From Saturday, September 29, 2018, Bologna hosted, for the first time, a major retrospective on the work of Alphonse Mucha, one of the greatest interpreters of Art Nouveau. Until January 20, 2019, the splendid 18th-century rooms of Palazzo Pallavicini (Via San Felice 24, Bologna) were adorned with 80 of the artist’s most famous works, 27 of which were shown for the first time in Italy.

The exhibition, organized by Chiara Campagnoli, Rubens Fogacci, and Deborah Petroni of Pallavicini srl in collaboration with the Mucha Foundation and curated by Tomoko Sato, offered a fresh perspective on the great artist’s work. Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was one of the most celebrated and influential artists of fin-de-siècle Paris, known primarily for his graphics, such as the theatrical posters created for the ‘superstar’ actress Sarah Bernhardt and his advertising images featuring elegant and attractive women. Mucha developed a distinctive style—known as “le style Mucha”—characterized by harmonious compositions, sinuous forms, nature references, and subdued colors, which became synonymous with the emerging decorative style of the period, Art Nouveau.

Despite the powerful impact of his style, little has been known about the ideas on art and aesthetics behind his work. The exhibition, titled Alphonse Mucha, examined the theoretical aspects of his works, particularly the concept of beauty, which was central to his art. Featuring around 80 works selected from the Mucha Foundation, the exhibition included some of the artist’s most iconic pieces, including posters and billboards from his Parisian period, and also explored the artistic language with which Alphonse Mucha expressed his nationalism after returning to his homeland in the later years of his life.

The exhibition was divided into three thematic sections:

1. Women – Icons and Muses: This section opened with Gismonda, the first true poster designed by Mucha for Sarah Bernhardt. In depicting the leading French actress of the time, the Czech artist transforms the “divine Sarah” into a Byzantine goddess. The poster received immediate acclaim when it appeared on Parisian billboards on January 1, 1895. Its visual impact—with its elegant elongated form and delicate pastel tones that rendered the actress’s image sublime, and its balance between simplicity and detail—was strikingly original. Delighted by the success of this poster, Bernhardt offered Mucha a contract to produce stage sets and costumes, as well as all the posters for her theatrical performances. During this contract, which lasted from 1895 to 1900, Mucha created six additional posters for Bernhardt’s shows, including La Dame aux Camélias (1896), Lorenzaccio (1896), and La Samaritaine (1897). The success of Gismonda also led Mucha to numerous commissions for advertising posters, including for well-known brands such as JOB (cigarette papers), Lefèvre-Utile (biscuits), and Waverley (American bicycles). This section primarily includes two groups of works: theatrical posters for Sarah Bernhardt and advertising posters for commercial products. By closely examining these works, the exhibition explores Mucha’s artistic strategies, especially his use of beautiful women as icons and vehicles for commercial messages. The section also includes some packaging and magazine covers.
2. Le Style Mucha – A Visual Language: At Mucha’s time, the concept of “art” underwent a revolutionary change with the advent of modernism, and the classical notion of “beauty,” one of art’s fundamentals, was challenged and evolved to embrace new ideas and forms. In this fermenting moment, Mucha began his exploration of the universal and immutable value of art and concluded that the ultimate goal of art was to express beauty, which he believed could only be achieved through harmony between internal content (ideas, messages) and external forms. As he wrote in his professor’s notes, published posthumously as Leçons sur l’Art (1975), the artist’s role is to inspire people through the harmonious beauty of his works and to elevate their quality of life through his art. To achieve this goal, Mucha developed a distinctive and characteristic artistic formula, a new communicative language, which used the image of a woman—symbol of his beauty message—along with flowers and other decorative elements drawn from Czech folklore and other exotic cultures. For Mucha, ornamental posters (panneaux décoratifs) were the ideal medium to fulfill his aspiration. Introduced for the first time by Mucha and his publisher, F. Champenois, these posters were mostly text-free and created purely for decorative purposes; produced in large quantities, they were immediately available to a wide audience, thus becoming an alternative form of art that could be displayed even by ordinary families. Of these posters, Mucha later wrote: “I was happy to be involved in an art form destined for the people and not just for the elegant salons. Affordable art, accessible to the general public, which found a place in the poorest homes as well as in the most influential circles.” The section presents some of Mucha’s decorative posters and explores the ideas behind these works, studying the characteristics of his stylistic signature. It also includes Mucha’s fundamental decorative manuals, Documents Décoratifs (1902) and Figures Décoratives (1905).
3. Beauty – The Power of Inspiration: The final section closed the exhibition. Mucha returned to his homeland in 1910 to actively pursue his dream of political freedom for his country, culminating in the creation of his masterpiece, Slav Epic (1912-1926), and other works intended to inspire the spiritual unity of the Slavic peoples. The final section showcases examples of Mucha’s later works, exploring how the “style Mucha” evolved in the art of message creation. The works on display in this last section include studies for the decoration of the then-new Prague Town Hall, as well as the poster for the Slav Epic exhibition held in Prague and Brno on the tenth anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s birth.