Focus On: Mucha Lithographs

I haven't done Art of the Week in awhile, so I'll be restart it with a bang, with this lithograph from the IU Art Museum:Alphonse Mucha, advertisement for Monaco, Monte-Carlo, 1897

I have a soft spot for lithography, as my undergraduate institution has a nifty collection (for more on that, check out here.) As they do once a month, the IUAM's print curator pulls a variety of works and opens the viewing rooms for a few hours for people to come and look around. The lithographs she had out were a nice variety--one of my favorites was one from a Berliner Succession art show that had been reused for a few years, so the date had been pasted over. You could see the thumbtack marks where it had actually been hung up. But this Mucha lithograph was what really caught my eye.

I love the stylized nature and clean lines of Art Nouveau prints and posters, and this was no exception. There is a lot going on, but (to me, at least) it doesn't feel fussy. I'm not sure what the spinning floral roundels have to do with Monaco, exactly, but the pretty lady is key to the majority of Mucha's works. Come to Monte-Carlo, he suggests, and this is what you'll see. Who would turn that down? Mucha was Czechoslovakian but did much of his training and work in Paris, which is what we usually think of when we think of Art Nouveau. What is really striking about this work when viewed in person is the richness of the colors (that blue sea in particular) and the gilded aspects--many of the flowers are traced in glittering metallic silver. Lithography, as near as I understand it, is printing using a stone, or more recently, a metal sheet. You don't etch the image onto the surface, but draw it with a waxy or oily substance, and then water is somehow involved, which repels the ink, and then you print it. (Yeah, that was technical, I know.) Anyway, you have to print each color separately onto the work, so you have to be really really really precise. I would imagine that a work of this intricacy would be hard to pull off.

And to show my bias towards Monte-Carlo, here is a bonus art of the week: my kitchen.
Admittedly, I chose that poster because the gent in it looks Lord Peter Wimsey, whom I have a literary crush on.