Yet Mucha himself thought that he owed his greatest artistic debt to the folk art traditions of his native Moravia (now part of Czechoslovakia). As an artist, Mucha eschewed having his work too nearly identified with the Art Nouveau movement. He took odds with the term itself, adamantly proclaiming, “art is not new, it is eternal.” When pressed by journalists for an explanation of his own approach to art and design, Mucha simply but eloquently answered, “I do things in my own way.”

Alfons Maria Mucha, or Alphonse Mucha, as the French called him, was one of the widest loved poster prints artists in Paris at the turn of the century. At the end of 1894, he became noted literally overnight with a poster for Sarah Bernhardt's Gismonda, a highly original design of an remarkably stretched shape, delicate coloring, and a combination of simplified outlines and Byzantine richness of ornamental decoration. In the following decade, Mucha's fixation with curves of long hair spiraling around impeccable women got the most characteristic and imitated feature of his numerous posters and panneaux d?coratifs, and "Le style Mucha" gained a lasting global repute. Surprisingly, the artist whose name became synonymous with the refined grace of French Art Nouveau Posters was a Czech who was born in 1860 in the small Moravian town of Lvancice and deceased in 1939 in Prague. Moreover, he was a more complicated and fascinating artistic personality than the widely reproduced women and flowers imply. When we consider his oeuvre in its totality, we see that he was not only a great poster artist and unexpectedly versatile designer, but also a talented and innovative illustrator, a memorable instructor, and a painter who hoped to be remembered not for the "fashionable vagaries" that were in such demand, but for his murals and monumental paintings. Mucha always took that chance, or Fate as he preferred to think of it, played an important part in his life. It may have been luck that sent his way his first patron, Count Khuen Belassi of Emmahof, and later in life the American industrialist Charles R. Crane, who enabled Mucha to depict Czech history in the grand fashion disregarding of the expense and ongoing styles. Even So, it was most certainly fortune that disrupted his gradual maturation as a history painter in the academic tradition, dramatically modified his vocation, and enabled him to establish himself very rapidly as the champion Art Nouveau artist in Paris. The breakthrough came with Gismonda, Mucha's first poster for Sarah Bernhardt. He got the commission by a stroke of incredibly good fortune just because he was the only artist present in Lemerciefs printing shop on December 26, 1894, when the great actress called and ordered a new poster for her play. Mucha was slung to celebrity by his first work for her, and regarding the grand rivalry in the field of poster design of the nineties, his accomplishment was stunning. He succeeded in producing art nouveau posters that were both in design and colorlnt? unlike any other art nouveau prints on the billboards, and from the beginning was believed not a follower, but an equal of the best poster artists of the period.

Of all the current influences, it was probably the power of Bernhardt's personality and the emotional strength of the scene in which Mucha chose to portray her for the Gismonda poster-on her way to church, in a Byzantine setting- that set off the beginning of his new style.