CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/20/2018

Alphonse Mucha was both the 'greatest decorative artist in the world' and a humanitarian philosopher

Belle Époque Czech artist Alphonse Mucha began to draw before he could even walk, using a pencil his mother would tie around his neck so that he could access it while crawling around her kitchen floor. Later, his theater posters for Sarah Bernhardt were so popular—and so ubiquitous—throughout his adopted home city of Paris that a whole new Art Nouveau style, le style Mucha, was born. In 1904, the New York Daily News even called him the "greatest decorative artist in the world." Yet Mucha was also a philosopher, a pacifist and a dreamer who was among the first to be arrested by the Gestapo when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. Though they are less well known than his most iconic fin-de-siècle posters and paintings, many of his later works express humanitarian concerns, and speak out against the threats of war in a rapidly changing world. For example, "Woman Watching a Burning Candle" (1933).