30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line' Review: Free-Flowing Style at the Phillips Collection
Washington
On Christmas Eve 1894, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), a Czech junior designer working alone in a Parisian print shop, received a rush order from actress Sarah Bernhardt for a poster advertising her title role in the Greek-set melodrama 'Gismonda.' Mucha—inspired, he said, by Bernhardt's flowing gestures, the 'magic of her movements . . . a spiral principle'—set to work. Fusing Eastern and Greco-Roman influences, Mucha's life-size decorative portrait-poster—illustrated with golden mosaics, sinuous arabesques, flora and fauna—idealized and eroticized Bernhardt as a neoclassical goddess and Byzantine icon.
