The exhibition entitled "In Praise of Women" opening in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts on 20 March will display outstanding works from Alphonse Mucha's oeuvre. Visitors will be able to see those works of Mucha - one of the best known masters of Secession - that he made in his Parisian, American and Bohemian periods. The exhibition, which comprises over 100 posters, graphic works, paintings and photographs will be open until 7 June and will be the opening event of the Budapest Spring Festival.

After the exhibitions devoted to Ferdinand Hodler and Gustave Moreau, the one presenting Alphonse Mucha's art is the last chapter in a series that the Museum of Fine Arts launched to provide a picture of the "golden age" of the late 19th century. After its display in Budapest, the material selected from the collections of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and the Mucha Foundation, also in Prague, can be seen in Brno. The exhibition focuses on Mucha's Parisian period, but it will also include a number of works he made in America and Bohemia. It was in Paris that the decorative style of his works, "le style Mucha", became known all over Europe and in the United States, and greatly contributed to the spirit of Art Nouveau at the turn of the century. Mucha's achievement in the art of the turn of the century was outstanding mainly in regard to posters and the applied arts. On the one hand, his art was characterised by eccentricity, a sense of style and the unique use of symbols and allegory, while on the other it was signified by the opportunities afforded to him by modern reproduction processes and the efficient application of imaging techniques.

Alphonse Mucha was born in 1960 in Ivančice, Moravia (today's Czech Republic). He followed courses in Vienna, Munich and Paris. It was Mucha's poster designs that were first met with overwhelming success in the mid-1890s, and this genre also brought him worldwide fame. He achieved his first great success when he won a prize at the "Salon" exhibition of 1894 in Paris. The majority of his art and advertising posters were produced by the printer Champenois, where all of Mucha's Sarah Bernhardt posters were also printed. Sarah Bernhardt was one of the most charismatic celebrities in Paris in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th. Her contemporaries considered her the best actress who had ever performed on stage. In the period between 1895-1901 Mucha designed most of her posters.

In late February 1904 Mucha moved to the United states, where he was welcomed as the leading figure of Art Nouveau, since in America this style earned renown thanks to his theatre posters advertising Sarah Bernhardt’s American tours. The celebrated master returned to Bohemia in 1910, where Slavic symbols and the period characteristics of the Slavs became the focus of his art. After the creation of Czechoslovakia, he designed the stamps and banknotes of the new state. When Bohemia was annexed in 1939, Mucha was among the first to be arrested by the Gestapo, and although he was eventually released, he never recovered from the pneumonia he caught while in prison and he died in the same year.

The exhibition is curated by Marta Sylverstova of the Moravian Gallery in Brno and Petr Stembera of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.