Alphonse Mucha and the Art Nouveau Ambience at Milano’s Palazzo Reale
With more than 220 works on display Alphonse Mucha and the Art Nouveau Ambience offers the public an original trajectory capable of reconstructing the elegant, precious, and sensuous taste of that day and age represented by the creations of Alphonse Mucha, as well as the furnishings and decorative artworks by European artists and manufacturers who were active during the same period.
The exhibition is promoted by the City of Milan – Cultura, produced and organized by Palazzo Reale in Milan, Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura in Genoa, and by 24 ORE Cultura, Gruppo 24 Ore, in collaboration with the Richard Fuxa Foundation and the Centro di Ricerca “Rossana Bossaglia”, Department of Culture and Civilization, University of Verona. The City of Prague is also a sponsor of the exhibition.
Alphonse Mucha and the Art Nouveau Ambience is curated by Karel SRP, formerly the curator of the Alphonse Mucha exhibition held in Prague in 2013, as concerns the artist’s works, and by Stefania Cretella, decorative art historian, for the part of the exhibition dedicated to the decorative arts in the Art Nouveau period.
The formula on which the curatorship is based is innovative: the scientific grounds and the research material for the exhibition will be valorized via a significant contribution for the co-funding of research grants and scholarships for young scholars and for the scientific activities of the Centro di Ricerca “Rossana Bossaglia”, directed by Valerio Terraroli and founded in 2015 at the University of Verona Department of Culture and Civilization, in memory of a great expert on and scholar of the Liberty and Deco styles and the twentieth century. This is a virtuous example of the effective and organic collaboration between public and private subjects who promote culture, and a university research centre whose common goal is the specialized and professional training of young art historians, with particular interest in the history of taste and the decorative arts.
“The exhibition is part of the trajectory that Palazzo Reale will undertake in 2016, aimed at delving deeper, via the great artistic movements and their key figures, into the period of transition and important changes between the late nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. This reflection will culminate with the exhibition on Symbolism, which will open in February 2016, and in the major project dedicated to Boccioni next spring”, says Assessor of Culture Filippo Del Corno.
After Milan the exhibition will move to Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, where it will be on view from late April through the end of September 2016.
The core of the exhibition comprises 120 works including affiches and decorative panels by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), from the Richard Fuxa Foundation. This Czech artist was one of the major interpreters of Art Nouveau, and soon became the “promoter” of a new communicative language, as well as of a powerful and new visual art. The female images in Mucha’s posters were extremely popular and were used in many spheres of society. Owing to the uniqueness of the style that has made Mucha a symbol of Art Nouveau his work still stands out today. Indeed, the unique and recognizable “Mucha Style” was and has been used in a great variety of contexts: posters, interior decor, advertising for a wide range of products, illustrations, and even theatrical productions, jewelry design, and architecture.
Although the exhibition focuses on Mucha, his works are accompanied by a series of ceramics, furniture, wrought-iron works, glass objects, sculptures and works by other European artists and manufacturers who embraced the same exquisitely floral and curvaceous forms that characterized a certain strand of international Modernism, and that was especially typical of France, Belgium and, to a certain extent, Italy. The aim of this exhibition is to provide a comprehensive idea of a rich and multifaceted era by creating a dialogue between Mucha’s inventions and some contemporary settings and decorations, thereby reconstructing the magical and dazzling climate of the Belle Époque.
Alphonse Mucha and the Art Nouveau Ambience
Palazzo Reale- Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan
10 December 2015 – 20 March 2016
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