Mucha was born in 1860 in southern Moravia, and initially found work by lettering tombstones and painting portraits, murals, and scenery for theatres. It is the first such museum in the United States, though poster museums in Europe date back several decades. “Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau / Nouvelle Femme” is one of the inaugural exhibitions at the Poster House, a museum of poster design and history, which opened in Manhattan in late June. Posters even influenced the colors used in turn-of-the-century clothing. At parties, women dressed up as their favorite posters and others guessed which ones they were. Magazines, galleries, and clubs quickly emerged to respond to this appetite. His rise was part of a poster craze that swept through Europe and the United States in the eighteen-nineties. Others simply cut them down from the walls themselves.Īfter Bernhardt ordered four thousand more posters, Mucha was famous. Some people bribed the bill stickers responsible for putting the posters up. But Mucha’s “Gismonda” poster startled passersby, and made them covetous. Parisians were used to seeing posters in the streets and in shops, advertising theatre and cabaret, circuses and books, cookies and soaps. Her surname arced above her head, like a halo. Bernhardt, dressed in the style of Byzantine nobility, was flanked by white spaces, as though she had stepped out of the ether. Mucha designed a long and narrow poster, filled with soft pastels and gold accents, avoiding the bold colors that were typical of the era. Most of the Lemercier illustrators were on vacation, so the task fell to Alphonse Mucha, a Czech émigré. She needed a poster for her play “Gismonda,” which was reopening in a few days. Bernhardt was one of the most famous entertainers in Europe, in part because of her talent for self-promotion. With the advent of new industrial printing technology, these commercial artworks were rapidly mass-produced and disseminated throughout cities, turning average urban streets into colorful landscapes, and the style associated with Art Nouveau posters laid the foundation for modern and contemporary graphics.Around Christmas in 1894, the actress Sarah Bernhardt called Maurice de Brunhoff, the manager of Lemercier, a publishing company in Paris that produced her promotional posters. Posters gave artists the opportunity to disseminate their work to far-reaching audiences and build large followings that included art collectors. While their styles of Art Nouveau vary greatly, this exhibition’s posters and their subjects offer a glimpse into societal interests during the late 1800s. Advertising everything from theatrical revues and products to newspapers and literary journals, posters also served as agents of social change, depicting new images of women as fashionable and independent people. The French, Belgian, Viennese, and American posters on view include works designed by Alphonse Mucha, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Henri de Toulouse-Latrec, Manual Orazi, Josef Maria Auchentaller, and others.Īrt Nouveau posters pushed the preconceived notions of “fine art” and merged the gap between academic art and applied arts, and the poster craze spread from Europe to America. This selection from VMFA’s collection of Art Nouveau posters highlights the late 19th-century design style, which emphasized beauty in natural forms and movement and was often expressed through flowing, stylized lines and flourishing patterns.
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