Mucha and the Slav Epic
Alphonse Mucha's Art Nouveau style was all the rage in 1920's Prague.
While Alphonse Mucha was famous for his commmercial art, the Art Nouveau painter was more interested in a grand masterpiece called The Slav Epic.
Alphonse Mucha is one of Prague's best-known painters and a representative of the Art Nouveau artistic movement of the early 20th century. He is probably most famed for his commercial art, which included posters, postage stamps, and banknotes. However, he was a serious artist committed to the idea that art was to convey a spiritual message.
Mucha's life's work was a gigantic series of canvases called The Slav Epic. Consisting of 20 images, the series was meant to tell the history of the Slavic people. While The Slav Epic was magnificent in scope, it was met with indifference by critics and the international crowd - although Prague locals favored its high detail and nationalist overtones. The Slav Epic was exhibited both in the United States and in what was then Czechoslovakia, but Mucha finally gifted the city of Prague with his masterpiece in the late 1920's.
World-famous works by Alphonse Mucha are recognizable still today. His representations of Sarah Bernhardt, his Four Seasons series, and other Art Nouveau decorative art posters that have joined the ranks of popular culture are displayed at the Mucha Museum in Prague. Unfortunately, The Slav Epic is on display elsewhere, in a castle in the small town of Moravsky Krumlov.
The same year Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Germans, Mucha was interrogated by the Gestapo, but was not held indefinitely and returned to home after the ordeal. This, along with poor health, contributed to his death in 1939 in Prague.
