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Alphonse Mucha, the Seduction of Art Nouveau in Florence

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Paris was the center of the art world, it was the Belle Époque and almost all the new artistic trends started from the French capital.
Photography and cinema gave a new cut to images and allowed us to show the world from new points of view, filling the public with wonder. World industry was expanding, railways and large ships were reducing distances. New technologies made daily tasks easier and industrial production possible at low costs. More was being produced and for a wider segment of the population, therefore people were also buying more, consequently irt was rendered necessary to be able to sell products better. Advertising posters were born, and were greatly influenced by Japanese prints.

It is in this historical context that reached popularity the Czech artist
Alphonse Mucha, painter, sculptor and graphic designer, protagonist of the exhibition at the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence until 7 April: Alphonse Mucha. The seduction of Art Nouveau.
Mucha developed a unique and iconic style, still loved and recognized throughout the world today, which always places at the centre the female figure: strong, charismatic and of great elegance. His women are sensual and innocent at the same time, icons of timeless beauty.
In Western culture, the concept of woman began to change during the Belle Époque. While until then women were seen and represented as a docile, passive, pure and domestic creatures, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, art began to provide a more progressive concept of ideal femininity. The woman of the new century is progressive, modern, an increasingly active subject in the public sphere and a participant in social activities.
Mucha promoted this new femininity, placing women at the center of advertisements for commercial products that were once typically associated with the male sphere: active and athletic women who rode bicycles, drunk alcohol and smoked, women who were emancipating and who no longer only stayed at home but also lived outside, among the people.


One woman in particular became his muse par excellence, the actress
Sarah Bernhardt, met in Paris in 1985, when Mucha, who was still unknown in the world of advertising posters, was commissioned to design a poster to promote the theatrical comedy "Gismonda".
The originality of the composition, the elegant lines, the unusually long format of the poster and the pastel colors immediately met with enormous success and also earned the admiration of the "Divine" Sarah who offered the artist an exclusive contract for six years, both as illustrator and as artistic director for the works she interpreted.
The collaboration between the two brought them both great fame, Mucha became the most sought-after graphic designer of the time and Sarah Bernhardt became a renowned theater star.


Mucha's language tooks inspiration from various sources: Japanese prints, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the forms of nature typical of all Art Nouveau, and Byzantine and Slavic decoration.
It is a unique and immediately recognizable style and companies competed for it to advertise their products. Mucha created renowned advertising campaigns such as those for Moët & Chandon champagne, Nestlé chocolate, and JOB cigarettes.
In 1904, Mucha left France to follow his ideals and arrived in New York on the transatlantic La Lorraine. His fame preceded him to America where he immediately found fortune, receiving several commissions as a portraitist, teaching in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia and managing to set aside a large sum of money to finance the great project he had had in mind for some time.
Therefore, in 1910 he returned to Prague where he dedicated himself for almost twenty years to the pictorial cycle of the Slav Epic, considered his greatest masterpiece: a colossal work, completed in 1928, which recounted the main events of Slavic history in twenty enormous canvases.

The exhibition itinerary at the Museo degli Innocenti is divided into six sections, which chronologically retrace Mucha's artistic career and life, and then concludes with a section dedicated to the development of the language of Art Nouveau in Italy, celebrating one of the most important artists Florentines of the time, Galileo Chini.
A truly unmissable exhibition, where beauty and elegance are the protagonists, in typical "Mucha style".


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