Ms Unexpected | Alphonse Mucha Exhibition in The Hague

Last weekend, Jon took me on a surprise trip to The Hague (Netherlands), and I loved every second of it. I did not know much about The Hague except that it was home to a lot of international organisations, among which the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court (which is impossible to ignore if, like me, you grew up in Belgium in the 1990s), Europol, and the World Forum. It is also home to fantastic museums, such as the Mauritshuis (where you’ll see The Girl With the Pearl Earring by Vermeer) and the incredible Kunstmuseum, with which I irremediably fell in love as soon as I stepped into its long pool-like tiled corridor.

We were lucky enough to catch the Alphonse Mucha exhibition (it closes on the 28th of August). I had never visited the Kunstmuseum, so I have no idea if it is their habit to do things so brilliantly, but the Mucha exhibition is a glaring example of what a temporary exhibition should be when done well.

Having worked in a museum myself, and having spent so much of my adult life visiting museums and galleries across Europe, I have developed a series of ~~weird obsessions~~ healthy points of interest regarding museography, and in particular, the staging of artworks and informative support. In that respect, and in many others, the Alphonse Mucha exhibition at the Kunstmuseum was nothing short of perfect. In a nutshell, I had a grand old time perusing the rooms, and my only piece of advice regarding all this is that you should run to see the temporary exhibition.

If you are not familiar with Alphonse Mucha’s life and work, he was a Czech painter, illustrator and graphic artist born on the 24th of July 1860 in the small town of Ivančice, Moravia (which is now part of the Czech Republic). He was one of the most prominent artists of the Art Nouveau movement, and his style is one of the most recognisable of the era.

Alphonse Mucha & Sarah Bernhardt

After working for the local aristocracy and studying at the Fine Arts Academy of Munich, Mucha moved to Paris to pursue his artistic education in 1887. Alas, his Czech sponsors stop financing him soon after, and he’s left to his own devices. He’s hired by Armand Colin, one of the biggest publishers in Paris at the time, to produce illustrations for a theatre magazine. Sarah “the Divine” Bernhardt (1844-1923), arguably the most famous actress of her time, is playing Cleopatra on stage, and Mucha draws her in a revolutionary style made of floral decorations and intricate ornaments, which catches the star’s attention.

When a couple of months later, she needs a poster to be made to promote her new play, Gismonda, a happy accident has it that Mucha is the only illustrator available at the printer’s shop, and he takes the challenge. The posters (pictured in the middle) are so new, and so beautiful, that the good people of Paris cut them off of the walls to take them home. The viral marketing operation is a success, and Bernhardt hires Mucha for the duration of six years.

This first room of the exhibition recalls the first Parisian years and the Bernhardt/Mucha partnership, with theatre-goes outfits, theatre posters, and portraits of Sarah Bernhardt by Alphonse Mucha. I liked the wealth of information, the occupation of the central space of the room by mannequins (their costumes were so beautiful!), and the bold choices to have the walls painted red and gold, plus the subdued lighting.

See the Sarah Bernhardt artwork at the Mucha Foundation

Belle Époque

The second room places Mucha in the wider artistic context of fin de siècle/Belle Époque Paris. At the time, the Eiffel Tower is being built, Monet (first picture) is experimenting, and Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters call for spectators to visit the music halls (second picture). More costumes, including two dresses made of the loveliest embroidered silk.

See more of Mucha’s turn of the century artwork in the Paris 1900 section of the Mucha Foundation

Photography

One thing I didn’t know before visiting the exhibition was that Alphonse Mucha had taken up photography in order to study the human anatomy and movements for his portraits. Here, you can see a series of Dancing nudes in the studio taken in rue du Val de Grâce (Paris), c. 1901.

See more Mucha photography at the Mucha Foundation

Decorative artworks

The exhibition has a couple of bigger rooms dedicated to Mucha’s decorative artworks, including this wonderfully detailed illustration for a Masonic certificate (first picture) as Alphonse Mucha was a Freemason himself. The French-speaking lodge of Prague is named after him. The second image shows Princezna Hyacinta (c. 1911), a ortrait of the popular Czech Andula Sedlácková in the titular role of the ballet and pantomime by Oskar Nedbal. In the third picture, you can see a series of glass vases inspired and/or designed by Mucha to illustrate the context of the room in which they sit, which is dedicated to his work in advertising.

See more decorative artworks at the Mucha Foundation

Advertising

Of course, most of the space in the exhibition revolves around Mucha’s ad posters, since much of his work was produced in that context. Because his arrival in Paris coincided with the expansion of mass-produced advertisement thanks to recent progress in colour-printing and lithography, as well as the Art nouveau taste for opulent illustrations, his work was soon in demand for all sorts of products, from absinthe to motorcycles. Mucha turned advertising into art.

His recipe basically boiled down to drawing the beholder’s attention to the poster by placing a beautiful woman at its centre, more often than not surrounded by some form of halo made of flowers or other decorative elements in order to then redirect the focus to the product being sold.

I personally love the Moët & Chandon Champagne diptych from 1899 (Grand crémant impérial and Champagne White Star) and I’m seriously considering ordering reproductions to decorate my sitting room if anyone can point me to a shop that does just that.

See more advertising posters at the Mucha Foundation

Objects

Mucha also produced packaging designs, which, much like his posters, soon turned mundane objects into small pieces of art. I’m left wondering if we’ll ever be able to calculate his influence on modern marketing techniques and how perceive the products we buy.

See more packaging designs at the Mucha Foundation

Afterlife

The American years at the Chicago, New York and Philadelphia academies during which Mucha produced his Slav Epic (a series of 20 monumental paintings) are glossed over, since the point of the exhibition is to focus on the Parisian years,¹ so our visit draws to an end with the afterlife of Mucha section. There, art that was influenced by his work is presented, with particular attention to the late 1960s/early 1970s psychedelic record sleeves.

I keep wondering whether I’d have enjoyed the same exhibition as much had it been presented in a different museum with a different staging strategy. If, as I suspect, we indeed see more exhibitions dedicated to Alphonse Mucha in the years to come, it will be interesting to see the differences and similarities. The beauty of the artwork rekindled my love for Art nouveau, piqued my curiosity in many regards, and challenged my conceptions—and at the end of the day, isn’t that what art is all about?