Master of the Tendrilous

In its brief heyday around the turn of the century, the tendrilous international style of art nouveau swept over Europe, dominating the design of everything from the Paris Metro stations to ordinary knives and forks. The inevitable reaction against it was particularly violent, and the whole movement was dismissed as a rather ludicrous, if temporary, aberration. Artists like Alphonse Mucha, if remembered at all, seemed as dated as gaslight and their work as decadent as Oscar Wilde's sun flower. But lately art nouveau has been getting a new look. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art had a big show of it three years ago, and in London last week Alphonse Mucha was once again a big name with simultaneous shows at the Grosvenor and Jeffress Galleries and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Bernhardt to the Rescue. It was on Dec. 26, 1894, that 34-year-old Alphonse Mucha, shaggy-haired and bearded, got his big break in Paris. He had learned to draw before he could walk, and his mother used to tie a necklace of crayons around his neck so that he could exercise his talent whenever he wanted. But for all that talent and for all his study, Mucha was getting nowhere. Then, out of the blue, Actress Sarah Bernhardt came to the rescue. She urgently needed a new poster to advertise her new play. The theater manager telephoned the poster printer, and the printer gave Mucha the designing job simply because he was in the shop at the time. Bernhardt was delighted: she gave Mucha a contract to design not only her posters, but some of her sets and costumes as well.

The world quickly became familiar with Mucha's larger-than-life posters of Bernhardt in her many roles, from Hamlet to Camille. He also designed advertisements and even menus; and when Czechoslovakia became a nation, Moravia-born Mucha designed its first stamps and bank notes.

Hair Is a Flower. He had two favorite themes, women and flowers. For him, a woman's hair was like some kind of exotic plant that swirled and swooped with a life of its own. A woman did not wear clothes: she let silks and satins flow over her in the same kind of swoops and swirls. As for the flower, it contained nature's most delicate lines and its subtlest forms. The beautiful bend of a supple stem, the gentle curves of a petal, the organic flow of line and form into each other--these were the secrets of the flower that Mucha wanted to impose on everything man designed.

It was a noble aim, this idea that man-made things should follow nature's masterpiece and that all objects, whether a ring or a house, should have an organic relationship to each other. But to live with art nouveau came to be like living in a world of peacock tails; it was not so much art as an empty, if dazzling, embellishment. In the end, Mucha himself turned away from it and spent the last years of his life in the Castle Zbirov in Bohemia, working on a series of academic pictures portraying the history of his people.

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