By jfbarszcz
The Czech Republic has produced a great number of visionaries: the composers Antonín Dvořak and Bedřich Smetana; the writers Karel Čapek and Franz Kafka*, and the playwright-activist-turned-politician Václav Havel are just a few. A name that was unknown to me until recently, however, was that of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century painter Alfons Mucha (pronounced MOO-kha). Perhaps he's better-known to people more versed in art history than I am, but I had never heard of him until I came to Prague.
And of course, now that I have heard of him and seen some of his work, I think he's someone more people should know about. Specifically, a few weeks ago I went to an exhibition of his magnum opus, a 20-painting cycle known as The Slav Epic. And "epic" is certainly an apt word to describe the scale of this project. Over the course of 18 years, Mucha painted 20 massive canvases in a depiction of his vision of Slavic history. I'm not certain on the dimensions of the canvases, but they all easily exceeded 20 feet in height. On each canvas is a different scene from the history or mythology of the Czech/Slavic peoples. I know it's a little silly to say that I'm floored by a painting just because of how big it is, but in this case it's the honest truth. The sheer magnitude of the paintings and the cycle as a whole really conveyed to me just how seriously Mucha took his life's work, how devoted he was to realizing his vision and telling this story. And it worked; the works are highly engrossing, containing both rich detail and a thematic/quasi-narrative arc (though without much of a background in the history of Slavic peoples, the pamphlet I had was definitely helpful in terms of providing context). I spent probably an hour at the exhibit, and I don't think this was even enough time to really take all of it in. So I'm gonna try to go again another one of these weekends, it's really that amazing (and I'm not even really much of an art person). Definitely something I recommend checking out if you ever visit Prague**.
*Note that many Czechs will complain when you mention Kafka, because he was a German-speaking Jew who just happened to live in Prague, and is therefore in their eyes not truly a Czech writer. I think this is kind of silly, but there you have it.
**The exhibit, I believe, is now permanently in Prague, after it was controversially moved from the town of Moravský Krumlov in 2010.