Exhibition of works by Alphonse Mucha, the father of Art Nouveau, opens in Florence

(27 Oct 2023)
ITALY ART NOUVEAU

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

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LENGTH: 7:03

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Florence, Italy - 26 October 2023

1. Wide of colour lithograph “Gismonda” next to photos of Sara Bernhardt
2. Various of “Gismonda”
3. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Francesca Villanti, curator of the exhibition:
“He (Alphonse Mucha) believed that beauty was the only way to elevate the human spirit and that it was necessary for everyone, not just for a small elite. The idea and intention was to create an image and an art that could be simple and affordable for everyone. After one of his first posters was made and then he found Paris wallpapered with his art, he was deeply impressed and said that that was exactly what he wanted to do because it was the way to immediately transmit art to the whole city and to make the city an open-air museum.”

4. Wide of advertising posters
5. Various of colour lithograph “Cycles perfecta”
6. Various of colour lithograph “Bières de la Meuse”
7. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Francesca Villanti, curator of the exhibition:
“Women are central to Mucha's art, he succeeds in transforming the ideal of women because on the one hand they are sensual but at the same time he manages to convey a profound innocence, a purity but also charging them with strength and energy. They are voluptuous women with this flowing hair but with a deep gaze, they look at you, they look into your soul and speak to you directly.”

8. Various photos by Mucha of models posing in his studio
9. Various of colour lithograph “Monaco-Monte Carlo”
10. Various of colour lithograph of “Nestlè’s food for infants”
11. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Francesca Villanti, curator of the exhibition:
“First of all, he understood the element that still makes advertising effective today, which is the fact of repeating the same image and getting it truly into people's heads, by way of repeating it. Not different images, but always the same one. When he was commissioned to make a poster he would also try to make the cover of the box or the label of the perfume bottle for the companies and he would always use the same image because that image had to be visually linked to the name, which is exactly what we still do today.”

12. Various of the lithographed label and tin boxes of “Lefévre-Utile” biscuits
13. Various of advertising posters
14. Various of set of small perfume bottles with lithographed labels
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Marcus Mucha, president of the Mucha Foundation, and great-grandson of Alphonse Mucha:
“My father had to leave Czechoslovakia in 1966 because our family had a bad profile with the Communist government. So he escaped and he got to England and I was born there. So we never thought we would go back to Czechoslovakia, and then in 1989 everything changed. But in the same way as we weren’t able to get back in to Czechoslovakia, Mucha’s work really wasn’t able to get out. And so the only thing people understood of Mucha’s work while I was a child was his lithographic work in Paris, and not the great flowering of his work after that time. And so one of the things that’s a privilege about my job is I get to reintroduce audiences around the world to an artist who during his lifetime was greeted by a cut-out of himself on his first trip to New York that said ‘Alphonse Mucha, the most famous artist in the world’. So for us to be able to take an artist who, because of the history of the 20th century, rather disappeared off the radar of Western art history is a great privilege for us to be able to do this work.”

16. Close of Mucha’s self-portrait
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