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Mucha’s Timeless Legacy of Line

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Fans of Mr. Mucha, the grand master of sinuous line, have been lining up across North America to admire some of his greatest works – epic posters of Sarah Bernhardt, beautiful women hawking products surrounded by swirling halos or smoke, and exotic details on small-scale, affordable decorative panels representing the seasons, flowers, or arts.

Created by the Mucha Foundation in Prague, Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line presents Mucha’s own collection of art and books that inspired his creativity, his early works as an in-demand illustrator, and his most famous posters and viral images. It’s all on display at the Boca Raton Museum of Art through March 1, 2026 after successful stops at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and Santa Fe’s Vladem Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Mucha’s 1897 lithograph Monaco – Monte Carlo, an ad for the Paris- Côte d’Azur railway featuring a young woman dreaming about her beach trip. Courtesy: Mucha Foundation.

See some of our favorite works from the Vladem installation in our Flickr album.

So how did a designer who was all the rage for Art Nouveau at the 1900 Paris Expo inspire Sixties psychedelic rock illustrators, Marvel Comics creators, and Japanese manga artists? You’ll see that in the exhibition, too. Check out this promo from Boca:

A portion of the exhibit features drawings, sketches, and acquisitions that suggest the building blocks that formed his mature style – Moravian folk style, the mix and match of multicultural design elements seeping into European designers’ consciousness, and the super-flat design in Japanese prints, and fantastical embellishments on Japanese collectibles in late 19th century Paris.

Just take a look at how many of these design influences Mucha packed into his viral street posters advertising actress Sarah Bernhardt’s new plays – mosaics like those in Eastern European churches, exotic decorative elements, and arcs functioning as halos.

Close-up of Mucha’s life-size 1899 poster of Sarah Bernhardt starring in Hamlet, with Celtic motifs. Courtesy: Mucha Foundation.
Close-up of Mucha’s life-size 1894 poster of Sarah Bernhardt starring in Gismonda featuring a Byzantine mosaic, Orothodox cross, and Slavic designs. Courtesy: Mucha Foundation.

Listen to the Foundation’s curator Tomoko Sato (shown in Phillips Collection galleries) explain how Mucha’s 1894 poster commission – his first – immortalized superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt:

When Mucha’s Gismonda poster appeared on the streets of Paris in 1894, it was a sensation and cemented Mucha’s status as the hottest designer of the day. Bernhardt signed him to a six-year contract (including designing her jewelry), and other offers started rolling in.

Everyone considered Mucha the leading practitioner of Art Nouveau, although Mucha never cared for this label. As the exhibition shows, Mucha’s style was a flat application with bold outlines around ethereal depictions of independent women, swirling vines and/or hair, and a sinuous spiral curving through his layout.

Detail of Mucha’s 1897 lithograph La Trappestine, a liqueur ad featuring a halo, Celtic designs, and a floral wreath. Courtesy: Mucha Foundation.
Plate from Mucha’s 1902 Documents dècoratifs, his designer handbook on how to combine human figures with decorative elements. Courtesy: Mucha Foundation.

As his fame grew, publishers licensed his images and published them at affordable prices worldwide. Mucha himself traveled abroad, teaching sold-out classes in drawing, line, and figures. He was in such demand that he eventually created books showing up-and-coming designers how to create universally appealing designs in his style.

When Mucha produced these design look-books in the early 1900s, could he have envisioned that illustrators and designers of the late 20th and early 21st century would take note? The exhibition showcases Fillmore West posters and Sixties’ rock album covers that repurposed Mucha’s style, such as this transformation of Mucha’s cigarette paper ad into a nearly identical promo for the Jim Kweskin Jug Band.

Mucha’s first product advertising poster – 1896 promo for JOB rolling papers featuring a sensuous smoker and a Byzantine border. Courtesy: Mucha Foundation.
1966 poster by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley for a San Francisco concert headlining the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Flowers in your hair? Swirling hair, flowers, and stars were part of Mucha’s “universal language” that took design in a new direction in the 1900s. Museum visitors love pouring over the Sixties album covers and posters detail in the exhibition, remembering which albums they owned and acts they saw, delightedly pointing out the Mucha design influences to their friends.

1966 tour poster for Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley.
1971 Skull and Roses tour poster for Grateful Dead by Alton Kelley.

But subsequent generations of media makers also adapted Mucha style – comic book and manga artists.

Joe Quesada’s 1994 Spread, Ninjak cover for Valient Comics.
John Tyler Christopher’s 2007 cover for Marvel’s Nova, no. 36B.

Listen to curator Sato about how Japanes artists adapted Muca’s design breakthroughs for 21st manga fans:

Next on the tour for this beautiful exhibition – the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (April 11-August 30, 2026) and Museo Kaluz in Mexico City (October 8, 2026 – February 7, 2027).  

The riches on display in this exhibition are also a reminder that much more is on view at the Mucha Museum – a spectacular new venue in Prague opened by the Mucha Foundation at the Savarin Palace in 2025, right on the western edge of Old Town. 

A star framed by a halo: years of Mucha’s poster ads for Sarah Bernhardt’s 1894-1899 plays – Hamlet, Lorenzaccio, and Gismonda. Courtesy: Mucha Foundation.

Man Ray at The Met

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After Man Ray saw European Cubism at the 1913 Armory Show, he knew what he had to do in his own art – abandon all of the constraints of contemporary American art and dive headfirst into Dada and push the boundaries – go rogue.  

Some say that Man Ray became America’s most important 20th century artist. Marcel Duchamp – who became one of Man Ray’s best friends and collaborators – would certainly agree. All the evidence for Man Ray’s status is right here in the Met’s survey of Man Ray’s formative years (1914-1929), Man Ray: When Objects Dream on view through February 1, 2026.

Man Ray’s 1930 Self-Portrait with Camera – a solarized portrait. Courtesy: The Jewish Museum.

Walking in, you look through the exhibition’s architectural aperture to an endless array of Man Ray’s famed rayographs – dreamy abstract black-and-white cameraless images – lining parallel black gallery walls. Nearly sixty have been gathered for this occasion from international public and private collections.

See our favorite works in the exhibition in our Flickr album.

Man Ray’s 1922 Rayograph published in Les Fuilles Libres (Loose Pages) magazine – a coiled wire puffing smoke emerges from a glass.  Courtesy: private collection.
Man Ray’s 1922 gelatin silver print Rayograph incorporating an everyday wire rack for dramatic effect.  Courtesy: Yale University Art Gallery.

Although the rayographs form the core of this show, you also see the oil paintings, airbrush drawings, sculptures, movies, and game boards – works that are rarely seen, but illustrate why Man Ray rapidly took center-stage in the modern avant-garde community.

While working as a commercial artist and photographer, he used his free time to make unconventional, revolutionary works that banished representation. In 1916, he wrote a “new art” treatise on how to condense motion and dynamic shapes into two dimensions.

Man Ray’s 1915 oil on board Cut-Out from his first solo show in New York in 1919 – representing three dimensions within two.
Man Ray’s 1916-1917 collage and pen-ink drawing The Meeting. Courtesy: The Whitney Museum of American Art.

By 1917, he was making large-scale works, portraying a Rope Dancer mid-performance with stencils, cut-up pieces of colored paper, and big colored spaces representing her shadows.

Man Ray’s 1916 oil painting The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows planned with cut paper. Courtesy: MoMA

His sculptures were made in true anarchist-Dada fashion – from junk found on the street or in his apartment-building trash can. In one gallery, a precarious grouping of dramatically lit wooden hangars is installed overhead like a chandelier. The cast shadows look pretty good, too.  His spiraling Lampshade, a sensuously curved metal sculpture is nearby, alongside paintings and avant-garde portraits where he repurposed the great shape.

Man Ray’s 1917 wood and clamp sculpture New York like a tilted skyscraper; at right, 1920 sculpture New York – a mysterious stack of ball bearings in a glass container. Courtesy: private collection; Tate.
Man Ray’s 1921 Lampshade – a dynamic painted tin and metal sculpture; inspired by a paper lampshade found in the trash a year earlier. Courtesy: Yale University Art Gallery.

He even made game boards and chess sets to symbolize his philosophy about the best way to make art – spur-of-the-moment imagination, abstract planning, clear intention, and an element of surprise.

The philosophy of the chessboard: Man Ray’s 1917 Boardwalk – an assemblage of oil, furniture knobs, and yarn on wood. Courtesy: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

For Man Ray’s fine-art photographs, he preferred using inanimate, everyday objects to humans. And as he progressed as an artist, he didn’t use a camera.  In 1917, he started making glass-plate prints (cliché-verre) with sinuous, patterned line drawings. Soon, he was innovating with Aerographs – abstract pencil-and-airbrush drawings inspired by new technology (“drawing in air”).

Man Ray’s 1918-1920 gelatin silver print “Integration of Shadows” – an assemblage of clothespins, glass, and reflectors; printed after 1935. Courtesy: private collection.
Before the rayograph: Man Ray’s 1917 untitled glass-plate negative (cliché-verre). Courtesy: Centre Pompidou, Paris

Man Ray primarily spent his time in Paris during the 1920s. Once he began making rayographs in his studio, he was content playing with unusual juxtapositions of everyday objects, studio lights, and various types of photographic exposures. It’s reported that in 1922, he created over 100 rayographs and abandoned painting altogether. (But he took it up again the next year!)

The curators make a point of juxtaposing several rarely-seen paintings with specific rayograms from the same period to make a point – the artist might have returned to experimental paintings as a compliment to some of the shapes and feelings he was exploring through photography.

Man Ray’s 1924 gelatin silver print “Rayograph.”  Courtesy: Whitney Museum of American Art.
Man Ray’s 1927 gelatin silver print Rayograph – an experimental exploration of printing his images on textured paper.  Courtesy: private collection.

His unusual, dream-like images were eagerly applauded by the inner circle of European poets and artists who would soon be the official founders of Surrealism. They were intrigued by dreams, psychoanalysis, inner worlds, and startling juxtapositions. In fact, the title of the Met’s show comes a phrase written by Man Ray’s fan, poet Tristan Tzara – “when objects dream” refers to Man Ray’s mesmerizing work.

Man Ray’s ability to make magic with the camera – distorted images, adding surprising symbols, and creating tableaux of otherworldly floating objects – only added to the  enthusiasm for his work.

Man Ray’s 1925-1928 gelatin silver print Marcel Duchamp. Courtesy: private collection.
Man Ray’s 1924 gelatin silver print Le Violon d’Ingres featuring performer Kiki de Montparnasse – published in the proto-Surrealist journal Littérature.

The exhibition concludes with Man Ray’s beautiful solarized prints (a technique co-invented with model/photographer Lee Miller), symbolic paintings, and photographs that have become icons of Surrealism.

Hear the curators talk about the exhibition as they walk through this beautiful, inspiring show:

Take a look through all of the artwork in the exhibition here on the Met’s website. For more on Man Ray’s life and collaborations, listen to a longer Met telecast about his 1920s work with Lee Miller, Kiki de Montparnasse, and Berenice Abbott here.

Man Ray’s 1920 sculpture L’enigme d’Isidore Ducasse (The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse) a mysterious wood, iron, wool, and rope assemblage to stir the subconscious (1971 edition). Courtesy: private collection.

Sculptor Shonnard Invents a Two-Continent Creative Life

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The joyful retrospective Eugenie Shonnard: Breaking the Mold, on view at Santa Fe’s New Mexico Museum of Art through September 1, 2025, tells the story of a determined young artist in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn who seized opportunities to follow her dream, learn from the best, forge lifelong friendships, and transform inspirations of the nature and culture around her into fine art.

In 1927, Shonnard took up full-time residence as Santa Fe’s first academically trained sculptor. For years, the community considered her the “dean of sculpture”, but after she passed away in 1978 at the age of 91, gradually her legacy and accomplishments faded into obscurity.

1930 portrait of Eugenie Shonnard in her sculpture studio by Wilford S. Conrow.

This year, the Museum chose to showcase Shonnard’s range of accomplishments – sculpture, painting, furniture, and architectural design. The strategy has worked, since most visitors remark, “What a beautiful body of work! Why haven’t we heard about her before?

Looking at the strong, robust sculptures of Breton peasants and Native American celebrity Dr. Charles Eastman featured in the introductory gallery, you would never guess that Shonnard started life as a sickly child whose wealthy parents kept her close to home. She spent lots of time outdoors with pets, nature, and the serenity of the Hudson Valley.

Shonnard’s 1923 granite portrait of a Basque woman, La Grandmére.
Shonnard’s 1926 direct-carved mahogany portrait of Dr. Charles Eastman, Chief Ohiyesa Communing with the Great Spirit.

Always considered a talented watercolorist, her teenage life took quite a turn when her mother allowed her to enroll in the New York School of Applied Design for Women – a school that taught proficiency in the “lesser arts” like lacemaking, wallpaper design, and book illustration, and cover design so that young women could have “appropriate” careers.

Shonnard’s 1907 pencil and watercolor design in the pastel “Mucha style” – organic designs framing ethereal woman with flowing tresses.

The most sought-after course was a figure drawing class taught by a visiting European professor – the famous Art Nouveau superstar Alphonse Mucha. A master draughtsman and designer, he taught students how to convey human expression in quick, sure, animated line and to use expressive, organic designs from nature to give their work a modern something extra.

Mucha immediately recognized Shonnard’s skill in blending human empathy and line, and advised her to think beyond what was offered at her school. He suggested that she go to Paris, train with top European sculptors (he’d provide letters of introduction), and seriously purse a “fine arts” path.  

Although her doctors advised her against making the long transatlantic passage, she and her mother set off for Paris in 1911. She loved it! She followed up with Mucha’s suggestions (and contacts), began her fine-arts sculptural training, and met other young American female sculpture students (like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Malvina Hoffman) who were soaking up all of the influences that the Parisian modern art scene offered.

Although he had retired from teaching students, Rodin made an exception for Shonnard and told her he’d be happy to review her work periodically. She worked across a variety of sculptural media (stone, clay, wood) in the atelier of Antoine Bourdelle (an early adoptor of Art Deco who also taught Matisse), showed with the American Woman’s Art Association, and exhibited at the Paris Salon.

When World War I forced Shonnard’s return to New York, she enrolled at the Art Students League for classes with superstar American sculptor James Earle Fraser.

Two of Shonnard’s popular garden commissions – a crane and pelican.

Combining everything she learned from Rodin, Mucha, Bourdelle, and Fraser, she began to excel in stripping her depictions of her subjects down to the essentials that captured each person (or animal’s) inner spirit.

Inspired by Brittany: Shonnard’s 1926 oak Figure of a Woman. Courtesy: Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas

Her career began to take off – commissions for sculptures, shows in New York, and acclaim for her portraits of people and gentle animals. Shonnard made the most of it, showing at New York galleries and the Booklyn Museum, working with her mentor Mucha, and criss-crossing America and Europe in the 1920s.

Like decades of artists before her, she was often drawn to Brittany to capture the spirituality, nature, and culture of the people in her art.

In 1925, she made a fortuitous stop in New Mexico at the invitation of museum director Edger Lee Hewitt, who introduced her to the thriving art community and innovative Native American artists. 

As with Brittany, much about the Southwest resonated with her – dramatic landscapes, spirituality of ancient New Mexican cultures, and the unique architecture and religious art of old churches.  She also drove out into the country to create plein air watercolors of the same Abiquiu landscapes that later inspired O’Keeffe.

Shonnard’s 1925 watercolor of Abiquiu’s unique landscape, Red and White Cliffs with Mesa.

Her sculptures inspired by her New Mexico experience created a sensation in Paris in 1926 – beautiful, direct-carved portraits from the faraway Southwest on display next to her work from Brittany.

Shonnard’s untitled 1925 mahogany Indian bust, shown in her solo show in Paris.

By 1927, Shonnard moved permanently to Santa Fe and began her own full-time studio from which she produced commissions, designed Southwest-inspired furniture, and explored Spanish and Pueblo cultures more deeply.

The exhibition includes designs for private chapel commissions with John Gaw Meem, examples of her furniture, and keenstone panels – her lightweight material invention that liberated her from manipulating heavy granite and wood in her studio, so she could keep carving and sculpting with a lighter material well into her seventies.

People who knew Shonnard said that she exuded a positive spirit throughout her life, seeking harmony with nature, animals, and people. It’s fitting that this retrospective includes a large room populated with her beloved birds, woodland, and backyard animals, and concludes with works by local artists she admired and whose works she collected – Maria and Juan Martinez and Awa Tsireh.

Detail of Shonnard’s Madonna sculpture.
Shonnard’s 1950 portrait Maria, a tribute to the acclaimed San Ildefonso artist.

Get to know this Santa Fe legend by looking through all her beautiful work (and work by her mentors) in our Flickr album.

Parisian Orphists Cover Guggenheim with Color

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Ascending the ramp inside the Guggenheim Museum to enjoy Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930, European optimism and color abound. The exhibition, on view through March 9, 2025, showcases the exuberance and innovation of artists living in early 20th century Paris, who felt exhilarated by the profusion of modern forms of music, dance, and architecture and used abstraction and prismatic color to translated their enthusiasm.

Avant-garde power couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay broke from analytic cubism’s monochromatic approach and injected pulsing color into the art-scene conversation in Paris.

Robert Delaunay’s 1911-1912 Red Eiffel Tower – modern architecture and cubism with a twist of color.

Inspired by 19th century color theory (wheels demonstrating complimentary and dissonant colors), they painted swirling orbs pulsing with harmonies and contrasts to show optimism about the future.

Modern buildings like the Eiffel Tower, electrification of city streets, and the syncopation in dance-hall music created a pre-war energy in Paris that motivated these “orphists.” Everything seemed to be happening simultaneously. Harmonious and dissonant colors and whirling shapes on large canvases seemed a good way to represent it, as shown in the Guggenheim’s fun musical promo:

The style was named “orphism” by none other than Apollinaire himself.  Robert Delaunay’s works in the exhibition include some of his early experimentation with abstract oval “windows,” his abstract riffs on the cosmos, and canvases still showing a hint of the real world.  All convey the simultaneous push-pull of Paris, modern life, and larger scientific forces.  

Robert Delaunay’s 1913 Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon. Courtesy: MoMA
Robert Delaunay’s 1913 The Cardiff Team, with Eiffel’s tower, aerial achievements, and sports dynamics. Courtesy: Van Abbemuseum, The Netherlands.

Many of Sonia’s orphist paintings are featured, including a gigantic horizontal color work inspired by the dynamic movement of tango dancers at a popular Parisian club. No doubt the massive 2024 Bard Graduate Center Gallery show about her forays into fashion and other creative fields (Sonia Delaunay: Living Art) influenced the Guggenheim curators to include her painted toy box and her celebrated super-tall accordion-book painting representing her collaboration with poet Blaise Cendrars.

Sonia Delaunay’s 1913 oil Bal Bullier inspired by dynamism of tango dancers at the popular Parisian club. Courtesy: Centre Pompidou

Innovations by the Delaunays are placed alongside other artists’ works that reflect the artistic breakthroughs of the early Twentieth Century – Kandinsky’s abstraction, the Blue Rider group’s symbolic use of color, and the synergies that artists felt between abstraction and music. In 1912, Leopold Survage intended to create the first fully abstract film, but the project was halted by World War I. Fortunately, we can envision his plan from his series of dynamic color drawings.

Colored Rhythms series of twelve 1912 ink drawings created by Léopold Survage for the first abstract film. Courtesy: La Cinémathèque Française

The music that inspired the Orphism is referenced throughout the exhibition – the improvisation and free structure of jazz, the dissonance of cutting-edge experimental music, and the staccato of the latest Parisian dance-hall craze – Argentine tango. The curators have even provided musical tracks to underscore this influence.

The Italian futurists Balla and Severini are also featured. Speed, modernity, and simultaneous city sensations were their bread and butter, too, even though they argued in the press and art journals that Futurism and Orphism were totally different.

Italian futurist Giacomo Balla’s 1914 Mercury Passing before the Sun, an allusion to recent cosmic events. Milan’s Museo del Novocento.
Gino Severini’s 1915 Dancer–Propeller–Sea. Courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum

In pre-war Paris, American modernist painters Marsden Hartley, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and Morgan Russell picked up on Orphism, although the latter two rebranded their work Synchronism when they wrote their manifesto.

Marsden Hartley’s 1914 Abstraction Courtesy: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s 1917 oil Synchromy. Courtesy: MoMA

Even after the War, the Delaunays continued to represent orphism even if they occasionally incorporated real-world elements. Early orphism adopter Albert Gleizes also continued in this style throughout his career, and inspired students like Mairnie Jelett to explore color theory and its potential.

Albert Gleizes’s 1942 Painting for Contemplation, Dominant Rose and Green.
Irish artist Mairnie Jellett’s 1938 Painting. Courtesy: National Museum, NI, Ulster.

Take a look at our favorite works in our Flickr album here, and enjoy a syncpated strut through the colorful side of Modernism in this catalog preview: