Free and eccentric, Sarah Bernhardt was the most important actress of her time and the first who knew how to attract public attention on and off the stage. She chained triumphs and nights of love, she liked to decorate her hats with a stuffed bat and she never went on tour without her own coffin. But above all she was a woman of unwavering tenacity and determination. Her failure was not with her and she was willing to do anything to avert it. For this reason, when in December 1894 the Parisian public did not respond as she expected to Gismonda’s representations, she thought that the problem was the poster and she demanded the design of a new one. The person in charge of doing it was a young and unknown illustrator named Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) -apparently the most famous names were on Christmas vacation- who only six years later was already a popular phenomenon of planetary dimensions.
Marcus Mucha, great-grandson of the creator of art nouveau, remembers the anecdote in front of that poster, which caused a furor in the streets of Paris (people tore them off the walls), and which now opens the Alphonse Mucha exhibition. The search for beauty at the Palau Martorell. “She rang Sarah Bernhardt’s doorbell prudently and timidly. He didn’t know what his answer would be. She opened the door herself. ‘Mr. Mucha, you just made me immortal. Mucha was then 34 years old and that first meeting was the starting shot of a career that would make them what for many was the first global artist. He was a precursor of merchandising, and even came to release a soap with his name.
Alphonse Mucha. The search for beauty brings together 80 pieces (posters, paintings, drawings and photographs) from the artist’s foundation and is the first to be presented in Barcelona since the one dedicated to him by CaixaForum in 2008. Born in South Moravia (Czech Republic) , Mucha developed a good part of his career in Paris, “the city from where he looked at the international art nouveau movement, of which he would later become a fundamental piece.
Advertising work, in which he became involved after meeting Sarah Bernhard, was for him a great testing laboratory where he could experiment with his own style, based not only on aesthetics but also on scientific ideas of the time, such as Freudian psychology. , which helped him to know what kind of compositions, what kind of shapes or movements made them happy and attracted the attention of the public”, says the curator Tomoko Sato.
Mucha, who was a seeker of beauty and placed women at the center of his work (“she is in charge of getting the message across, whether it is a product or a political philosophical idea”, says the curator), returned to his country in 1910 and applied that scientific knowledge learned in the field of advertising “to encourage people to fight together for independence.” The year that she finally achieved her dream, 1918, she signed her famous Song of Bohemia, also present in the exhibition.
Mucha, who despite his reputation as a womanizer “lived like a monk”, as his son Jiri explained in his biography, died in 1939, ten days after being arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was weak from pneumonia, but above all “he was heartbroken to see his country occupied by the Nazis,” recalls his great-granddaughter. 100,000 people took to the streets of Prague to see him off.
