Page 43 - Expanded-Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 43/145
Of course, towards the end of the century, more and more artists took advantage of photography as a now familiar tool to supplement drawing. The Mucha Museum in Prague has a collection of Al- phonse Mucha’s photographs of sets and models, done in preparation for previously conceived poster designs and for his series of epic paintings celebrating Slavic culture.
Alphonse Mucha: photo-graphic processes c1890.
Czech-born Mucha moved to Paris in 1887, and had his big breakthrough in 1894, after designing a poster for Sarah Bernhardt’s Gismonda. His art nouveau style of illustration absolutely chimed with the spirit of the times, and he was a prolific graphic artist, illustrator and painter until his death in Prague, persecuted by the Nazis as a reactionary artist, in 1939.There is a museum in Prague dedic- ated to his work. What interests me most here is his use of photography. Following painters like Courbet and Degas, he began making photographs of carefully posed, styled and coiffeured models in the early 1880s, eventually buying a large studio in Paris in 1896, and purchasing his own large- plate cameras. The resulting series of photographs, made between 1896 and 1900 are fascinating, not just in tracing the source of some of his graphic images, but in revealing his splendid studio - used as a venue by the Lumiere’s for demonstrating their cinematograph films, but also as reposit- ories of Mucha’s own collection of art nouveau objects, props, draperies and furniture. That he was a consummate graphic artist as well as a superb draftsman, is obvious from the examples above. His work was rediscovered in the late 1960s by psychedelic poster artists like Nigel Weymouth and Michael English. More recently Mucha’s graphics have inspired the poster designs and graphic ID of the Isle of Wight Festivals - designs that build upon Dave Roe’s original 1969/1970 designs., but owe a great debt to Mucha’s sensual art nouveau.
So by the end of the 19th century, the use of photography by artists was more or less commonplace - or at least unremarkable. I suppose the work that summarised and symbolised this acceptance was Emile Bayard’s: Le Nu Esthetique of 1904: