Mucha's Moon: The Art Nouveau Goddess

Alphonse Mucha painted the most reproduced moon-goddess image in the world. A patient case for what his discipline can teach the practitioner — and what his costuming should not be borrowed wholesale.

If a modern reader has seen an art nouveau moon-goddess poster on the wall of a coffee shop, a tarot reader's parlor, or a witchy boutique — and they almost certainly have — they have, in nearly every case, seen the work of Alphonse Mucha or one of the painters who followed him. Mucha (1860–1939) was a Czech illustrator who produced, over the course of his career, the visual vocabulary that has stood in, ever since, for "feminine, mystical, gentle, lunar." His posters were commercial. They were also, in his own private life, deeply religious. The combination produced the image-set the modern witchy-merch market is still working through.

The market mostly imitates the costume. The discipline underneath is more interesting.

What Mucha understood

Three working things.

One: the figure is small inside a larger ornament. Mucha's posters almost never feature a woman standing alone against a blank background. The figure is set inside an elaborate framework of curves, plant forms, halos, stars, decorative geometry. The framework does most of the visual work. The figure is the inhabited center.

This is true of every working altar, also. The objects sit inside a framework — the cleared shelf, the small cloth, the candle's circle of light, the implicit geometry of where things are placed. The frame is doing the spiritual work. The object is the center the practitioner returns to. Mucha understood this. The witchy-merch industry, which sells only the figure, mostly does not.

Two: the line is patient. Mucha's lines are slow, deliberate, almost decorative-medieval in their patience. The line goes where it goes. The line is never rushed. Look at one of his moon-goddess posters and trace, with the eye, a single curve from where it begins to where it ends. The curve takes the long way. The long way is part of the working.

This patience translates directly to practice. The practitioner who lights the candle quickly, journals fast, and rushes to the next slot has not done the line. The practitioner who lights the candle slowly, holds the moment, and lets the line of the working unfurl — has done what Mucha was depicting. The poster is a practice instruction in a different medium.

Mucha painted slow attention. Slow attention is, mostly, the spiritual practice the posters are advertising.

What not to borrow

The costume. The flowing hair. The drapery. The Edwardian ideal of the gentle pre-modern woman. None of this is the practice. All of it is style. Style is allowed to age. The style is now a century and a quarter old, and aging in specific ways the practitioner should look at clearly.

Most Mucha-style poster-girls are conventionally young, conventionally beautiful, conventionally posed. Working practitioners are usually none of these, and the practice itself is older than any of them. The poster is a decorative reading of practice rather than the practice itself. A poster on the wall is fine. A poster as the practice is not.

The small Mucha-discipline practice

For the practitioner who likes the art nouveau aesthetic and wants to extract its discipline rather than its costume:

Pick one Mucha image. Print it, or find it in a book, or have it on the screen. Sit with it for five minutes. Trace, with the eye, one curve from start to finish. Then trace another. Then notice where the eye keeps returning. That place is the painting's center.

Take that quality of attention into the next ordinary task. Wash one dish slowly. Light a candle slowly. Write one sentence in the journal slowly. The Mucha lesson is the slowness, not the gilt. The slowness is what makes a practice an altar instead of a chore.