::Prague - Day 2.....Salvador Dali and Alfons Mucha Exhibition

Monday 7th May 2007

Whilst visiting the Old Town Square, where there is a lot going on....mooching around we came accross a Salvador Dali and Alfons Mucha exhibition, it only cost a few crown, so we decided to pop in and check it out.
Before going to this exhibition, in the past, for some reason or another, i have come accross the work of both of these artists.

Alfons Mucha's illustrations are often featured in some of the contempory Graphic Design journals...such as Grafik and Creative Review. He produced paintings, posters, advertisements, book illustrations. as well as jewellery designs, carpets and wallpaper, and theatre sets. His style of work is known as Art Nouveau. Most of his work features beautiful healthy young women, who dress in Neoclassical looking robes.

He is very popular in the Czech Republic, because when Czechoslovakia won its independance after World War I, Mucha designed the new postage stamps, bank notes and other ogvernement documents for the new nation.
I managed to get a few photo's of these...but unfortunatly the quality of the photo's that I took are really poor. We weren't meant to take photo's in the exhibition, so we had to take the ones we have got, really sneekily. But you still get a good idea of the stuff we checked out.

So... below the first image of the exhibition advertisements we found out on the Old Town Square, are four examples of Alfons Mucha's work featured in the exhibition, including one of the banknotes he designed for Czechoslovakia.






Alfons Mucha has become a very marketable commodity in Prague, as evidenced by the countless postcards, calendars, posters, mugs, playing cards, fridge magnets and other touristy knick-knacks you can find around the town.






I am really glad that we came accross this exhibition, at first i was a bit reluctant about spending my money...but i think it was worth it.
I didn't really have much interest in the work of Salvador Dali, but looking at some of the techniques he used were really interesting and feel i can look into both Dali's AND Mucha's techniques when i come to venturing into the printmaking studio at college.
In particular, the work of Mucha and his lithographs....