The Mucha Museum
Alphonse Mucha was an artist, draftsman and illustrator who achieved his greatest world renown in the 1890s and 1900s as a leader in the Art Nouveau style. His commercial work was mainly posters showing beautiful young women intertwined with nature and graphic flourishes. His later work focused on paintings dedicated to the glory and history of the Czech and, more broadly, the Slavic people. He was a champion of Czech independence from the Austro-Hungarian empire and, following that reality, was the artist chosen to design the first Czechoslovak currency and stamps.
Alphonse Mucha was an artist, draftsman and illustrator who achieved his greatest world renown in the 1890s and 1900s as a leader in the Art Nouveau style. His commercial work was mainly posters showing beautiful young women intertwined with nature and graphic flourishes. His later work focused on paintings dedicated to the glory and history of the Czech and, more broadly, the Slavic people. He was a champion of Czech independence from the Austro-Hungarian empire and, following that reality, was the artist chosen to design the first Czechoslovak currency and stamps.
The small museum was excellent in showing his drafting and graphic abilities with which I share a modicum of kindred spirit. His mastery of the human form and all its nuances was breathtaking. His later, nationalistic allegorical work was a little heavy in ‘message’ to my taste, bordering on melodrama, but his use of intense colors was wondrous. One of his last works was a large stained glass window in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague Castle. It tells the story of St. Cyril (he gave the Slavs their alphabet) and St. Methodius, who both brought Christianity to Eastern Europe. Mucha’s amazing use of colors here is at full reckoning with north light punching up the impact. He used blues and greens to represent the past and the yellows and oranges to portend the future.
Mucha died soon after the Nazi invasion of Czechaslovakia. He had fallen ill during a Gestapo interrogation and never recovered. He probably died brokenhearted after seeing his beloved nation overtaken yet again.The Museum of Communism
This is a privately run museum (irony #1), set up, in the city’s main downtown shopping district (irony #2), sharing a building with a casino and a McDonalds (#3 and 4). It was surprisingly informative, going beyond the predictable discarded busts of Lenin, Marx and other communist heroes.. It explained the history and circumstance of the rise and inevitable victory of Soviet-backed Czech communism before WW2 and immediately after.
This is a privately run museum (irony #1), set up, in the city’s main downtown shopping district (irony #2), sharing a building with a casino and a McDonalds (#3 and 4). It was surprisingly informative, going beyond the predictable discarded busts of Lenin, Marx and other communist heroes.. It explained the history and circumstance of the rise and inevitable victory of Soviet-backed Czech communism before WW2 and immediately after.
Striking exhibits included a classroom for the indoctrination of children; a typical shop that only sold two different products and a chilling recreation of a secret police interrogation office. The last exhibit room had a TV playing the events of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 when the madness finally came to an end. Very sobering and a fitting tribute to the resilience of the Czech people.
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