At the end of the 19th century, Alphonse Mucha created a sensation throughout the streets of Paris through his posters representing the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. It was an overnight sensation and announced the new artistic style and its creator to the citizens of Paris, Art Nouveau. This brought fame and reputation to the poster artist. However, Mucha’s talent was never confined to lithography. Shading the world with a colorful sensuality, Mucha’s art expresses itself as much on the monumental decorative panels of a living room as on small delicate China pieces. The author enables us to discover all the richness and variety of this fin-de-siècle artist.
I enjoyed learning about Mucha's art and life in this small book, full of his art. I wish that the pieces of art would have gone along with the dialog on the page though. I will be attending an immersive art show of his work soon, so I enjoyed seeing many of his art pieces featured in the book.
Loads of Mucha's work but the book is discombobulated. The text feels smashed in with the art with no thought to showing the right pieces with the proper passages. Also I'd love to see the specific works of other artists that the author references as influences.
4.5* I'm a huge fan of Art Nouveau and I enjoyed Mucha's artwork. This book was well done we learn about Mucha's journey and his artworks thanks to the pictures. I quite liked the fact that we have the testimony of his son it gives more credibility.
This is a nice book about the wonderful Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha. It contains a lot of great pictures of his works, but they are quite small (due to the format of the book). I'm glad I borrowed this book from the library before buying it, as I'm now convinced there has to be better books about Mucha. The book has some informative text, but never in relation to the picture on the following page(s). Most of the pictures are not mentioned at all in the text. A lot of other artists and their works from the same period are compared to Mucha and his art, but if you want to see these you'll have to search elsewhere (I used Google a lot while reading this book). I also believe that some of the information given in the book is wrong. It claims that Mucha was born on 14 July 1860, while the muchafoundation.org says 24 July. I trust the Mucha Foundation over this mediocre author.
In love with Mucha's painting when I travelled at Vienna for the first time, where I visited the museum there. I read this through Kindle book. Although it is black and white, I still love that
This book is light on info and not set up for Kindle use. It's a fine introduction to Mucha, but you will have to go elsewhere for detailed information and analysis.