By PUBLICITY OFFICER
Arts enthusiasts enjoyed the latest ADFAS arts talk evening featuring UK Arts Society lecturer Kathy McLauchlan on Monday, September 11, at The Crossing Theatre.
Attendees heard the story of Alphonse Mucha’s journey when he returned to his homeland to embark on 20 massive canvases of the Slav Epic after many years working in Paris.
Mucha at the time, in the late 1800s, was the renowned art nouveau poster-creator who largely featured the legendary model and actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Mucha was determined to return and work in Prague in the later years of his life, initially undertaking the painting of frescos in the interior of Prague’s Municipal House.
The most interesting in artistic terms in the public house is the painting in the Lord Mayor’s Hall.
The themes of the interior wall and ceiling paintings, similar to the Slav Epic, were dedicated to the Slavic harmony, tradition and historical past of the Czech people.
But to fund the Slav Epic, his monumental painting dream, Mucha had to make multiple trips to the USA in search of a patron.
By executing society portraits in 1909, Mucha finally found his man, the philanthropist Charles Crane, when Mucha painted the portraits of two of his daughters.
Crane was a wealthy and well-connected businessman and a recognised connoisseur of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
In 1902, Crane had invited Charles University Professor and future president of Czechoslovakia Thomas Masaryk to give a series of lectures at the University of Chicago.
This initiated the strong links between the United States and Slavonic political circles which were to prove instrumental in the foundation of the new Czechoslovak Republic.
Mucha and Crane met again a year later in Chicago.
Wanting to embark on the project with no financial gain to himself, Mucha returned to Prague in 1910 with Crane’s backing and went on to spend the next two decades producing the Slav Epic (1910-1928), interspersed with continued works at Municipal House.
Czechoslovakia, historically known in English as Bohemia, later emerged as the Czech Republic after a peaceful split from Slovakia in 1992.
The selection of paintings currently on show in the Mucha Museum in Prague encompass the whole range of Mucha’s artistic visions, however, the housing of the Slav Epic, due to its monumental dimensions, has remained a problem.
The works have been transported to temporary exhibition spaces inside and outside of Prague, and alternately placed in storage and homeless for lack of permanent exhibition space big enough to hold all twenty canvasses, the largest measuring eight by six metres.
However, in early 2021, it was announced that Mucha’s Slav Epic is to go on display in a new permanent home in the historic centre of Prague, its true homeland.
The 20 canvases will be displayed in the new Thomas Heatherwick-designed ‘Savarin’ development, currently scheduled to open in 2026.
Our next lecturer is UK television personality Gillian Hovell, known as ‘The Muddy Archaeologist’, who will be taking us through archaeological sites of the ancient Mediterranean on Monday, October 16.
This will be our last lecture concluding the 2023 season.
