{"id":74489,"date":"2014-07-24T16:00:31","date_gmt":"2014-07-24T20:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74489"},"modified":"2014-07-25T09:56:13","modified_gmt":"2014-07-25T13:56:13","slug":"le-pater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/24\/le-pater\/","title":{"rendered":"Le Pater<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"4384259187_45afbd1809_o\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1899, Alphonse Mucha, a progenitor of Art Nouveau, published Le Pater<\/em>,\u00a0an illustrated edition of the Lord\u2019s Prayer embellished in his sinuous, faintly occult style. Mucha, who was born today in 1860, made only 510 copies of the book, which he considered his masterwork. According to the Mucha Foundation<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\n

Mucha conceived this project at a turning point in his career \u2026 [he] was at that time increasingly dissatisfied with unending commercial commissions and was longing for an artistic work with a more elevated mission. He was also influenced by his long-standing interest in Spiritualism since the early 1890s and, above all, by Masonic philosophy \u2026 the pursuit of a deeper Truth beyond the visible world. Through his spiritual journey Mucha came to believe that the three virtues\u2014Beauty, Truth and Love\u2014were the \u2018cornerstones\u2019 of humanity and that the dissemination of this message through his art would contribute towards the improvement of human life and, eventually, the progress of mankind.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whether or not you buy into\u00a0Mucha\u2019s spiritual ambition\u2014and I must admit that I don\u2019t\u2014his illustrations are striking in their depth and detail, with a certain haunted, diaphanous quality that would be imitated, if never duplicated, throughout the twentieth century, right on up to those ponderous Led Zeppelin \u201cStairway to Heaven<\/a>\u201d black-light posters that continue to grace all too many dorm rooms. As the artist Alan Carroll explains,<\/p>\n

\n

in the 1870s and 1880s, so many American artists went to study in Paris (e.g. Sargent, Whistler, Cassatt, Eakins, Homer) because American academic training at the time was generally considered so inadequate. Combine this with a mesmeric American fascination with the Old World, and we can begin to see why Mucha\u2019s early trips to the States were so rapturously received. And yet Mucha seemed reluctant to lap up the attention that the gentry and grandes dames<\/em> of American Society were determined to bestow. Indeed, he was sick and tired of his obligations, as evidenced in a hilariously melodramatic letter he wrote in 1904: \u201cYou\u2019ve no idea how often I am crushed almost to blood by the cogwheels of this life, by this torrent which has got hold of me, robbing me of my time and forcing me to do things that are so alien to those I dream about.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Something of that crushed-to-blood quality comes through in\u00a0Le Pater<\/em>, whose fascination with the otherworldly is predicated on a kind of desperation: There must be something more, right?<\/em><\/p>\n

You can see more of Le Pater<\/em>\u00a0on\u00a0Carroll\u2019s blog, Surface Fragments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Lepatermucha005\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1899, Alphonse Mucha, a progenitor of Art Nouveau, published Le Pater,\u00a0an illustrated edition of the Lord\u2019s Prayer embellished in his sinuous, faintly occult style. Mucha, who was born today in 1860, made only 510 copies of the book, which he considered his masterwork. According to the Mucha Foundation, Mucha conceived this project at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[14732,35,14733,9158,2783,14734,12985,270,6857],"class_list":["post-74489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-alphonse-mucha","tag-art","tag-art-nouveau","tag-birthdays","tag-illustrations","tag-le-pater","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-paris","tag-spiritualism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLe Pater<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Alphonse Mucha\u2019s illustrated edition of The Lord\u2019s Prayer.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/24\/le-pater\/\" \/>\n<meta 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