Le Style Mucha

Art Nouveau and a 19th century Warhol

By Jim Moriarty

 

Though no single artist invented the late 19th century Art Nouveau movement in the way Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque defined cubism, Alphonse Mucha’s name appears at the very top of the rolling credits. The grand sweep of his life and career, everything from his ground-breaking lithographic posters and photography to his decorative commercial work on products like champagne and chocolate, his friendships with Paul Gauguin and Auguste Rodin, his links to mysticism, and his staunch Slavic patriotism, are all on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art through Jan. 23.

Think of Mucha as the Andy Warhol of his era. He was to lithographic printing what Warhol became to screen printing. “Warhol appropriates mass culture in a way that’s different from Mucha, but he is associated with celebrity (Marilyn Monroe) in a very distinct way. Mucha gets his start working with Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, who is a superstar actress at the time. He makes a name for himself with images of a famous woman in a very similar way to Warhol,” says Michele Frederick, the associate curator of European Art at the N.C. Museum of Art.

Mucha and Warhol were artistic rock stars of their day, financially successful juggernauts, turning commercial imagery to suit their own artistic aesthetic. “The idea of breaking down barriers between fine and applied arts and using commercial language in what becomes fine art is very similar,” says Frederick. It was at the very heart of Art Nouveau — the rejection of a rigid, classical definition of what subjects and forms could define what was art and what wasn’t.

“Art Nouveau in Paris is essentially invented by Mucha in the 1890s,” says Frederick. It was called Le Style Mucha.

Mucha’s commercial art, breathtaking in its execution, was innovative in ways that remain distinctly modern. One of the posters in the exhibit is for Cycles Perfecta, a bicycle company. “He doesn’t really show much of the bicycle,” says Frederick. “You can’t tell if it has two wheels or two pedals or a seat. What he’s showing you is what it feels like to use this product. When you think of a company, like Apple, some of its most iconic advertisements show you what it feels like to use an iPod, not how it works. That’s something that’s super modern.”

Born in 1860 in the small town of Ivančice in what is now the Czech Republic, Mucha’s training was traditional in every regard. He studied at the Munich Akademie der Bildenden Künste (the academy of fine arts) and then the Académie Julian in Paris. His breakthrough work was a poster commissioned by Bernhardt for the play Gismonda at the Theatre de la Renaissance. The play opened with great success in October of 1894, and its run was being extended beyond the Christmas holidays. Bernhardt wanted a new poster to be hung on Jan. 1, 1895, advertising both herself and the play. The poster depicts Bernhardt in a richly embroidered costume with a mosaic-tiled wall and Orthodox cross in the background.

“For Mucha,” writes Tomoko Sato in his book Alphonse Mucha, “Byzantine civilization was the spiritual home of Slavic culture . . . Mucha’s use of the Byzantine motif in Gismonda was partly influenced by the mediaeval Greek setting of the play; nevertheless, from around 1896 onward, Slavic motifs became a regular feature of Mucha’s posters.”

In 1894 Mucha met and became friendly with the Swedish writer August Strindberg, who at the time was consumed with concepts of mystical forces and the occult. “Mucha was profoundly influenced by Strindberg’s notion of ‘mysterious forces’ that guided a man’s life,” writes Sato. “This was later to contribute to Mucha’s own idea of ‘unseen powers,’ which is manifested in his work as the recurring motif of a mysterious figure appearing behind the subject.” Mucha’s spiritual journey led him to Freemasonry, which he practiced for the remainder of his life.

“So much of Mucha’s art 100-plus years later looks very French to us,” says Frederick. “Preserving the idea of his Czechness is very important. He’s not just a commercial artist, he’s a political artist as well, especially later in his career.”

After repeated trips to the United States, wealthy Chicago businessman Charles Richard Crane (son of the plumbing parts baron Richard T. Crane) agreed to finance Mucha’s grand opus, The Slav Epic, a patriotic project that would consume the last decades of his life. He began working on the first of what would become 20 monumental paintings — the largest is 19 1/2 feet by 26 feet — in 1911, when his homeland was still ruled by the Hapsburg monarchy, consolidated then as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1928, marking the 10th anniversary of the creation of Czechoslovakia following the end of World War I, Crane and Mucha together bequeathed the paintings to the city of Prague. The N.C. museum’s exhibit features large digital projections of the paintings as well as close-up views of some of their details.

“I am convinced that the development of every nation can only be successful if it grows organically and uninterruptedly from its own roots, and the knowledge of its past is indispensable for the preservation of that continuity,” Mucha said at the ceremony donating the works.

The peace and independence of Mucha’s Slavic homeland was short-lived. In 1933 Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. In March of 1939, German troops marched into Prague, and Hitler declared the establishment of the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Mucha was arrested, then released, by the Gestapo. He died four months later.   PS

Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at
jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

The Kitchen Garden

Backyard Beekeeping

Buzzing around the basics

By Jan Leitschuh

Fancy a new hobby for the new year?

There is a sweet and time-honored pastime that goes hand-in-bee-glove with home gardening — apiculture. A beehive in the yard offers multiple benefits. Backyard beekeeping can plump your culinary garden’s quality and volume, with a delicious honey chaser.

Intrigued? Your timing is impeccable. Bee school is in session.

Beginning beekeeping basics will be explored Thursday nights in Vass, from Jan. 20 through Feb. 24. Taught by Erin McDermott-Terry of the North Carolina State University apiculture program, the course will help you get your hive up and running.

As a keeper of bees, you’d join the likes of such famous people as Sir Edmund Hillary, Sylvia Plath, Henry Fonda, Leo Tolstoy, Martha Stewart (of course!) and, er . . . Sherlock Holmes.

According to the Cornell University College of Agriculture, since 52 percent of United States homeowners describe their neighborhood as suburban (and only 27 percent identify as urban, with 21 percent as rural), new beekeepers are more likely to live in a suburban neighborhood. Since a typical hive only requires a few square feet, almost every backyard has more than enough space for a hive.

Home beekeeper Kim Geddes became interested after reading news reports of declining bees. “I read an announcement in the  paper about beginning beekeeping classes offered near my home, so I decided to enroll,” said Geddes, an engineer who lives just outside Pinehurst. “After taking the classes, I was eager to get started.”

Geddes fell hard for bees and has kept them in her backyard for three years now. “I love all kinds of animals, and I’m also committed to conservation endeavors, so beekeeping seemed like a good fit for my interests,” she said.

During her first year of beekeeping, she noticed her backyard kitchen garden becoming more productive due to the increased pollination. “It’s pretty common that home gardeners, when they get bees, notice a marked improvement in their produce,” said Calvin Terry Sr., of Midnight Bee Supply in Vass.

Honeybees forage flowers for two reasons: pollen for protein and nectar for carbohydrates. Veggies and fruits require pollination to set fruit. In cucumbers, for example, a female flower needs 8-12 pollinator visits in a single day to produce a decent fruit.

It was friendship and opportunity that led avid Southern Pines gardener Cameron Sadler into beekeeping. When friend and beekeeper Marcia Bryant sold her farm to move to Penick Village, she asked Sadler if she would like to house the productive-but-now-homeless hives at her place.

“I said I’d love to have the apiary at my farm if she would be willing to teach me,” said Sadler, who recently retired from Mondelez International and is also Master of Foxhounds with the Moore County Hounds. Besides Bryant and Sadler, neighboring friend Desiree MacSorley also works the apiary.

Sadler later bought her first nuc (a small core colony of bees) from Midnight Bee Supply in Vass. She enjoys the win-win of beekeeping and gardening. Her flowers helped produce sweet honey, and the bees increased the productivity of her veggie gardens.

“I grow a kitchen garden because I love to have really fresh produce, fruit and herbs to eat and cook with,” she said. “I absolutely believe my garden and my bees’ prosperity is due to the positive interaction of the bees with the plants.”

Sold on the idea of a bee yard in the kitchen garden but somewhat intimidated? Feel like you might need ongoing support? The local arm of the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association (NCSBA), the Moore County Beekeepers chapter, welcomes newcomers and meets monthly in Southern Pines on the second Tuesday of every month, according to Master Beekeeper Hugh Madison.

While backyard bees aren’t cuddly like livestock, their proponents can be ardent. “It’s hard to describe the attachment that a beekeeper forms with their bees,” said Geddes. “I felt a sense of pride seeing my girls work so hard in the garden that I provided to nourish them.

“I got into beekeeping because I wanted to address the decline in bee population,” she added. “I had failed to recognize the benefits that I would enjoy by raising bees — not just the sense of pride in addressing a conservation issue, but I was amazed to discover that my row crops produced almost double the yield.”

And the sweet finale for Geddes? “This past year, I bottled 40 pounds of honey!”  PS

Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, avid eater of fresh produce and co-founder of Sandhills Farm to Table.

Resources: The Vass Bee School, Thursdays, Jan. 20-Feb. 24, $80/person or $140/couple. For more information visit midnightbeesupply.coursestorm.com.
For N.C. State’s online BEES courses and other counties bee schools, visit https://www.ncbeekeepers.org/calendar/courses-bee-schools.
The Moore County Beekeepers chapter holds meetings on the second Tuesday of every month at 6:45 p.m. at the John Boyd VFW Post on Page Street in Southern Pines. All are welcome. Visit the chapter’s Facebook page.