Alphonse Mucha in The Hague

Vacation time and the very first thing I wanted to do was to visit exhibition in The Hague about Czech maestro Alphonse Mucha and his celebrated Art Deco work - even though the man himself was reserved about belonging to any group or clan, but we lump him together with Art Deco for the sake of chronology. I have loved and admired Mucha's work for the longest time but probably saw his work for the first time in real life last year in The Allard Pierson Museum on “Goddesses of Art Nouveau“ exhibition, that made a point of explaining how the artists of the time successfully adapted to new commercial trends, namely advertisements and posters for various products. 

This is in fact how Mucha became famous, since as a painter he was starving artist who depended on goodwill of local financier (Count Belasi) and a struck of good luck around New Year 1894. when he got commission for creating theatrical poster for latest Sarah Bernhardt play. I was always fascinated with stories how people actually become famous and in this case it was a lucky break - nobody else was available during Christmas holidays, Bernhardt insisted poster must be ready by 1. January and Mucha was available. The highly stylized poster was something completely new for Parisians who were so impressed that many posters were in fact stolen from the walls - Bernhardt herself was pleased with the reaction and gave Mucha a six year contract. 

The exhibition in Hague's Kunstmuseum was very beautiful and various aspects of Mucha's creative work were all nicely covered - there was a very good introduction to his beginning, breakthrough with Bernhardt and all sorts of work later, including posters for bicycles, boxes for cookies, etc. To my biggest surprise the place was actually genuinely crowded, even though this was almost the end of exhibition and the public interest was still great. There was a lot of effort made to illustrate the times when Mucha worked, particularly his time in late 19th  century Paris. It was joy to see his famous work so well represented and displayed handsomely in a beautiful building - I have even seen his famous "Four seasons"  and many others. The rest of the building was nowhere near as interesting, since lot of space was unfortunately given to modern art that was in a sharp contrast with Mucha, to me it mainly appeared annoying. Somehow it just made it even more clear how much are we removed from somebody of his stature.