Mucha Museum in the Kaunitz Palace
Why is it significant?
Walk up Panská to the pale baroque palace with the grand doorway, the Kaunitz Palace, and notice the posters on its walls: women with halos of hair, wrapped in flowers and swirling ribbons. You have seen that style a thousand times, on tea tins and tattoos and tarot cards.
Key Facts
| Place | Mucha Museum in the Kaunitz Palace |
|---|---|
| Address | Panská 7, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08420, 14.42770 |
| Part of Walk | Gilded Leaves and Crystal Facades: Prague's Art Nouveau & Cubist Walk |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk up Panská to the pale baroque palace with the grand doorway, the Kaunitz Palace, and notice the posters on its walls: women with halos of hair, wrapped in flowers and swirling ribbons. You have seen that style a thousand times, on tea tins and tattoos and tarot cards. This is where it comes home.
Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 in Ivančice, a small town in Moravia, and spent years scraping a living in Paris as an illustrator. Then, at Christmas 1894, so the story goes, he was almost the only artist still at work in a printing house when an urgent order arrived: a poster for Sarah Bernhardt in the play Gismonda. His tall, narrow, almost Byzantine design went up on the walls of Paris at the start of 1895, and Parisians cut the posters down to take them home. Bernhardt signed him to a six-year contract, and overnight Le style Mucha was everywhere.
But Mucha did not want to be remembered as a poster man. He spent nearly twenty years on the Slav Epic, twenty enormous canvases about the history of the Slavic peoples, completed in 1928 and given to the city of Prague. And when Czechoslovakia was born in 1918, he designed its first postage stamps and banknotes, famously without asking for a fee. The new republic carried his women in its citizens' wallets.
The ending is dark. In March 1939 the German army occupied Prague, and Mucha, a famous Slavic patriot and Freemason, was among the first people arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was released, but he was nearly eighty and his health broke. He died on the 14th of July 1939 and was buried at Vyšehrad cemetery, among the great names of the nation.
The museum opened here in 1998, run with his family. And if you visit St Vitus Cathedral at the castle, look for the stained-glass window he made in 1931... the same flowing lines, now in coloured glass and light. Back on the street, continue to the end of Panská and turn left towards the dark Gothic tower rising over Jindřišská.