Page 151 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 151/206
Alphonse Mucha: photo-graphic illustration practice 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 dedicated 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 repositories 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 graphic 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.
https://www.mucha.cz/en/
So, Mucha gets lucky, the most famous actress in the world - Sarah Bernardt - loves his posters - and fortified by her support, in Paris he embarks on a series of posters for a multitude of clients, acquires his own photographic studio, and often stages his own photographs, styling and acquiring props for increasingly lavish and more stylised art nouveau graphic output. He poses models - and costumes them - for photographs that act as reference guides, and provide ways of sketching-out preliminary layouts. His style - delicate colour washes with a bold, voluptuously curvilinear black key-line, comes to personify and exemplify art- nouveau graphic design: