an enormous church built in 1344 and entirely enclosed
on the grounds of Prague Castle, the largest palace complex in Europe. In many ways
Mucha lived the final part of his life as an anachronism; the paintings in the Slav Epic
resemble the old-fashioned theater drops he had painted early in his career.
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Nevertheless, as an obvious symbol of the Czech nation and a proponent of the

Orthodox faith, Mucha was one of the first people interrogated by the Gestapo after the
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entry of German troops into the country. Shortly after his return home from one such
interrogation in July of 1939, the elderly artist became ill with pneumonia and died.
Between the end of the war and the fall of Communism in November 1989, Prague
saw just one National Gallery exhibition devoted entirely to the work of Mucha2;
paradoxically, the Gallery sponsored many exhibitions of his work abroad, especially
after the 1960s when the Art Nouveau style came back into fashion.
As we have seen, Mucha rejected his membership in the very movement he had
founded. He believed that art was eternal and that his own work was unique to him and
intended to be spiritual in nature. But his sinuous line, elegant vegetal forms, and classical
shapes in the hands of a furniture maker like Josef Hoffmann, architects like Antoni
Gaudí or Adolf Loos, designers of glass and jewelry like Louis Comfort Tiffany and
Koloman Moser, contributed to some of the most elegant and beautiful objects and
buildings the world has ever known. At the Exposition Universelle, Mucha himself
encouraged the attempt to raise the status of craft in the decorative arts to the same
aesthetic plane occupied by painting and sculpture. Some idea of the impact of Art
Nouveau on 20th century design can be gained by walking into the lobby of the Hotel
Pariz (1904), in the historic old town section of Prague. There you enter a complete
environment in which every decorative element, the wall tiles and papers, the furniture
and carpeting, the lighting appliances and desert trolleys, even the silverware, has been
harmonized and brought to a stage of gleaming perfection. In 1905, the year after the
Hotel Pariz opened, the Art Nouveau movement was essentially over as an intellectual
adventure; Matisse and his cohorts had invented Fauvism, with its arbitrary use of
bright color to work with and against form, the first of the new century’s artistic
revolutions with many more to follow. Among these was the invention of the world’s
first abstract paintings, in 1910 or 1911, by a Russian (Kandinsky), two Frenchmen
(Delaunay and Picabia), an American (Arthur Dove), and a Czech working in Paris,
Frantisek Kupka. Perhaps the example of another Czech working in Paris had been
important to Kupka, perhaps not. But in 2013, in the museum on Kampa Island in
Prague, an exhibition of Klimt, Mucha and Kupka linked the imaginations of three
significant artistic pioneers who were inspired by Vienna, Paris, and Prague.

REFERENCES
1. Rosenblum R, Janson HW. 19th Century Art. New York: Abrams; 1984:457.
2. Sayer D. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton, NJ: 1998:18-25, 161-163 & 249-251.
3. Potter P. Fine art and good health for the masses. Emerg Infect Dis. 2006;12(7):1182-1183.
4. Barglow R. Art and Science: A Marriage Made in Heaven? Tikkun; 2013, http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/
art-and-science-a-marriage-made-in-heaven.
5. Salcman M. “A Mermaid” by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), cover article. Neurosurgery. 2005;57(2):
376-378.
6. Salcman M. “Ulysses and the Sirens” by Herbert James Draper (1864-1920), cover article. Neurosurgery. 2006;59
(2):422-424.
7. Sayer D. Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. Princeton, NJ: 2013:198-220.

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