“What Shall We Do With It?” Finding A Place for Alfons Mucha and His Slav Epic

Abstract

Not very often does a work of art, which provoked very mixed reactions at the time of its completion, continue to stir the political and cultural waters nearly one hundred years later. The Slav Epic, a series of twenty large canvases created by Alfons Mucha (1860–1939) between 1909 and 1926 on the topic of Slavic history and myth, is such a work, and it has provoked critical comments from Czech art historians, politicians, and journalists. The most recent disputes, which have arisen in the last couple of years, concern the city council of Prague, which has expressed a wish to house the work somewhere in Prague in fulfillment of the artist's wishes, and the town of Moravský Krumlov in Mucha's home region, where the Epic was exhibited for forty years and lays claims to it as well. The debate about its physical location has also been joined by a number of public figures, including Mucha's grandson and the secretary to the then Czech president Václav Klaus, who called the Epic “the kitsch of the millennium” and “sheer Pan-Slavic propaganda.” Such negative comments only highlight the fact that the Slav Epic continues to generate controversy and has not yet found its place in the Czech, let alone European, context.