Alphonse Mucha: how 4,000 works by the artist found a palatial new home in Prague

On 19 July 1939, Alphonse Mucha was laid to rest in Prague’s Vyšehrad cemetery. He had died of pneumonia five days earlier, aged 78. The Nazi forces occupying the city shed few tears, Mucha having been a well-known pacifist and freemason, who opposed the aims of the Third Reich.

They insisted that only close family attend the funeral. More than 100,000 people turned up, however. In part, this was simply a protest against the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. In part, it also revealed the esteem in which Mucha was held by his compatriots.

Today, the artist is famous for having been a pioneer of Art Nouveau around the turn of the 20th century. ‘He was much more than that, though, and our purpose is to explore his fascinating life and career as a whole,’ says Marcus Mucha, the artist’s great-grandson.

Marcus is executive director of the Mucha Foundation, which has just opened a museum in central Prague dedicated to the artist. The idea, in a sense, is to demonstrate how a poor boy from a small town in Moravia came to receive such a huge send-off in the Czechoslovakian capital 70 years later. (In the interim, on his first visit to the United States in 1904, he was hailed by the New York Daily News as ‘the greatest decorative artist in the world’.)

The artist’s grandson, John Mucha, and daughter-in-law, Geraldine Thomsen Mucha, set up the foundation in 1992, with the intention of promoting his oeuvre. It owns the world’s biggest holding of his art, with a collection of 4,000 works. These range from paintings, drawings and jewellery to lithographic posters (many of them originals taken fresh from the press by the artist and unseen in public before).

The foundation has also organised more than 90 exhibitions worldwide, including one recently held at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and another currently on show at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Which raises the question: why has it taken so long to open a museum?

‘We have been building up a substantial body of research over the past three decades,’ Marcus says. He adds that it also took a long time for the right space to come along: namely the Savarin Palace, ‘a beautiful Baroque building, which has been carefully restored. It’s located on Na Příkopě, Prague’s equivalent of London’s Regent Street.’

Crucially, the Savarin site has the bonus of offering a potential home, at last, to the cycle of paintings widely considered to be Mucha’s masterpiece, The Slav Epic — a cycle that has led a turbulent existence since its completion almost a century ago.

Mucha was born in 1860 in a town called Ivančice, three hours south-east of Prague. His father was a court usher. Alphonse started his career apprenticing as a scene painter for a theatre-design company in Vienna. That apprenticeship ended abruptly in 1881, however, when his employer’s biggest client, the Ringtheater, burned down in a fire that killed hundreds.

Upon returning to Moravia, Mucha was commissioned by a local landowner, Count Eduard Khuen-Belasi, to decorate his castle. Khuen-Belasi went on to sponsor the artist’s studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and, later, the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi in Paris.

In the French capital, he frequented Madame Charlotte’s Crémerie, a café in the sixth arrondissement where hard-up artists — including Paul Gauguin and Paul Sérusier — could eat in exchange for pictures. Mucha and Gauguin became friends, and following the latter’s return from his first trip to Polynesia in 1893, briefly shared a studio.

Mucha’s big break came at Christmas a year later, when Sarah Bernhardt demanded a poster to promote her production of the play Gismonda, which opened within days at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. Bernhardt was the most famous actress of her time — known by Oscar Wilde as ‘the divine Sarah’ — and her demand presented the Lemercier printing house with a problem. All their senior illustrators were off for Christmas.

It thus fell to Mucha to produce a poster — one that became a sensation. Parisians woke up in awe on New Year’s Day 1895 to see it plastered across their city. Apparently, half of the posters had been removed from their hoardings by nightfall.

Bernhardt is depicted as the titular heroine, Gismonda, in long brocaded robes, her hair an effusion of flowers. She holds a palm branch so large it covers the first half of her name, which is written in a halo-like arch above her head.

With its subtle colours and slender vertical shape, Mucha’s design marked a radical departure from customary posters (which tended to be brashly coloured and square).

Bernhardt loved it, instantly offering Mucha a six-year contract to design posters, stage sets and costumes for her productions. She wasn’t the only person to covet his services. Mucha became a highly successful figure in advertising, producing posters to sell bicycles, perfume, brandy, soap, champagne, chocolate and more.

In perhaps his most famous advert, for JOB cigarette papers, the artist put less emphasis on the item being sold than on the woman whose cigarette smoke envelops her in sensual abandon. With his hypnotic work from this time, Mucha helped bring the new style of Art Nouveau to its apogee — his JOB image in many ways epitomising it, from the sinuous lines, organic forms and pastel palette, to the wealth of floral details and the seductive woman with luxuriant hair.

‘By the early years of the 20th century, he was rich and famous, but he had also become unhappy,’ says Marcus Mucha. ‘In the museum display, we break his career down almost into two halves: the first running up to and including his successes in Paris, the second charting his more spiritual path towards The Slav Epic.’

Beginning a search for truths beyond the visible world, Mucha became a member of the masonic order Les Inseparables du Progrès. He grew to believe that beauty, truth and love were the cornerstones of humanity, and that his art should reflect this — resulting in works such as Le Pater (1899), a Symbolist rendering of the Lord’s Prayer as an illustrated book.

Part of the attraction of freemasonry, Mucha said, was that it ‘condemns all oppression of people of different opinions and beliefs’. This had especial resonance, as the land today known as Czechia was ruled for most of Mucha’s life by one of two empires: the Austrian or the Austro-Hungarian.

A movement called the Czech National Revival gathered pace through the 19th century, aimed at reviving Czech literature, language and identity, all of which had long been denigrated by the Habsburg overlords. Mucha keenly read the writings of the movement’s key figures, such as František Palacký.

In 1910, he moved to Prague, where he designed a number of subtly patriotic posters for cultural events and groups. The museum displays one for the Moravian Teachers’ Choir: it depicts a woman in folk costume (representing the Czech nation), seated on a withered tree (alluding to foreign occupation) with her ear cupped to the song of a blackbird (a symbol of change).

Czechoslovakia gained independence at the end of the First World War, after which Mucha designed its new stamps and banknotes for free.

His outlook was never narrowly nationalistic, however. ‘The purpose of my work was never to destroy, but always to… build bridges,’ he said. ‘We must live in the hope that humankind will draw together.’ One particular bridge he sought to build was that between Slavic peoples, whom he felt should live together as one nation rather than under the yoke of different empires.

He travelled extensively through central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, researching local traditions and liaising with experts on Slavic history. The end result, almost two decades in the making, was The Slav Epic, which he donated to the city of Prague in 1928.

Financed by Charles Richard Crane, a Chicago industrialist with an interest in Slavic culture, this cycle consists of 20 monumental canvases. Part myth, part history, they depict a score of emotive episodes chosen by Mucha to chart the development, struggles and heroism of Slavic civilisation from ancient times through to his own.

It’s true that the peace treaties after the First World War brought imperial rule to an end across Europe (when Mucha was roughly halfway through his cycle). However, there was still no pan-Slavic state. ‘We are free, but the mission of the epic is not complete,’ Mucha said.

The museum’s final room is devoted to The Slav Epic. It includes scaled-down reproductions of four of the canvases (which will be rotated over time), plus photographs of the cycle’s creation.

The paintings themselves were initially kept in the chapel of a school in Prague, before being rolled up and hidden when the Nazis — deeply hostile to pan-Slavism — marched into the city in March 1939. Mucha was briefly arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, dying a few months after his release, devastated by his nation’s fate.

Rumour has it that The Slav Epic canvases were buried in a grave. Even after the Second World War, they stayed under wraps, Czechoslovakia’s new rulers — the Soviet-backed Communist party — deeming Mucha to have been a bourgeois figure.

The cycle went back on show in a castle in Moravský Krumlov (a town near where the artist was born) in the 1960s — a decade, incidentally, when Mucha’s seductive Art Nouveau work came back in vogue and earned him a new generation of fans worldwide. The cycle is still in the castle today.

Mucha’s gift came with the condition that the city of Prague build a space for it to be exhibited permanently, a condition that hasn’t been met — until now.

Thanks to €20 million of funding from the Czech property developers Crestyl, the Savarin Palace — built as a home for a noble family in the 1750s, but until recently used as a casino — has become a museum. The next step, the Mucha Foundation hopes, is to create a bespoke underground space beneath the palace courtyard, where The Slav Epic can be housed. Thomas Heatherwick has already designed the space, with building work ready to begin as soon as the final permits are granted.

The Slav Epic actually met with a mixed reception when it was first unveiled, its vast narrative seeming outmoded to the myriad avant-garde figures active in Prague between the wars (the likes of the Devětsil group). Over time, however, the cycle attained iconic status, and its pacifist and pan-Slavist themes have clear global relevance today.

‘We hope to see it showing in the new space by 2028, the year of its centenary,’ says Marcus Mucha. ‘In the meantime, there’s a brand new museum in the heart of Prague for people to enjoy.’

The Mucha Foundation’s museum is now open at Savarin Palace, Prague. For details, visit mucha.eu. The city has another museum dedicated to Alphonse Mucha, slightly smaller than the one at Savarin Palace. This was opened by the Swiss businessman Sebastian Pawlowski in 1998. The Mucha Foundation lent works to it, before withdrawing them all in 2024, ahead of its own museum’s opening