Word: mucha
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...climax was the turn of the century, in 1900. But in that brief time the look of Western capitals-and especially their bourgeois interiors-was utterly transformed by architects led by Victor Horta and Hector Guimard, designer of the Paris Metro entrances; poster artists like Privat Livemont and Alphonse Mucha; designers of jewelry like René Lalique; glassmakers and ceramists like Louis Comfort Tiffany, Emile Gallé and Felix Bracquemond. A new style of luxury art, the last great mannerism, had been found. Because of a hostility to "applied" as against "high" art, and because Cézanne...
...sense, art nouveau invented female chic in the popular arts. Not since the 16th century mannerists had there been such a plethora of delicately icy women as now appeared on that new form, the advertising poster. Mucha, a Czech émigré who became Sarah Bernhardt's court artist, and followers like Privat Livemont helped change the sexual prototypes of the 19th century before they launched a million psychedelic posters in the late 20th...
...Alphonse Mucha was a sculptor too, and nothing in this show epitomizes the art nouveau vision (or fantasy) of woman better than a bust he designed around 1899 for a Parisian jeweler. This astonishing object, whose form shifts like water in the twining reflections of silver flesh and gold hair, is perversely liturgical-a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame...
...Nouveau artist named Mucha...
...ALPHONSE MUCHA by Jiri Mucha, Marina Henderson & Aaron Scharf. 136 pages. St. Martin's Press...