The turbulent beauty of art nouveau is still all over culture

Washington Post

19-03-2025

There is no train in 'Monaco • Monte-Carlo.' The railway ad instead pictures a woman, poised at the shore's edge. Encircled in rings of carmine- and blush-tinged blossoms, she looks up, hands held in wonder, her lips cherry red. Anticipation swells in the Alphonse Mucha poster, in the liquid folds of a satin skirt, in the stirring of plans unformed. This is not the world as it is, but as it could be.
Mucha, the subject of a Phillips Collection survey, was a student of the world. As a child in Moravia, in the present-day Czech Republic, he spent his days poring over 'flowers, the neighbours' dogs and horses,' noting every curve and flourish, as he wrote years later. 'I tried not only to depict them, but also to preserve them.'
Mucha's sketches are nimble, some ecstatic. One, of a man at rest in a high-backed chair, is impossibly fluid, his coiled mustache and tousled hair a flurry of razor-sharp slashes. His pastel 'Holy Night' is a furious study of cornflower and powder blues, veiled by a web of tissue-paper-thin streaks. Mucha examined life closely, intensely. He was, artist Charles Matlack Price observed, 'the most perfect and painstaking draftsman.'
Mucha was a close observer of the world, drawing out the strange and fantastical. Art should project 'moral harmonies,' he professed; it should 'know how to charm.' In his pictures, he didn't bother with facial details. More interesting to him was capturing the movement, the verve of his subjects, suffusing them with luster. In one picture, he swapped out an actress's short, red curls for cascading blond tresses; in another, he elongated a model's fingers, coiling them around a fluted bouquet. His work is all affect, made 'to glorify beauty,' he said, to awaken the soul.
This movement — the sweeping lines, rich patterning and swirling ornamentation — became an instantly recognizable element of art nouveau, the style Mucha helped lead to lasting popularity through 20th-century commercial art, global comics and counterculture. As an illustrator in fin de siècle Paris, Mucha saw his images reach wide audiences, especially images featuring the beloved French actress Sarah Bernhardt.
His theater posters are wide awake. In one, for the Alexandre Dumas play 'The Lady of the Camellias,' he set Bernhardt against a violet ground, dappled with pearl-gray stars. As the title courtesan, she is forced to give up her lover, her death all but inevitable. She turns away, enveloped in cream-colored blooms.
In 'Lorenzaccio,' Bernhardt is still more withdrawn. Draped in billowing opals, she is Lorenzo de' Medici, who kills the tyrant of Florence. Bernhardt here is steely, lost in thought before a gilded archway, a mint-green dragon snaked about her. Each captures what Mucha called the 'particular magic of her movements,' Bernhardt's sinuous lines and chilly, spellbinding gaze.
There's much to gaze at in Mucha's pictures. Take 'Zodiac,' a woman in profile, glittering in syrupy crimson, teal and eggshell, her hair a spiral of copper. (Mucha was especially fond of redheads, writing in a 1908 article, 'A man admires a red-haired woman for the same reason that he papers the walls of his bachelor apartment red … because red is his favorite color.') He was unguarded, his work brimming with periwinkle-blue diadems and whirling arabesques, his studio overgrown with rococo tables and grand palms. The effect is thrilling, if slightly manic. He once lamented, 'I never had time to finish the work.'
That energy carried over to Mucha's classroom. He was an in-demand teacher and charmer, earning 'a reputation as a kind of joker,' a student recalled. 'We had a circus.' His philosophy was simple: Art should stir the viewer, inviting them to a higher plane. The idea recurs in the show in a French-blue Grateful Dead cover — of a skeleton, crowned with bloodred rosettes — and a Pink Floyd print — of a castle floating through a scarlet- and yellow-soaked sky — the pictures at once conjuring and falling short of the Czech master.
Mucha saw his work as a reprieve. People 'needed to breathe fresh air,' he maintained, 'to quench their thirst for beauty.' That splendor, edged in Mucha's prints with sumptuous brocades and rubies, may be what's missing from some of his many followers. As one pupil said, 'There are few who have been on this Earth like Mucha.'
Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St., NW. 202-387-2151. phillipscollection.org.
Dates: Through May 18.
Prices: $20; $15 for seniors; $12 for military personnel; $10 for students and teachers; free for members and visitors 18 and under. Admission is pay-what-you-wish daily from 4 p.m. to closing. On the third Thursday of the month, the museum stays open until 8 p.m. and admission is free after 4 p.m.