Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha was a Czech painter and graphic artist whose decorative poster designs became one of the defining visual idioms of Art Nouveau. His sudden fame began at the very end of 1894, when he produced, on short notice over the holiday, a poster advertising the actress Sarah Bernhardt's play Gismonda; its tall format, flattened decorative composition, and idealized female figure framed in flowing hair and ornament set the template Mucha refined across a stream of theatrical posters, advertisements and decorative panels through the 1890s and 1900s, most famously his 1896 Job cigarette-paper poster and his multi-panel Seasons series. Later in life Mucha regarded his Slavic Epic, a cycle of twenty large canvases on Slavic history completed over nearly two decades, as his true masterwork, distinct from and more important to him than the commercial Art Nouveau graphic work for which he remained internationally best known.