‘Mucha merchandising’

   

Galartsy

Speaking of the fine arts (see post below), if you are a Freemason and a lover of Art Nouveau, then you cherish Bro. Alphonse Mucha, the Bohemia-born master who made the style his own at the turn of the last century. Well, I guess he has achieved a vendible status he didn’t ask for, because an online retailer is offering decorative and functional items, including pillow cases and ceramic mugs, with Mucha’s art on them. (This edition of The Magpie Mason is not an endorsement of any product. Caveat emptor.)

Galartsy

Galartsy

Galartsy

From the venerable website of the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon:

Alphonse Maria Mucha

July 24, 1860 - July 14, 1939

Mucha was born in Bohemia (Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic) in 1860 and moved to Paris in 1890 where he became the star of the poster-art movement under the patronage of Sarah Bernhardt. After World War I, he returned to Czechoslovakia, inspiring a slavic arts and crafts movement which combined elements of art nouveau with classic national themes. In addition to commercial art, jewellery design, interior decoration, sculpture and stage design, Mucha experimented with lettering and calligraphy to produce excellent source material for unique typefaces. Mucha’s style is widely considered synonymous with French Art Nouveau and he is one of the most imitated artists and designers of all time.

Initiated 1898, Paris;

Founder of Czech Freemasonry; and

Sovereign Grand Commander, Supreme Council Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Czechoslovakia, 1923.

From the Mucha Foundation:

Mucha’s sensitive and meditative spirit drew him to the esoteric aspects of Freemasonry. He was initiated into a Masonic Lodge in Paris in 1898. The influence of Masonic symbolism is evident throughout his work, especially in his decorated book Le Pater. After the formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Mucha was instrumental in establishing the first Czech-speaking Lodge, the Komensky Lodge in Prague, and he soon became Sovereign Grand Commander of Scottish Rite Freemasonry for Czechoslovakia. He later became the second Sovereign Grand Commander of Czechoslovakia.

Mucha Foundation

This self-portrait captures him in ceremonial Masonic regalia complete with the hat, jewels, and sash decorated with the embroidered number 33, indicating the highest rank of the Scottish Rite, surrounded by the sacred triangle. Standing in front of Art Nouveau style wallpaper, Mucha deliberately framed himself against an aureole made of stars, a signature motif of the “Style Mucha.”

And from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

From the 1880s until the First World War, western Europe and the United States witnessed the development of Art Nouveau (“New Art”). Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of the natural world, Art Nouveau influenced art and architecture especially in the applied arts, graphic work, and illustration. Sinuous lines and “whiplash” curves were derived, in part, from botanical studies and illustrations of deep-sea organisms such as those by German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919) in Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature, 1899). Other publications, including Floriated Ornament (1849) by Gothic Revivalist Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) and The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by British architect and theorist Owen Jones (1809-74), advocated nature as the primary source of inspiration for a generation of artists seeking to break away from past styles.

The unfolding of Art Nouveau’s flowing line may be understood as a metaphor for the freedom and release sought by its practitioners and admirers from the weight of artistic tradition and critical expectations. . .

The term Art Nouveau first appeared in the 1880s in the Belgian journal L’Art Moderne to describe the work of Les Vingt, twenty painters and sculptors seeking reform through art. Les Vingt, like much of the artistic community throughout Europe and America, responded to leading nineteenth-century theoreticians such as French Gothic Revival architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79) and British art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), who advocated the unity of all the arts, arguing against segregation between the fine arts of painting and sculpture and the so-called lesser decorative arts.

Deeply influenced by the socially aware teachings of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau designers endeavored to achieve the synthesis of art and craft, and further, the creation of the spiritually uplifting Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) encompassing a variety of media. The successful unification of the fine and applied arts was achieved in many such complete designed environments as Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde’s Hôtel Tassel and Hôtel Van Eetvelde (Brussels, 1893-5), Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald’s design of the Hill House (Helensburgh, near Glasgow, 1902-4), and Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt’s Palais Stoclet dining room (Brussels, 1905-11).