She was the 19th century Taylor Swift, he was the one who made her a superstar (2024)

She was the most famous actor of her time, arguably the world’s first modern celebrity – the Taylor Swift of her generation who reputedly kept a pet tiger and prepared for tragic roles by sleeping in a coffin.

He was a struggling painter, illustrator and graphic artist whose stylised theatre posters made that actor Sarah Bernhardt one of the most recognisable faces of her time, and helped define art nouveau’s trademark aesthetic.

Alphonse Mucha’s work went on to become the inspiration for psychedelic London, his Byzantinesque motifs readopted for album covers and band posters, and later in the work of manga artists.

“Divine” Sarah, as she was known, visited Sydney on a global tour to wild acclaim in 1891, and now her ethereal visage is to feature prominently in the first solo show in Australia of the art of Czech-born Mucha.

Works from the artist’s five-decade career, including those seminal theatre posters, illustrations, jewellery, interior decoration and photographs will be exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW as its ticketed winter blockbuster from June 15.

Unveiling its program for 2024, the gallery announced it would also stage a mid-year major survey of one of Australia’s most significant and respected abstract painters, Lesley Dumbrell.

Mucha blurred the line between fine art and commercial mass production, raising graphic design to a higher aesthetic, exhibition co-curator Jackie Dunn says.

His working relationship with Bernhardt was not unlike Andy Warhol’s with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Burton.

“Sarah Bernhardt was really the first global celebrity in a way Taylor Swift is for her generation, and it was Mucha who helped create her image,” says Dunn.

Bernhardt was already madly famous when artist and superstar client first met in the days before Christmas 1894.

Bernhardt was in urgent need of a theatre poster for a production of Gismondo and Mucha, a minor illustrator just beginning to make inroads in Paris, happened to be at the printery correcting proofs when she visited, and was tapped for the job.

His design proved very different from most other art nouveau posters around, Dunn says. “It was a very dramatic image in a most unusual format that he constructed that was full length, effectively life-sized.

“It was very elaborate, very richly embellished but also a muted palette with soft tones, the complete opposite of Toulouse-Lautrec and others who were using these big, bold colours at the time.

“And it was just such a hit that it took the art world by storm, and he started a six-year exclusive working partnership with her and a lifelong friendship.”

Such were their appeal, Mucha’s posters were souvenired as soon as they were pasted up around late 19th-century Paris. With the proceeds from his commissions, he set up a studio that became a hub for artist friends and models, a theatrical space covered in Japanese prints and scrolls and resplendent with Chinese textiles and rugs.

By 1904 when Mucha headed to New York he was considered one of the greatest decorative artists in the world, but after he died in 1939 he fell into obscurity until a retrospective in 1963 at the Victoria and Albert Museum restored his reputation.

Out of that emerging psychedelic rock culture, young graphic artists in London and San Francisco resurrected the Mucha style, which was represented in album covers and band posters for rock bands Cream and The Grateful Dead.

“It’s pretty fabulous to see this rediscovery of Mucha in the 1960s, and he really becomes the language of 1960s London,” Dunn said.

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Arts minister John Graham said Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau would be the greatest single exhibition of the artist’s works to be seen in Australia.

In other program announcements, acclaimed contemporary artist Angelica Mesiti will take over the Art Gallery’s subterranean Tank Gallery from September 21.

And the much delayed major artwork commission bial gwiyuŋo (the fire is not yet lighted) by First Nations artist Jonathan Jones is also scheduled to open some time this year, the gallery says.

Jones’ Indigenous art garden, now being constructed on the land bridge over the Eastern Distributor, is the largest and last of the nine major works commissioned by the art gallery from leading Australian and international artists as part of the Sydney Modern Project opened more than a year ago.

Meanwhile, separate announcements of the gallery’s summer international blockbuster exhibitions have been delayed until later this year.

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