Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Alphonse Mucha won overnight fame in Belle Époque Paris on New Year’s Day 1895, when one of his sinuous, pastel-coloured lithographs was papered across the city, and made Art Nouveau synonymous with “le style Mucha”. He was soon hailed in the US as “the greatest decorative artist in the world” while a 1960s revival orchestrated by his son, the late Czech writer Jiří Mucha, made his decorative panels ubiquitous as Athena posters. Their garlanded women and flowing lines chimed with flower power and the anti-Vietnam war movement, sparking album covers and Japanese manga.But the Mucha Museum opening this month in central Prague has been created partly to “dynamite the idea that Alphonse was just an affichiste” — a poster artist — John Mucha, the artist’s grandson, tells me at home in Mucha House, the family’s private trove by the Prague Castle, set up to recreate the artist’s atelier. Although closely associated with fin-de-siècle Paris, he was born Alfons Mucha (pronounced Mu-haa) in 1860, in the southern Moravian town of Ivančice under Austro-Hungarian rule and amid the surging Czech National Revival. The new museum traces the artist from his Moravian roots to The Slav Epic (1912-26), his monumental cycle of large-scale figurative paintings that were hidden during the Nazi occupation, only reemerging to public view in 1963. The series is on display at Moravský Krumlov, a cavernous Renaissance castle a short drive from his hometown.In a wing of the baroque Savarin Palace in the Czech capital, the Mucha Museum is a partnership between the Mucha Foundation (created by John Mucha in 1992) and the Czech property developer Crestyl, which funded the palace’s €25mn restoration. An older Mucha Museum exists around the corner, but the family foundation severed ties with it last year after what John, a former banker and the foundation’s president, describes as financial “battles”.Part-history, part-myth, ‘The Slav Epic’ has immense emotive power, setting out the artist’s vision of a struggle for cultural and religious freedom against invasion and persecutionMucha, who returned to Prague in 1910, died in 1939 soon after interrogation by the Gestapo. “He was arrested by the Gestapo because he was a nationalist, a pan-Slavist and a Freemason,” his grandson says. On his death, “100,000 people lined the streets of Prague”. The postwar communists spurned him “as a decadent bourgeois”. Yet even before the Velvet revolution in 1989, his cash value was clear. Of the foundation’s collection of at least 4,000 original artworks, John says:“We export nothing and sell nothing; we acquire and conserve.”A preview of the museum’s permanent exhibition in Savarin’s chandeliered ballroom, Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau & Utopia, yields clues as to why the Nazis thought him a “dangerous painter” and why the communist culture minister wanted his epic destroyed. Designed by the Czech architect Eva Jiřičná in Mucha’s muted palette of soft pinks and blues, the show begins with intimate family portraits after his academic training in Munich and Paris (with friends such as Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec): a 1905 watercolour of his wife Maruška, a Czech-Jewish artist he met in Paris; a 1917 oil painting of their beribboned daughter Jaroslava.His theatre poster for Victorien Sardou’s Gismonda starring Sarah Bernhardt, papered all over Paris in 1895, led to a six-year contract with the Parisian actor. With gold halos, mosaic backdrops and floral frames, his revolutionary panel designs made such self-possessed and creative women into seductive icons, mining both Czech baroque sculpture and Byzantine church art. He borrowed, too, from Japonisme raging in Paris — spurring today’s appreciation of his art in Japan. For Tomoko Sato, the foundation’s curator since 2007, his vertical panels resemble hanging scroll paintings, and his sequences folding screens.With first print-runs of a thousand, “many of these original lithographs were rolled up by Alphonse fresh off the press, and not opened till the 1990s,” says Marcus Mucha, his great-grandson and executive director of the foundation. As with William Morris, sharing beauty through mass production was a utopian ideal. Yet on losing a key patron, Mucha moved into book illustration, advertising and packaging — from Moët champagne to soap.Moravian folk costumes and Masonic symbols were always embedded subversively in his art. A lithograph for his first solo show in 1897 shows a woman crowned with Moravian daisies painting crowns of thorns and fruit against a pink heart of homeland. In another coded message of 1911, for a Moravian choir, a woman seated on a withered tree — alluding to culture under foreign occupation — cups her ear to a blackbird’s dawn song.Mucha’s pan-Slavism was far from exclusivist: a Masonic tenet, cited on the museum wall, was freedom of faith and conscience (Jewish men were admitted). Like his composer friend Janácek, Sato says, “he saw art as a mission to inspire independence and a better society”. An Austro-Hungarian commission to decorate a pavilion at the 1900 Paris world fair for Bosnia and Herzegovina — under Vienna’s imperial rule since 1878 —led to stimulating research across Slavic lands, but also an honour for services to empire, triggering a crisis of conscience. A Masonic falcon dominates his subsequent ceiling painting, “Slavonic Concord”, in Prague’s nearby Obecní dům (Municipal House). When Czechoslovakia was born in 1918, Mucha designed its first banknotes and stamps for free.Yet The Slav Epic was his labour of love, unfolding during seismic shifts in central Europe, as romantic nationalism gave way to trench warfare and Czech independence emerged from the collapse of empires. Part-history, part-myth, the 20 huge sailcloth canvases have immense emotive power in person, setting out the artist’s vision of a struggle for cultural and religious freedom against invasion and persecution, from grey gloom and terror to sun-filled apotheosis. The first 10 canvases chart key moments in Czech history, while the others range around the Slavic world. Little-known even among Czech people, Mucha’s humanist, pacifist series may be ripe for rediscovery, just when the notion of Slavic unity (and Russian leadership) is again fiercely contested.The Mucha Museum’s final room is dedicated to the epic. It combines four scaled-down reproductions, which will rotate over time, with Mucha’s preparatory photographs of models he staged like a film director for its cinematic compositions. (He posed for one as Jan Hus, the reformer burnt as a heretic.) First shown in 1919 in Prague, the then unfinished epic was slammed by some as old-fashioned history painting overtaken by events. Yet for Mucha, “we are free, but the mission of the epic is not complete.” Jiří Ludvík, a young historian who directs Moravský Krumlov castle where the paintings are conserved, sees it as “more myth than history” but thinks it offers grist for vital debate.“Alphonse believed spiritual salvation would emerge from Russia,” his grandson says. “He was naive — hence, his art was so powerful.” In Paris, he rode a wave of Franco-Russian amity against rising German power. But a 1913 visit to “mother-Russia” disillusioned him, as seen in the epic’s “The Abolition of Serfdom” (1914), portraying confused faces of the downtrodden outside the Kremlin. “He never depicted war as heroic,” Sato says, “always the aftermath of battle, showing no one wins.”With his Chicago patron, Charles Crane, Mucha gifted The Slav Epic to the City of Prague in 1928. A protracted legal dispute curtailed a world tour in 2017, which the foundation opposed on conservation grounds. The egg-tempera canvases with highlights in oils are so fragile, Sato says, “we want a proper resting place”.The aim is to house the epic in the Savarin Palace, in an underground complex being designed by the British architect Thomas Heatherwick, its entrance in the palace’s ochre Riding School across the courtyard. It would be exhibited for the first time in the sequence Mucha intended but that even he never saw. For that feast, John Mucha hints, this museum is an “aperitif”.The Mucha Museum at the Savarin Palace in Prague opens on February 24, mucha.eu; ‘The Slav Epic’ is at Moravský Krumlov castle, Moravia, mucha-epopej.czFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
