Mucha and Art Nouveau at The Phillips
The travelling exhibition comes to DC, with ladies, lines and luscious colors.
I can tell that you, like me, have been waiting with bated breath for the opening of the new Mucha exhibition – Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line – to open at The Phillips Collection. You are in luck, because the show kicked off last week and runs through May 18th.
Alphonse Mucha was a painter in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Originally from what’s now the Czech Republic – Lands of the Bohemian Crown when he was born, I’m told by Wikipedia – Mucha moved to Paris as a young adult, and that’s where he made his name. He falls into the general art nouveau category and is best known for his illustrations, posters and advertising work.
It’s fascinating to think about the kinds of art that once could have a place in the common consciousness. Many of the posters and paintings Mucha made would end up on Parisian streets, slapped up with glue to walls and buildings.
The world was a much quieter place – maybe not actually, I’m not an auditory historian – in that there were fewer people, things moved more slowly and people had a different kind of leisure time.
Biography over. If you want to learn about how one time someone gave him paper as a present or how he started out thinking he might be a singer, there are plenty of places to get the details.
We’ll focus in on the man’s work, how goddamn beautiful it is and how it reminds me of my own family. Slightly more autobiographical than the staff-guided tour at the Phillips is going to be, admittedly, but think of all the things I know that they don’t. Like that I grew up with a lovely Will Bradley print on my parent’s wall that probably would look very different were it not for Mucha.
Insights – I’m full of ‘em.
A woman just referred to people, with no hint of irony, as riffraff. What a time to be alive.
Mucha’s most well-known pieces are in the art nouveau style, which makes sense for his timeline, as the movement was most popular from the late 1800s through the First World War. Art nouveau looks at nature for inspiration in its form. Practically, that means more curved lines and images reminiscent of flowers and trees. Instead of everything being clear, straight lines and logic, art nouveau pieces – and architecture – flow across the canvas.
There’s a pretty clear parallel between art nouveau and what we call “continental philosophy”. Continental contrast with analytic philosophy, with the former being more focused on the experience of the world and the latter being a rigidly logical approach.
The philosophical fork appeared much earlier. Most people toss Kant out as the dividing line, and he was alive at the same time as George Washington but, one imagines, much more tiresome at parties. I think both art nouveau and continental philosophy suffered setbacks after WWI. The realization that modern man doesn’t live in harmony with nature and that science was the new religion had chilling effects on both.
I tried to work the word “contemporaneously” into that last paragraph and realized it was both a) needlessly complex and b) kind of a tricky word to shoehorn in.
Back to the art. Klimt’s The Kiss is an easily recognizable piece of nouveau. It clearly relies on the lines and signifiers of nature, while shimmering with luxury. The kissing bodies rise up from a thick carpet of flowers and greenery. The gold leaf reflects the light and tints the whole thing with a sense of the rising sun and decadence. The curves of the couple melt into each other, making the bodies basically indistinguishable from a distance.
Now take a look at two other paintings from around the same time – Matisse’s The Green Stripe and Singer Sargent’s Lady Warwick and her Son. The Matisse has the clear markings of an impressionist classic, with thick strokes and a flattened perspective. While taking some inspiration from nature, there’s no sense of richness or indulgence. It’s a calm, meadow to art nouveau’s well-maintained garden.
Lady Warwick lives on the other side of the fence. There are some nods to the idea of trees in the background of the piece, but it’s all sharp lines and realistic representations. Classical plinth under the kid, rich garments and just the most uninterested faces. It’s not a well-maintained garden, it’s a greenhouse full of plants that shouldn’t all be living under the same roof.
Mucha’s approach to art nouveau was more illustrative than Klimt’s. Timeless Mucha has sections that pull his work into the 20th and 21st centuries, largely because his influence is so clear in contemporary graphic design.
While Klimt’s style is defined, it’s difficult to replicate when you’re designing an ad for a new car, your mediocre band or a high-end boutique. Mucha makes it easy.
“Mucha makes it easy” would totally be this guy’s slogan if he opened a graphic design business in the 1990s. Lots of business cards with two-tone ivy on them.
Mucha relied on clear outlines and curves for his work. Everything drifts like smoke, whether it’s clothing, hair or actual smoke. Those crisp outlines show up in modern comics and posters and video games. If you were to take a Mucha poster and drain all the color out of it, you’d have a really great coloring book. I’m not the first person to think so, apparently.
The Phillips show – it’s actually a travelling exhibit and it’s headed to New Mexico in June – is a really wonderful mix of awe-inspiring and informative. The first room opens with highlights from across Mucha’s career – big posters from Paris and some smaller illustrations and an example of a modern take on his work. It’s a good kickoff and intro to the style you’ll see throughout the show.
It’s also one of those opening rooms that immediately lets you know if you’re going to like the show. There’s no slow burn to get through the early years of laboring away at a tiny desk in Prague – I don’t think that’s a thing he did, by the way – painting still lifes before inspiration hit. The rest of the show follows that lead at pace. It’s hit after hit and it’s the only time I’ve been inspired to actually buy the exhibition book.
I mentioned some autobiographical connections earlier and I suppose that’s a fairly big part of why this show appeals so much to me. My late father loved early 20th century book design, which borrowed heavily from Mucha’s style.
I’m calling it “Mucha’s style” and I think he did revolutionize a part of it, but it was actually not totally uncommon in Paris at the time. Toulouse-Lautrec and all his buddies were making posters of all sorts during the Belle Epoque in France. Belle Epoque is a term I didn’t know until last week – just means the “Beautiful Era” when Europe was trying out not fighting with itself constantly. Spoiler alert – it didn’t last.
That sinuous line and focus on beauty was central to a lot of the works hanging on my childhood home’s walls. Bradley, Margaret Armstrong and Aubrey Beardsley – I think – were all hanging in the living room, surrounding the bookshelves filled with decorative covers.
After my parents died, my sister and I cleared the room out. I ended up taking a bunch of the illustrations I couldn’t bear to part ways with. Something about wanting the things your loved ones cared about to carry on with you.
I remember – this is a total tangent, but I’ve done the indent thing a bunch in this piece so here we are – when I was about twelve, going back to the city where I was born. My parents took me to the home of my closest friend from my toddler days. Her dad and mine met through some book collectors club.
Anyways, he was a huge Will Bradley collector. Having seen more of this stuff as an adult, I imagine he had what was then one of the largest private collections of decorative covers going. We walked through this separate storage room/library in his house. Perfectly climate controlled, very clean, very antiseptic.
It’s far and away the best way to care for the books, but it’s a tough road to art appreciation. Looking back, that experience made me much more thankful for my dad’s approach – prints on the walls, seasonal decorative covers turned out to face the room, a chance to live with art.
I’m not going to pretend like that connection is a) unique to me or b) something you’ll feel but I think you should go to the show anyways. There’s a very good reason that Mucha’s style has been copied for over a century – it’s stunning.
I’m sure there are critics who find it a little cloying or overly pretty, but I’m not one of them. I do have that feeling about a lot of Pre-Raphaelite works, but art nouveau never makes me anything other than excited to be looking at art.
If you can get to the Phillips for this one, do it. The show is wonderfully curated and the layout the Phillips has gone with makes it easy to see how Mucha’s work has impacted popular culture. You can also imagine child me standing there in awe of something so clearly distilled and formative.
PS - A thing I realized as I was working on the header for this piece — a lot of Mucha’s work is poorly represented online because of the muted but lush coloring he used. Most of what I see is overly saturated or bright. Another reason to go see the stuff in person.