Art Nouveau Presentation...

I have been assigned to look at one or two practitioners from the 'Art Nouveau' Movement that took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Alphonse Mucha was regarded not only as a practioner of Art Nouveau, but in fact the catylyst of the movement. The genre was (suprisingly) started by a Lithographed poster. From a young age Mucha enjoyed art and drawing, and came to work at decorative and potrait painting. Neoclassicism was one of Mucha's inspirations.

"Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov hired Mucha to decorate Hrušovany Emmahof Castle with murals, and was impressed enough that he agreed to sponsor Mucha's formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mucha#Early_years.

Alphonse Mucha brought the most distinct elements of Art Nouveau across in his drawings/paintings of women. In these images you can clearly see the way trails are left seeming to echo larger parts of the drawing (Dress, Flowers in the drawing above), or trails are concieved from smaller parts of the drawing and brought out (from the hand, image below).

 You can see the trails, floral and flowing themes continud in these images.

 Mucha, like many following artists of the movement, worked on stained glass windows, one of his more famous and large scale works of this type is shown on the right.

If you look closely you pick out elements that are representative of the movement (the swirls near the bottom, centre; or the tree centre, top)


I think the wide range of colours used symbolises a free-minded take on what was actually a very traditional and closed context (...stained glass windows).

 Mucha's highly regarded set of images called 'The Slave Epic' were considered by himself his lifetime achievement. The set consisted of 20 large canvases that were initially displayed together. The images collectively took 18 years to create.

Below are some images from The Slav Epic.