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Organic, sinuous lines, with vines snaking around stylized letters, ethereal women with flowing tresses, and botanical borders characterize the style of Art Nouveau, the enduringly popular movement that to this day adorns drawings, posters, notebook covers, and even tarot card decks. But where does the  style come from and why is it still so enduringly popular today?
The answer can be found In the new exhibition, “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau,” on view through September 22 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Billed as one of the most comprehensive presentations of Mucha’s art to date, the show features more than 200 works from drawings and photography to lithographs, sculptures, and paintings drawn from the Mucha Family Collection through the Mucha Foundation in Prague.
Self-portrait with posters for Sarah Bernhardt at Mucha’s studio in rue du Val-de-Grâce, Paris, c1901 © Mucha Trust 2024
Born in 1860 in Ivančice in South Moravia in today’s Czech Republic, the Czech artist rose to fame at the turn of the 20th century in his adopted home in Paris, where he arrived in 1887 as a student at the Académe Julian. He began working as an illustrator in 1889 for publishers in Paris and Prague, while dapping into designing posters, stage, and costumes.
In 1895, Mucha’s poster for the play Gismonda starring celebrated French actress Sarah Bernhardt brought him instant stardom. Bernhardt reportedly loved the poster and exclaimed: “Monsieur Mucha, you have made me immortal.”
Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda (1894) colour lithograph, 216 x 74.2 cm © Mucha Trust 2024.
The work made Mucha immortal, too. The distinctive drawing style and shape of the work was hailed as the birth of “Style Mucha,” characterized by the tendril-like lines and soft pastel colors. “The purpose of my work was never to destroy but always to create, to construct bridges,” he once said. The invention of a new visual language seen in his Art Nouveau posters, illustrations, and decorative panels, made Mucha a central figure of the art movement.
Throughout his eventful life, Mucha encountered many other key cultural figures at the time. He was friends with Paul Gauguin, with whom he said a studio, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, with whom he practiced occult ceremonies. He also journeyed to the U.S., taught at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1909 before returning to his home country and started working on his The Slav Epic project.
Alphonse Mucha, The Slav Epic XX: Apotheosis Slavs for Humanity (1926) (detail) egg tempera and oil on canvas, 480 x 405 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Considered to be the most important work by Mucha, The Slav Epic consists of a series of 20 monumental canvases measured by 19 feet x 26 feet depicting the history and civilization of the Slav people. From conceiving the idea in 1899  to its final completion in 1926, Mucha dedicated his career to the project, which was a symbol of his devotion to the culture and his people. The series was gifted to the nation in 1928 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Austria-Hungary Empire.
In 1939, he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo over his alleged Masonic and Slavic nationalist activities when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. He was released but died shortly afterwards.
More images from the exhibition below.
Installation view of the “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau” exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June 22 September 2024, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
Alphonse Mucha, The Seasons: Summer (1896), color lithograph, 103 x 54 cm © Mucha Trust 2024.
Installation view of the “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau” exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June 22 September 2024, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
Alphonse Mucha, Poster for JOB cigarette papers (1896), colour lithograph, 66.7 x 46.4 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Installation view of the “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau” exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June 22 September 2024, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
Alphonse Mucha, Reverie (1898), color lithograph, 72.7 x 55.2 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Alphonse Mucha, Princess Hyacinth (1911), color lithograph 125.5 x 83.5 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Alphonse Mucha, La Nature’c1900, patinated bronze and malachite, 70 x 27 x 28 cm © Mucha Trust 2024

Alphonse Mucha, Poster for Slavia Mutual Saving Bank, Prague (1907), color lithograph, 54 x 36 cm © Mucha Trust
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When we think of Cubism, a pivotal moment in the birth of modernism when artists began to deconstruct their pictorial compositions, we immediately think of Picasso and his collaborator Georges Braque. The names of renowned Salon Cubists like Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger may also come to mind. You’d be forgiven for assuming that no woman made a meaningful impact on the movement, since this has long been the dominant art historical narrative.
Enter Maria Blanchard. Though she was critically acclaimed in her day, the Spanish artist’s reputation fell into obscurity in the decades after her death in 1932. She is now the subject of an expansive retrospective at the Picasso Museum in his birthplace of Màlaga in southern Spain.
Though Blanchard was born in another Spanish city, Santander, in the same year as Picasso, 1881, rigid gender norms pushed both talented painters down different paths. Yet, against the odds, Blanchard would consistently defy societal expectations.
Maria Blanchard. Photo: © Henri Martinie/Roger-Viollet.
The artist was born with several physical disabilities, including kyphoscoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine that caused chronic pain, affected her growth and caused her to limp. As a result, Blanchard was badly bullied at school and her parents encouraged her to pursue a burgeoning interest in art.
By her early twenties, she moved to Madrid to continue her studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In 1908, the government of Santander gave Blanchard a grant to continue her education after she won third prize at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. This backing helped her move to Paris the next year to enroll at the Academie Vitti.
Maria Blanchard, Woman from Brittany (1910). Photo: José A. Gallego Poveda, courtesy of Colección Gobierno de Cantabria.
In her early works, it is easy to see Blanchard’s talents as a painter in the more traditional style and spot the emergence of some early experimentation. Some works seem to suggest she may have been looking at Munch, for example, while others are heavily stylized, a tactic she would deploy throughout her career.
Many of the works in the exhibition are sensitive portrayals of humble figures who look particularly pensive or melancholic. We can only guess at the reason that, shortly after moving to Paris, Blanchard painted The Spanish Woman (1910-13), in which a beautiful woman with classically Spanish features appears emotionally devastated. In 1914, the war meant Blanchard returned to Spain for two years before moving back to Paris in 1916.
Maria Blanchard, Lady with Fan (1913-16). Photo: Belén Pereda.
At this time, Blanchard immersed herself in the city’s avant-garde artistic milieu and absorbed the latest developments in a highly experimental movement known as Cubism. At one time, she shared a studio with Diego Rivera and she also befriended Juan Gris. Upon joining the Section d’Or group, Blanchard began making colorful, collage-style Cubist works, choosing to depict predominantly female subjects or humble still lifes. A particularly fun example on show is the sensually anthropomorphized Green Still Life with Lamp (ca. 1916–17).
Blanchard’s ability to produce exploratory works on the same radical terms as her male peers helped earn the respect of a highly patriarchal art world. Just after her death, her friend, the painter and critic André Lhote, recalled how “her unquestionable technical control, allied with her intense humanity, [which] made her work staggering.” Picasso also praised two works Plate of Fruit and Child with Balloon that were acquired by the Musée de Grenoble in 1926.
Maria Blanchard, Botella y copa de frutas sobre una tabla (c. 1917-18). Courtesy of Colección Zorrilla Lequerica.
Once she had decided to settle in Paris permanently, the artist changed her name from María Gutiérrez, taking her mother’s french surname Blanchard to make a complete break from her beginnings in comparatively conservative Spain.
Partly informed by the “return to order” prevalent in the 1920s after the horrors of World War I, Blanchard soon developed the lessons of Cubism in new directions, pursuing her own vision. Unlike many of her male peers, she was neither particularly interested in the dark complexities of modernity or increasingly abstract investigations of form. Rather, Blanchard was interested in capturing typically marginalized experiences, often focusing on subjects who were working-class or people of color.
Maria Blanchard, The Fortune-Teller (1924-25). Photo: © Studio Monique Bernaz, Geneva.
She began painting everyday domestic scenes of people—mostly women—cooking, embroidering, doing household chores, getting dressed up, or breastfeeding, usually surrounded by their offspring. Whereas the identities of the women in Picasso’s many wacky portraits are almost irrelevant, a real sense of characters is evident throughout the work of Blanchard.
“Her Cubist experience likely gave her the momentum needed to continue to develop the germ of the personal project she brought with her upon leaving [Spain],” suggests the Picasso Museum’s artistic director José Lebrero Stals in the show’s catalogue. Unsurprisingly, Blanchard’s chosen themes were often picked apart by critics, who believed them to be unsophisticated and evidence of a Spanish primitivism.
During the 1920s, Blanchard was an established artist that worked with a group of dealers known as Ceux de Demain, most notably Frank Flausch, who supported her until his death in 1926. After the death of Gris in 1927, Blanchard’s health deteriorated and she died from tuberculosis on April 5, 1932, at the age of just 51.
Maria Blanchard, Girl at her First Communion (1914). Photo courtesy of Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
One of Blanchard’s best known works, Girl at her First Communion is an ominous interpretation of a girl’s societally-sanctioned rite of passage into womanhood. It was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1920 and now hangs in Spain’s pre-eminent modern art museum, the Reina Sofía in Madrid. That year, Blanchard was also included in “French Avant-Garde Art,” a landmark exhibition in Barcelona that saw her work shown alongside artists like Matisse, Miró, and Picasso.
For many decades after her death, as the continent of Europe faced the upheaval of war, only a small circle of dedicated collectors kept Blanchard’s memory alive and preserved her work. Reviewing one exhibition of her work at the Galerie Drouant-David in 1942, the critic Maximilien Gauthier described her “as a woman, a failure.” In 1950, another critic G.J. Gros claimed that she “did not sacrifice her art” to her womanhood because “she was crippled and without beauty.”
It wasn’t until 1982 that Blanchard received proper institutional recognition at the now defunct Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid. Another retrospective followed at the Reina Sofía in 2012, the same year her work was exhibited at Fundación Botín in Santander. So far, however, there have been no major museum show outside of Spain and much work remains to be done to bring international attention to Blanchard’s many achievements.
“Maria Blanchard: A Painter in Spite of Cubism” is on view the Picasso Museum Màlaga in Spain through September 29, 2024. 
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