Patrick Bade
Alphonse Mucha

Patrick Bade - Alphonse Mucha

- But first of all, I’d like to give a very warm thank you to Tanya Dubey, who kindly offered to correct my Czech pronunciation. She and her husband have also contributed an alternative recipe for Marillenknödel, which I think you’ve been sent. So thanks to them. It is wonderful, as Wendy says, how the whole thing has become a big family. This week I’ve had medical advice. I’ve had a wonderful email from somebody in South Africa about a very interesting South African sculptor called Herman Wald. I imagine South Africans will know about him, who did a really remarkable Holocaust memorial. So it’s wonderful all these things cropping up. So today, with the help of Tanya, I’m going to be talking about Mucha, not as the French would like to call him Monsieur Mucha. And the image you see on the screen is a poster by Mucha. And I had, when I was a student living in a student dorm in 1970, I had a reproduction of this poster over my bed, which was a very unoriginal thing in 1970. Mucha had been, there’d been a tremendous revival of interest in him. His posters or reproductions of them were to be seen absolutely everywhere. So he became very, very famous, world famous. I’m sure he would’ve been delighted that he, after a long period of neglect, there was this revival of interest. But I think he also might have been a tad disappointed that it was really only one period of his work and one aspect of his work which had caught the world’s imagination, the Art Nouveau period in the 1890s when he was based in Paris. And actually, to this day, other aspects of his work are less well-known. So he was born in 1860 in a little town called Ivančice, thank you very much again, Tanya, in Moravia, to a poor family with several children.

This is his self-portrait on the right-hand side as a young man. The family were really not wealthy enough to educate him, so they sent him as a chorister in the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul in Brno, the capital of Moravia. And amazingly, he was a contemporary, as a small boy, of another very great Czech artist, who was also a chorister in the cathedral, and that was Leoš Janáček. So apparently, he really was quite religious as a boy and as a young man. The church, as you can see, is basically a huge gothic church that has been, what the Germans would say, describe as barockisiert, baroqueized. And you can see in particular a wonderfully flamboyant Baroque pulpit. And I feel that this actually, sorry, it’s a bit fuzzy, but there’s a detail of the pulpit with these putti and and voluptuous figures in movement and so on. And I feel that this is something that probably stayed with Mucha for the rest of his life. That there is, in his DNA, you could say, an element of middle European Baroque in his style. He showed talent at an early age. He was constantly drawing. But he was rejected when he applied to study at the academy in Prague. So instead, he went off to Vienna in 1880, and he was employed by the Burgtheater, no, the Ringtheater, Ringtheater, on the ring in Vienna, which you see here. And he was painting scenery. I think that’s another quite important formative influence for him, the techniques of painting scenery. Later, at the end of his career, when he’s painting these enormous historical epic pictures, he’s using the technique of distemper.

That’s a glue-based medium on canvas, which is, was in the 19th century, a standard technique for theatrical productions. So this was a useful period for him, but it was brief. Because just the next year, 1881, was a terrible, terrible fire, with 500 members of the audience perishing. And it was actually on the eve of the premier of Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann.” And it gave that operetta, or opera, rather, it has the same reputation in German theatres that say “Macbeth” has in British theatres of a piece that brings bad luck. So initially, it brought bad luck to Mucha, ‘cause he lost his job, and he went back to Moravia. And he eked a living making portraits until he found a local aristocratic patron who agreed to fund his studies. And he sent him to Munich, which was regarded as being an important art centre. This is the period in Munich of the so-called painter princes. And the two leading painter princes, these were artists who were tremendously, tremendously respected, and they earned enormous sums of money, and they lived very, very lavish lifestyles. This is the Lenbachhaus in Munich, now one of the world’s leading art galleries with the greatest collection of Blue Rider Expressionist art and many other wonderful things. It’s a really terrific museum. But it was the palace of the artist Franz von Lenbach, who you see looking very serious in the inset on the right-hand side. We don’t have the records for it, but it’s always said that Mucha studied with Karl von Piloty. And that does, again, it makes sense. Piloty, and he’s a sort of forgotten figure now, but he had an international reputation in the middle of the 19th century. He even won medals at the Paris Salon for painting. This is an enormous, enormous picture, you know, taller than a house.

And it’s a great historical epic of, it’s Thusnelda, the ancient German heroin, who was captured by the Romans and paraded through the streets of Rome in the Triumph of Germanicus. So you see at the top of this picture. So it’s a big piece of kitsch really. But obviously, I think it did impress Mucha. So, although, as I said, we value him primarily as a wonderful graphic artist, wonderful poster artist, what he really wanted to do all his life, and what he finally ended up doing, was painting great national epic canvases. I have to say he’s rather more interesting than this one. So in 1888, he’s really got what he wants from Munich. And his patron says, “Well, I’m prepared to fund you a bit further, "and you can go, you can choose, "you can go to Rome, or you can go to Paris.” And wisely, he made the choice to come to Paris. I think he would’ve been a very different artist. We probably never would’ve heard of him again, actually, if he’d gone to Rome in 1880. But Paris was a very exciting place to come. 1888 was an amazing year to come to Paris. One thing, he would’ve witnessed what you can see at the top of the screen here, which is the construction of the Eiffel Tower, which was being built throughout that year and was completed in April, 1889, for the third, let me see, one, two, no, it’s the fourth of the great Paris World Exhibitions. So that would’ve been tremendously exciting for him, the year after he arrived, people coming from all over the globe to see that. And Paris itself, what can you imagine from a boy from a village in Moravia to arrive at what felt like the capital of the universe in the 1880s, with the newly completed Haussmann Boulevard. And although I don’t suppose he had much spare money for lavish nightlife, there was a lot going on in Paris, of course, the birth of cabaret at the foot of Montmartre, Moulin Rouge and so on.

And what he may not initially have been aware of was 1888 is one of those key years in early modern art. It’s the year, in the summer of 1888, Gauguin painted this picture, “Vision After the Sermon,” which is his big breakthrough picture, and you can say one of the most influential masterpieces of early modern art. He develops a style that he called Synthetism, where the forms are flattened and simplified and heavily contoured. As we shall see, this is relevant to the work of Mucha. In the same summer, of course, this is painted in Brittany, and in the same summer in Arles, Van Gogh painted his… He also had a great breakthrough in that year, achieved full maturity as an artist, and again, laid the foundations between them. They laid the foundations of a lot that was going to happen in Western art from 1888 up to the First World War. So I think Mucha, well, initially, he’s unlikely to have known about either of these two, but he almost certainly knew this picture, which was actually the most radical picture painted in that important year of 1888. It’s by an artist called Sérusier. It’s tiny. I don’t know how big your screens are, but it’s probably not bigger than the image you see on your screen. And it’s known as “The Talisman.” And it was a result of a painting lesson that was given to Sérusier by Gauguin. Now, Sérusier was a student at the Académie Julian, where Mucha enrolled in that year, 1888. And at the end of the summer, Sérusier went back, and he showed this picture to all his fellow students. And they were all completely amazed by it. They’d never seen anything like this, a painting that at first glance, looks almost abstract. It’s just made up of flat patches of colour. So here is the Académie Julian. I don’t think I can recognise Mucha amongst them. I’m not exactly sure what year this is, but it’s around that time.

So Académie Julian, you enrolled. Every day you could go there, and you could draw or paint from the nude model. That was the key thing. Of course, it’s a very key thing for Mucha. His drawing of the nude is absolutely essential to his art. And once a week or whenever, a master would come and correct your drawings and give you advice. Here’s another image of the Académie Julian and all the artists drawing or painting from the nude model. The following year, he moved to another academy, a similar one called Académie Colarossi, and there he was tutored by this artist. He’s called Jean-Paul Laurens. And again, I think it was important for what Mucha was going to do towards the end of his life. Because Jean-Paul Laurens was particularly known for these large-scale historical reconstructions. Around 1890, I mean, he was 30, of course, in that year, and his patron finally said, “No, enough already. "I’m not going to support you anymore. "Got to support yourself.” So he’s searching around really for any kind of work that will bring in some income. And he achieves a modest career as an illustrator. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But this is a photograph of Mucha around this time. As you can see, he sported Moravian national costume, even in Paris. That must have made him a rather exotic figure. And for a while, he took in Gauguin. Gauguin was in Paris in 1893 in between his two trips to the South Seas. And he shared accommodation with Mucha. Well, I have to say, I can hardly think of anybody I would less like to share my flat with than Paul Gauguin for a whole variety of very unsavoury reasons. Anyway, this is an extraordinary picture of Gauguin playing Mucha’s, his very proudly owned harmonium.

Why he’s minus his trousers, I really don’t know and don’t like to think. So this is a time when there was a flowering of illustrated magazines. And you can find mountains of them at the flea markets. And they could offer a regular basic income to an artist, like Mucha, who had a competence in draughtsmanship. These are two of the magazines that we know he worked for, La Vie Populaire, Le Petit Français Illustré. But, of course, in a way, it’s very anonymous work. It doesn’t allow an artist really to express himself with any kind of individuality. But there were important things happening in the last quarter of the 19th century in the graphic arts. Firstly, there is a rapid improvement in techniques of colour lithography. Lithography was a graphic art that was invented or discovered by a Bavarian called Alois Senefelder right at the end of the 18th century. He was the son of a washerwoman. And she kept tally of all the washing with a waxy crayon. She made marks on a piece of stone, a piece of limestone. And he noticed that when it rained, the water was repelled from the areas where there were the waxy crayon marks. And this is really the basis of lithography. It’s the mutual repulsion of oil and water. And initially, lithography, it was monochrome. It’s quite complicated to do colour lithographs. You need a different stone or a different plate for each colour. This is actually by Lautrec, and it shows a lithographic press. But by the 1880s, colour lithography was being exploited to make posters. And this led to a complete transformation of city streets throughout the Western world. The painting on the right-hand side shows what posters looked like in the 1860s, where they probably were, these would’ve been lithographic prints but just in one colour and with just writing on them. It took a while for artists or entrepreneurs to realise that you could make very striking, bold, coloured images.

And so the poster was born as an art form in the 1880s. And it was said at the time, it was like the street suddenly became open-air art galleries. Now, it’s a bit ironic here that I’ve got a photograph that’s actually London, not Paris, in the 1890s, that the photograph is black and white, so you actually can’t see the vibrant colours of the posters, but what you can see is how you’re suddenly, walking out in the streets of a great city, you’d be surrounded by these images. This shows the stages of creating a poster with different plates for different colours that are superimposed. And that technique, although it’s actually a very different technique from a colour woodcut, it makes similar demands on the artist. The artist has to think in terms of, also for a woodcut, you need a different block for each colour. So the artist has to think in terms of a very limited number of colours. Japanese woodcuts, I’ve talked about them before. Some of you who’ve been with Lockdown for a while may remember my talk about the influence of Japanese woodcut prints that flooded into Europe from the 1860s and had a very, very profound effect on early modern art. Again, one of the chief inspirations for the development of the poster as an art form. 'Cause not only do you have these very bold, brightly-colored images with simple flat areas of colour, but you also, with Japanese woodcut prints, they demonstrated to Western artists how you can integrate imagery and information. The first great master of the poster was Jules Chéret, immensely prolific. It’s estimated there were over 2,000 posters by Jules Chéret, and this is a very character…

There he is on the left, and there is a typical Chéret poster. Whatever he’s advertising, it’s always a sort of ditzy blond or redhead who’s leaping ecstatically through the air. And the greatest master of all, of course, was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Excuse my sniffle. The Moulin Rouge poster showing La Goulue dates from 1892. But the one that made the greatest impact when it appeared on the streets was this one of the cabaret artist Aristide Bruant. That went up in 1893, and it literally stopped people in their tracks. It’s so effective because, in its boldness, you can read the image, and you can read the message from the other side of the street. And sometimes these posters were also displayed on the side of trams or buses. And there are stories of people being so astonished by these images that they would run along the street to keep sight of the poster on the side of a bus. Now, 1892-3 is the date of, it’s the kind of official birth really of the Art Nouveau style in its fully-fledged form. And it’s born in Brussels, and the creator of the Art Nouveau style. It’s quite rare you can say that a style is born in a particular year and that it is the creation of one artist. But here we can, I think. We can say that this type of curvilinear Art Nouveau with all the whiplash line was created by the architect Victor Horta. And the first example is this, the entranceway of the Maison Tassel in Brussels in 1892, completed in '93. And very quickly the style really catches on. I’ve described it before as being like a virus. It just spread from place to place. First place it went was Paris.

It was taken there by Hector Guimard. And his first, he went to Brussels. He saw the work of of Horta, loved it, picked up on it, and he came back, and he designed in 1895 the Castel Béranger. It’s an apartment block in the west of Paris. This is the gateway into the Castel Béranger on the right. And of course, he’s most famous for his metro entrances. And sometimes, in France, the Art Nouveau style is called Style Metro. Now, as far as Paris is concerned, the two most important figures of the Art Nouveau style are Hector Guimard and Alphonse Mucha. We think of it as a very French style. We call it Art Nouveau. The name Art Nouveau actually comes from a shop that was set up in 1895 by a German, actually a German Jew, called Siegfried Bing, and he promoted the style. So as I said, we think of it as typically French, but at the time, there were a lot of French people who really didn’t like it, and they saw it as alien and foreign. And it was a leading French critic called Arsène Alexandre, he denounced the style. He said, “All this style reeks of the depraved Englishman, "the drug-addicted Jewess, or the cunning Belgian, "or a charming mixture of all these three poisons.” Now, Mucha’s great breakthrough came at the end of 1894. He’d been, as I said, earning a nice little living as a pretty anonymous illustrator for magazines and occasionally designing advertisements and so on. Now, on Christmas Day, 1894, he went to his printers on an errand actually for somebody else. And there was a great tizzy going on because the actress, Sarah Bernhardt, she was appearing in a new play at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, short distance where I am now. I pass it every Saturday on the way to the flea market on the 38 bus. There you can see exterior, interior of this charming little theatre. Very Belle Époque, very fin de siècle.

And she was appearing in a new play called “Gismonda,” which is set in the Renaissance, and she needed a poster. And as I said, it was Christmas Day. People were away. They were with their families. They couldn’t find an artist. So the printer said, “Look, "do you think you can knock together a poster "for Madam Bernhardt, and I’ll give you a ticket, "and you can go and see her in the theatre, in the play.” And he said yes. It was a great opportunity. His problem was that he didn’t have any clothes. You know, you had to dress up to go to the theatre, even though he was in a seat right up at the top in the gods. And what seems amazing to us is, if a man, you all had to have hats to go to the theatre. And he needed a top hat, and he couldn’t afford one. He managed to borrow one, but it was actually too big for him. And he didn’t want to take it off and put it beside him because, you know, these things were expensive, and he didn’t want it to get stolen. He didn’t want to lose it. So he was balancing the top hat on his head while he was making little sketches of Sarah Bernhardt on the stage, and it kept on falling down over his head. And eventually, a nice friendly gentleman came up to him and said, “I can see your problem. "Do you want me to look after the hat "so that you can concentrate on the drawings?” He said, “Yes, please. Thank you.” Anyway, the gentleman turned out to be Victorien Sardou, very famous playwright who’d actually written the play “Gismonda” and wrote a lot of the most popular plays of Sarah Bernhardt, including “Tosca,” of course.

That’s what he’s best known for today. Now, Sarah Bernhardt, at this time, she was in her 50s. So for an actress, I suppose you’d say no spring chicken. She was universally regarded as the greatest actress in the world. She was certainly the most… No, actually, that’s not quite true. She was the most famous actress in the world. There were people who didn’t think she was the greatest, and I’ll come to that in a minute. She was certainly the greatest in terms of publicity. She had an uncanny instinct for exploiting new technology, new developments in society to promote herself. These are photographs that were taken of her in the 1860s by the French photographer Nadar. She would’ve been around 20 when these were taken. So I think you can say she was the first. These are the first ever glamour photographs of an actress. She’s the first actress to exploit photography. And how incredibly gorgeous and beautiful and expressive her face is at this early point of her career. And constantly through her career, she knew what buttons to press. She exploited new means of travel. She was the most travelled woman in history up to that point. She went round the world I don’t know how many times, travelled backwards and forwards across the United States and so on. She understood the power of the press, the new mass circulation newspapers. And she knew how to get her name before the public in all sorts of different ways. I mean, she did all sorts of incredible publicity stunts. She took a very dangerous balloon journey across Paris.

You can see an illustration of it there. That was big publicity. And she cultivated, because it pleased the punters, she cultivated the image of a femme fatale. She claimed that she only slept well in a coffin. She invited photographers to come round and photograph her taking a nap in her coffin. I mean, she certainly was quite egotistical, as actresses can be, but I mean there was nothing really very fatale about her. She was really a nice Jewish girl who liked, very warmhearted, very hospitable, loved to feed people. I think that’s a very Jewish quality. She liked to invite people round to dinner. But she was quite a gifted sculptor. You can see this. But she’s all the time working on this image to get publicity. Her best-known sculptures is this bronze on the right-hand side, which is a self-portrait as a vampire with bat wings. So this was Mucha’s sketch for the poster for “Gismonda.” And it was strikingly original and unusual in several ways. The story is set in the Renaissance, but actually in Athens or late Middle Ages, early Renaissance in Athens before the arrival of the Turks. And he’s given it a rather Byzantine look. So you’ve got a combination of Byzantine stylization with a very elongated format which he’s derived from Japanese woodcut prints. Oh, here you’ve got the actual poster. You can see the, in a way, he’s in tune with Gauguin’s Synthetism 'cause you’ve got flat areas of colour and the very heavy contouring of all the forms. Because the poster is so elongated, it actually had to be printed in two sections that are stuck together.

And on the left is a Japanese print. This elongated form that was quite common in Japan ultimately derives from Chinese scroll painting. And he wasn’t the only artist in the 1890s to experiment with this very elongated form. On the right-hand side, you can see a painting by the Nabis artist, who he certainly would’ve known because he was a fellow pupil at the Académie Julian. That’s Pierre Bonnard on the right-hand side. It was a tremendous. It was a huge, huge success. People went crazy for it. There were stories of people going out in the middle of the night with a razor to cut down and steal the posters. Sarah Bernhardt ordered a very large quantity of posters from the printers and retained the commercial rights for them. And they very nicely augmented her income through selling the work of Mucha. And it was also used in London, where it was also a great success. And this is quite an interesting comparison. This is a figure by the English sculptor Alfred Gilbert, which he made for the tomb of the Duke of Clarence that’s at Windsor Castle, and it’s often pointed out that there’s very strong influence of the “Gismonda” poster on this beautiful polychrome sculpture. So immediately, Bernhardt and Mucha, they bonded, and for the next six years, he’s working largely for her. He produces a whole series of these elongated posters for Sarah Bernhardt in her different famous roles, and he designs her costumes. He becomes her sort of style manager. This is my absolute favourite, “La Dame Aux Camélias.” Let me see if I can show you. I actually have a reduced version of it here. Don’t know if you can see that. Picked up at the flea market many years ago. Now, this was, of course, her greatest role.

Well, I don’t know if it was her greatest role. It was her battle horse role. And I mentioned that there were people who didn’t think she was the greatest actress in the world. There were people like George Bernard Shaw who thought Eleonora Duse was the greatest actress in the world. And there were several roles where they overlapped, but this was the one where they competed most fiercely. And perhaps rather foolishly, Sarah Bernhardt invited Eleonora Duse to Paris to appear in her favourite roles in Sarah Bernhardt’s own theatre. At the time, it was called Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt. And there’s a very funny description of these two great women meeting and embracing one another and somebody saying it looked more like a wrestling match than an embrace. And in fact, the whole thing turned into something close to a theatrical bare-knuckle fight between them, with them alternating in the role of the Lady of the Camellias. Duse on the left, Bernhardt on the right. What I just showed you is a reduced version of the poster, and because posters very quickly were taken very, very seriously as an entirely new art form, and people wanted to collect them. But most people don’t have the space for a poster that’s going to take up a whole wall. So various entrepreneurial printers brought out these small versions. The best known is a series called… Can’t see it here I’m afraid 'cause it’s covered by the stuff at the bottom. It’s a series called “Les Maîtres l'affiche,” the master, the poster. Every month, they brought out a reduced version of a successful poster. They brought out Lautrec, they brought out Chéret, and they brought out lots of Mucha. And these are still very collectible, and they were produced in quite large numbers.

Oh, this is, sorry, a bit of a dim image of the one I bought at the flea market. You can still find them. “Tosca,” a play written Sardou as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt. Of course, today, largely known from Puccini’s opera, which is based on the play. Going to move on quickly 'cause there’s a lot to say. So there are other posters and images of Sarah Bernhardt. I really like this one, I think it’s a great one, by William Nicholson, but I’m not sure if she commissioned this or if somebody else commissioned it. This is Orazi, no, Manuel Orazi. I can’t say, I mean, it’s a nice Art Nouveau image, but I don’t get much of Sarah Bernhardt from it. This was one, Grasse, Bernard Grasse, which she did commission, but she didn’t like, and she rejected it. That’s the one on the left. Now, while he’s doing all this, he’s a very busy boy throughout the 1890s, working for Sarah Bernhardt, at her beck and call, but also doing a lot of commercial work. And really, the idea for all his posters, it’s very similar. It’s always a gorgeous girl with abundant, tendril-like hair. Girls and flowers, essential to the Art Nouveau style. So it might take you a minute to work out that the poster on the left-hand side is actually for railways, the Monaco-Monte-Carlo railway. And so the stems of the flowers, of course, suggest rails and wheels. And this is a wonderfully improbable advertisement for bicycles on the right-hand side. I do hope that girl tied up her hair before she went on a ride on that bicycle. Otherwise, she was going to risk coming to a very sticky end, like Isadora Duncan. So chocolates, soap, biscuits, lots and lots of alcohol advertisements, and smoking.

Now, smoking, of course, was not something that was a respectable thing for women to do in the 1890s. Indeed, you’d be making a very shocking statement as a woman to light up a cigarette in public in the 1890s. But here are two advertisements for JOB cigarettes. And there’s, of course, a delightful opera, I recommended it to you, called “Susanna’s Secret,” that came out in the early 1900s by Wolf-Ferrari. And the plot revolves around the fact that Susanna’s secret, she has a secret vice, and that is that she likes to smoke. And of course, her new husband is suspicious, 'cause he doesn’t know that she smokes, and he smells cigarette smoke on her clothes, and he assumes that she has a lover. But it all turns out well in the end. So Mucha, like so many artists of this period, has a type. He has an ideal type. All his sisters, all his women in all his, they all look related. They can have different coloured hair, but they all have very similar facial features. That’s true of Renoir. Renoir’s son Jean. 'Cause Renoir married his wife, was very much his ideal type with a little snub nose and wide mouth and the plump, curvaceous body, and so on. And Jean Renoir said, “Oh, whenever I look at paintings "of girls by my father, "I always feel I’m looking at my sisters.” And on the right-hand side, Burne-Jones too, he’s another one of these artists who has an ideal female type. And that’s true of commercial artists. I mentioned that Jules Chéret, whatever he’s advertising, whether it’s oil for oil lamps or a newspaper or whatever, it’s always the same girl, and she can only vary really. She’s wasp-waisted, hourglass figure. And she’s a kind of ditzy redhead or blonde. This is Dudley Hardy, who’s a sort of Anglo-Saxon version of Jules Chéret, same kind of Belle Époque hourglass figure and the same kind of ditzy character. This is Grasset, who favours a more slender and more aesthetic type of female beauty.

Mucha’s type is ultimately based on the Pre-Raphaelites. And when you make this comparison, you can see that the JOB, the famous JOB advertisement, is really a kind of naughty parody of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix,” which is his tribute to his dead wife, Lizzie Siddal, who committed suicide with an opium overdose, with a laudanum overdose. And he’s shown the moment of her death, with a dove dropping the poppy into her hands, as a moment of ecstasy. So it’s a kind of Liebe und Tod, kind of love, death, with her eyes closed, her lips parted. I think you can see that Mucha, it’s almost a direct quote. He’s reversed it to disguise the borrowing. And there is something, this is… It’s the big death and the little death, isn’t it? The moment of ecstasy. This is the girl, her moment of ecstasy is getting a puff on a cigarette. Now, the hair, that’s the other thing, the halo of hair and the tendril-like hair. This is a great period of hair fetishism among artists. Rossetti notorious. You know, if he walked down the street, and he saw a woman with a kind of hair, the kind of colour of hair or texture of hair that appealed to him, he would be transfixed and mesmerised, would break off his conversation. So, why was hair in this period the fantasy? Why was it so incredibly erotically charged for these artists? And you got a clue here with this photograph, where you see these bourgeois, respectable women all tightly corseted and upholstered. They all have long hair, but, of course, the hair, a respectable woman, you would never see her in public with her hair down or her hair loose. It was always confined. A man would only see a woman with her hair down or loose in a situation of extreme intimacy. Hence, I think, it’s almost like a Pavlovian reaction for men in the late 19th century of loose hair having such a high erotic charge. It’s the Pre-Raphaelites who really get this thing going. And this is a Punch cartoon of Pre-Raphaelite paintings with a Pre-Raphaelite woman whose hair has gone completely berserk.

So Rosetti on the left. Degas was also notorious hair fetishist. Late in his life, he would hire models just to sit with him and comb their hair. And hair, of course, it’s weaponized by the femme fatale. Hair is the ultimate means of entrapping a man. That’s Munch you can see on the left, where the woman’s hair has, it’s got a life of its own, and it’s reaching out to wrap itself round the man’s neck. And you feel also with the JOB that this hair has a life of its own, and any nice young man had really better watch out if he’s not going to get wrapped up in it. Talking of being wrapped up in hair, two famous literary examples of hair fetishism. Georges Rodenbach, “Bruges-la-Morte,” that’s the novel that Korngold’s “Die tote Stadt” is based on. And in the opera, the hero worships a memory of his dead wife, and he has her long hair under a glass dome, and he preserves it. And towards, then he actually uses his dead wife’s hair to strangle his mistress. And on the right-hand side, the famous scene in “Pelléas et Mélisande,” where Mélisande’s hair falls out of a castle window and envelopes Pelléas. Debussy, of course, a great, great hair fetishist as well, not just that scene in “Pelléas” but his song “La Chevelure,” which is about a lover, a lover entwined in his mistress’ hair, and his piano piece, “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” And this is very charming on the right-hand side. Obviously, he met a young girl with lovely blonde hair, and she must have asked for an autograph. And he’s written out the first, the melody of “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” with the stave lines looking like wavy girl’s hair. Of course, the melody suggests, it goes. ♪ Da, da-da-da, da-da-da ♪ ♪ Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da ♪ So it’s kind of wavy, melodic line suggesting the curls of the hair. This is a poster that Mucha made for Sarah Bernhardt in the play “Médée,” “Medea.”

And as you can, she’s wearing a snake bracelet. And this still exists. Mucha designed it, and it was made by the great jeweller George Fouquet. And so Mucha became very involved in the design of jewellery, and he designed this fabulous interior of Fouquet’s jewellery shop, which was conveniently situated opposite the notorious Maxim’s. So Maxim’s, I mentioned I think last week. Was it last week? No, I don’t think it was with you. I’m sorry, it was in another lecture. That the courtesans of the late 19th century, often they preferred not to be paid in cash. They preferred to be paid in jewellery. So it was very convenient. You know, a wealthy gentleman would go to Maxim’s, he’d pick up a beautiful girl at the bar there or in the restaurant, and then all he had to do was cross the road to Fouquet and buy a wonderful bracelet designed by Mucha. This interior, by the way, it’s been reconstructed in the Carnavalet Museum, which has just reopened in Paris after a lengthy refurbishment. And I’m hoping to go there at the end of this week with Trudy. So he’s really into the decorative arts. And in 1902, Mucha publishes a big book of his designs called “Documents Decoratifs.” This was actually really tempting fate. Because, I would say, he was almost inviting plagiarism. So many people borrowed his designs. And sometimes they cheapened them. Here are two more of my flea market finds. Those are cigarette cards on the left-hand side, which are kind of knockdown, cheap versions of Mucha girls. And actually, rather a nice drawing I think on the right-hand side, which is a design either for a menu or a programme. But you can see the girl at the top, the flowers in her hair, tendril-like hair, very Mucha-like. It’s an anonymous drawing. But he was very, very widely imitated. Now, the absolute dizzying peak of Mucha’s career was the Paris World Exhibition of 1900. And he had megalomaniac designs for this.

This is his design for how the Eiffel Tower might be transformed for the Paris 1900 exhibition. That was not taken up. I think we must be quite grateful for that, actually. But he was very busy, nevertheless. This is Rue des Nations, the Street of Nations, where all the different countries in the world are represented, a pavilion which represented their national culture and their national style. And Mucha was employed to decorate the interior of the pavilion of Bosnia Herzegovina. This is the exterior and here are the interior murals that he painted, some of which survive and belong to the Petit Palais. Here you can see how they look today. So that’s the peak. But the trouble was, it was a huge success, and also his designs, I said, were very, very widely imitated, and very quickly after 1900, a reaction set in against the Art Nouveau style in general, which people felt had become cheapened and over-popular. I’m sure I’ve said this to you before, you know, Art Deco is a style that lends itself to mass production. Art Nouveau isn’t. You know, cheap, mass-produced Art Nouveau is nasty. And it brought about a kind of reaction. And I think very, very quickly after 1900, Mucha found himself out of date, passe. And 1904, he goes to America. This is a portrait he made when he was in America. On right-hand side is a poster he made before the First World War for the American actress Maude Adams. And the trouble was that he was sort of stuck stylistically. So by 1910, what you see on the right-hand side is, and these, they’re very lovely, but they weren’t novel anymore.

They were yesterday’s style. And so, although he did okay in America, I think he must have realised that his time as a really fashionable poster designer and illustrator was over. But that was not really what he wanted to do anyway. He was passionate, passionate Czech patriot. And in 1910, he goes back to Bohemia, and he wants to be involved. Of course, he’s very, very thrilled when Czechoslovakia is created as an independent country in 1980, 1918. And he wants to be involved in this great national revival. And he is employed by the new state. This is a window that he designed for St. Vitus Cathedral. He was also invited to design bank notes, as you can see here. But his great project from 1910 until his death in 1939, so that’s a period of nearly 30 years, was to paint 20 enormous paintings, “The Slav Epic.” He’s celebrating the history of the Slavs. And these he presented to the city of Prague, and they are on display there now. How successful are they? I don’t really know. I can’t really say. I mean, they’re ambitious. They’re enormous. Maybe they’ll come into their own one day. It seems to me that they’re borderline kitsch and that they don’t work actually all that well. This is showing, this shows the introduction of the Slavonic liturgy.

This shows the Slavs under the heel of the Turks and the Goths. This shows the abolition of serfdom in Russia in the 1860s. So they’re enormously, this shows, the title of this one is “The Apotheosis of the Slavs.” So it’s a bit of a sad ending really, particularly the nature and the timing of his death. So at 1939, you sort of think, couldn’t God have mercy on him and actually take him before 1939? So he lived just long enough to see everything that he’d hoped for, everything he’d longed for, the creation of a Czech nation undone by the invasion of the Nazis. As a very prominent Czech patriot and nationalist, he was, of course, very much under suspicion with the Nazis. And he was arrested, and he underwent days of very brutal interrogation. And when he was released, he was really a broken man in very fragile health. And he died in July, 1939, of pneumonia. So that’s it for today. Let’s see what we’ve got for…

Q&A and Comments:

Linda, thank you. Glad you liked my book on Klimt.

Yes, that was a great exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. I saw that. In fact, I took groups around it. There have been several big. I think there’s been one in America since then, hasn’t there? A Mucha exhibition.

Glad you like. I don’t know why I’m red, but nevermind. Thanks for the recipes. You’ve made a needlepoint, Arlene, of that poster of Mucha. That must have been quite a task. Born on July the 24th. I don’t know what star sign that is. There was an excellent exhibition of his work at the Walker Art Gallery a couple of years ago.

This is somebody mentioning, yes, that Herman Wald, the South African sculptor I mentioned at the beginning. Yes, well, you’ve got the, you can click on that and find out more about him. You can find, of course, the big posters really cost you a lot of money, and they’re likely to come up for sale at Christie’s and Sotheby’s or to be in top galleries. But the small versions, which are very fine quality, you can, well, for Mucha and Lautrec, they’d still cost you a fair amount of money. They’d be a few hundred euros. But you can find a lot of very nice Belle Époque posters for under 100 euros in that series of “Les Maîtres l'affiche.” Montreal gifted one of the Paris metros. Lucky Montreal.

Former cafe Julien, now the Bouillon Julien, has many Mucha paint. Oh, do you know? It’s not the same Julien that I was talking about, by the way. And it is lovely. I’m not sure that they’re actually Mucha. They’re Mucha style paintings in that bistro Julien. Thank you.

One poster has Hebrew letters. I think that probably was Sarah Bernhardt. She was very, very proud of being Jewish, and she never wanted to hide that. So I think that’s quite likely. “Rapunzel” would be an ideal literary tale for one of these artists, I’m sure. Lautrec did the cover, L'Estampe Originale series. As you mentioned, Mucha did the cover image used for each issue of L'Estampe Moderne. Right, oh, that’s from Ron, yeah, who should know.

Margaret, dying to get to the Carnavalet. Yes, it’s open. Yes, it’s well and truly open. I’ve been to it three times already with Trudy, the Carnavalet. It’s a museum in the city of Paris. Fantastic museum. No, his work is not. There are oils by him. Those big murals, as I said, are distemper. That’s glue-based. And of course, I’d say his most important work is graphic. It’s in the medium of lithography.

This is Ron, again. Bing, the great art dealer, not only the vanguard of Art Nouveau in the ‘90s. He’s also key introducing Japanese prints to France. That’s true. Well, in fact, they’d been introduced well before him, but he certainly promoted them. He was a great collector of them and so on.

Right. Tanya, I’m going to try your Knödel recipe.

Geraldine, Mucha. Yes, I’ve heard about her, a Scottish composer.

Q: How old is he?

A: 1860 to 1939. My maths is not that good, but one should be able to work it out. Leo is his sign.

Thank you all for your nice comments. Very nice comments. JOB cigarette papers, you had to roll your own. Yeah. Thank you, again. Very, very nice comments, and it’s such a pleasure really to do these and to talk to you.

Q: Is it true?

A: Yes, I think George Bernard Shaw was anti-Semitic, and he was against Sarah Bernhardt. He was really nasty about her. But I don’t think it was for anti-Semitic reasons. He just thought that she was very artificial as an actress. And a lot of people did. Major show in Genoa.

Q: Did artists like Mucha, who painted massive paintings, use any special techniques to keep the proportions and detail of the subject matter consistent?

A: Hmm, I’m not sure. I’d have to think about that.

Sarah Bernhardt’s mother was a prostitute. So was she for a while, actually, early in her career. And it was a toss-up for her whether she was going to, whether she’d earn more vertically or horizontally.

Q: Ditzy, is that an English term?

A: Ditzy, it means, you know, a ditzy blonde. I think it’s an American term, isn’t it?

Yes. Not Mucha. I don’t think Mucha’s blondes are ditzy.

No, I think it’s Chéret. They always look completely idiotic to me. They’re all sort of, you know, sort of real dumb blonde types.

John, roll-up cigarettes being used at school in the 1970s. Ooh, naughty. Mucha house in Prague.

And thank you, again, for your very, very nice comments. And we’re going to move on to Czech opera. I do hope you’ll follow me there. It’s such a rich, wonderful field. Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček will be the main figures on Wednesday.

Thank you, everybody. Bye-Bye.