"I didn’t know I was this geeky until I discovered the online world through my office’s 2400 baud modem back in ’93." Mucha – Jugendstil
We weren’t the only ones in the country who’d decided to go see the Alphonse Mucha exhibition at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. It is a venue entirely unsuitable to large capacity crowds. This made our experience of the work of Mucha less enjoyable than it might have been had we had more space to move in.
Since childhood I’ve been been fascinated with Jugendstil. It has an immediate appeal, though I’m no connaisseur.
I am sure its intrigue would wear off quickly if I saw it too often. There’s something sickly about it — something not quite right with Mucha’s mad stare of Jaroslava (a girl much in favour with Mucha, it seems) and Medea’s morbid act or Beardsley’s Salome. Apparently H.R. Giger is a fan. He would be.
After Mucha, Disfarmer (fascinating) and Edward Steichen (too small prints, too familiar shots), Minimeeters Inc. took five.
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Later on in the day we spotted a man in a big coat.
Comments (4)
My mother first started her art dealing business in 1973. She started out selling Louis Icart and soon after Mucha, out of our house. So we were always surrounded by these images. In ’76, I got to go on a business trip to Paris with her in search of Mucha at the flea markets… I would have loved to go to this exhibit. Tell us more.
That era has always been one of my favorites for art, both in Europe and North America. The Mucha exhibition would have been fantastic to see in person.
They had a lot of great material at the exhibit, including some of his jewellry and sketchbooks. But they didn’t have his magnum opus, the Slavic Epos. The images deserved a better exhibition. The lighting was crap and the order was unclear – worst of all the texts they had explaining everything were not very well written.
Amazing detail on the images. What struck us most was the difference in style between the clothing and the filigree on the one hand and the women’s faces on the other. Up close, the faces looked like an afterthought… or a crude start. All the detail went into the clothes and decoration.
Also very cool were newspaper cuttings from that era. There was an interview with Sarah Bernhardt from a Dutch paper. ‘Interviews’ were a new thing, so the article starts out with an explanation of what an interview is!
I think those theatre posters were my favourite.