MUCHA: The Triumph of Art Nouveau ...

MUCHA: The Triumph of Art Nouveau by Arthur Ellridge (Terrail: 223 pp., no price indicated). The work of Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) embodied the Art Nouveau style in turn-of-the-century Paris and remains popular a century later. Ellridge’s well-balanced account of his career shows that despite his brilliance as a designer and illustrator, Mucha was not the major painter he aspired to be. His murals celebrating the Slavic people are stiff and artificial, with none of the imagination or grace of his posters for Sara Bernhardt.