?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
ALPHONSE MUCHA (1866-1939) MEDEE THEATRE DE LA RENAISSANCE / SARAH BERNHARDT. 1898. 82x301/2 inches. Champenois, Paris. Condition B: losses in lower and right margins; discoloration and creases in margins and image; horizontal folds; Two sheets. Japan. One of the classic posters in the series that Mucha was commissioned to design by Sarah Bernhardt. Medee was a contemporary version of a play originally written by Euripides. It is a classic, violent Greek tragedy about the warrior Jason. When he returns home from his quest for the Golden Fleece, he brings with him Medea. When he falls in love with another woman, Medea, "driven by a pagan code of honor and her own dark passions . . . conceives a terrible vengeance of gothic cruelty: she kills Jason's father, her own two children, and his new mistress, so that he would have to go through life deprived of everything he loved." (Rennert/Weill p. 208). The sober and tragic image depicts a glimpse of the slaughter, with Medea, a mad look in her eyes, standing with a bloody dagger over one of her victims. The composition is organized vertically, there is Mucha's trademark semi-circle, or "halo," behind the actress's head, and the lettering has been designed in the form of mosaic, to evoke ancient Greece. It seems that Sarah Bernhardt's name has been added by another hand, as it is too clumsy to be part of Mucha's original intention. In fact, preparatory drawings exist showing her name, as usual, across the top of the poster, but in the final version there was clearly not enough room at the top to accommodate Mucha's design. Rennert/Weill 53, DFP II 645.
