Mucha

From Goodreads

Mucha - An Illustrated Life
Roman Neugebauer

I picked this book in the Prague airport on the way home as an afterthought. I'm glad we had a few extra minutes because it was worth the impulse buy. Often those purchases don't pan out as well as this one did, like the house organ. But at about $5, the book not the organ, the stakes weren't that high. It's a quick read and a good miniature biography. There's a lot of interesting stuff in Mucha's life and it is written in an easy style to read. Mucha's aesthetic theories are intriguing too and how they are intertwined in a nationalism and ethnic struggle speak to the condition of late 19th century and early 20th century Europe. He was born and flourished at the dawn of a new age only to die as that dawn was blotted out by the clouds of Nazi Germany. His work's renaissance seems to be being born again at another tempestuous epoch's beginning.