True-to-life colors of the canvases together with unique printing technology helped produce a one-of-a-kind book. The large-format picture publication “Epopej” in a limited edition offers a view of the smallest details of Mucha’s work and presents the spectacular Slav Epic in a yet unseen form.
Date: 29 March at 18:00 Book presentation and lecture by the author Jan William DrnekVenue: Czech House JerusalemLanguage of the event: EnglishRSVP until 24.3 on jerusalem@czech.cz
The Book presentation will be accompanied by an exhibition "Behind the scenes - making of the book Epos"
Jan William Drnek created a digital copy of Mucha’s entire Slav Epic. Twenty canvases covering a surface of 650 m2 in total, over 20 000 photographs and approximately 30 TB of data. The result of the entire team’s work is not only the digital copy, but also the unique picture publication EPOPEJ. It was released in a limited edition of 200 pieces under the publisher Albatros.
About the book
The book is printed using a special technique. The printing grid is invisible not only to the naked eye, but even when using a magnifying glass, enlarging the image up to circa 6 times. The book depicts the Slav Epic canvases exactly as they may be viewed close-up in the gallery. This printing technology is almost never used in practice, mainly due to high costs and technological difficulty. “Although you cannot purchase the Slav Epic paintings, this book will allow you to see them better than you often could in a gallery,” says Jan William Drnek.
The size of the book is 62 cm by 42 cm. There is a reason for these exact dimensions, because the size of an open page copies the commonly given size of the largest canvases of the Slav Epic – 610 cm x 810 cm. The book has 336 pages of mostly pictures. In a way, each of the 200 copies is an original, complemented by a jewel designed by Jarmila Mucha Plocková, Alphonse Mucha’s granddaughter, three symbolic stones from places of the Slav Epic’s stories, and a special magnifying glass for viewing. The book is hand-bound and is placed with the other artefacts in a special hand-made case. The whole set weighs 23 kg.
Jan William Drnek
Jan William Drnek, has been clutching a photo camera in his hands since the age of six and always dreamt of making large format prints. In view of the political circumstances and opportunities available in his country at the time, this dream remained an unquenchable desire for many years.
He studied cyber-technology at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, where he specialized in control systems and devoted his later studies to the development of an apparatus that could follow eye movements. The knowledge he acquired in the realm of human eyesight in those days became useful during the photo projects he engaged in later on.
By the mid-90s, Jan William was smitten by the large format printers that started to appear on the market. Together with a group of friends, he founded the HSW sign making company, which not only became increasingly active in terms of sales, service and maintenance of such printers but also offered support in colour management issues. He spent thousands of hours developing new printer profiles, which eventually led him to design a number of custom made printer profiles for the entire array of printing media used in sign making production.
Jan William has continued his personal drive to innovate. For example, during the last few years, he has developed his own methodology for creating very precise reproduction of graphic images. In education, he has developed teaching tools for graphic designers which are able to help students to understand the principles of human perception, colour management and the potential of various printing technologies.
In December 2017, Jan William Drnek initiated and carried out a very demanding project with the cooperation of the National Gallery in Prague. He executed the high precision digital copy of the Slav Epic. It was the first time that this extraordinarily large and monumental piece of art, a collection of twenty canvases of a total area of 650 sqm, was captured with maximal possible precision. His photography can be printed with unbelievable fidelity to the original art. They can also serve antique restorers for their studies. Together with a team of experts, he prepared a luxury book on the Slav Epic to reach a worldwide public with this spectacular work of art.
Alfons Mucha
(24. 7. 1860 – 14. 7. 1939)
Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 in Czech Republic. His singing abilities allowed him to continue his education through high school in the Moravian capital of Brünn (today Brno), even though drawing had been his first love since childhood. He worked at decorative painting jobs in Moravia, mostly painting theatrical scenery, then in 1879 moved to Vienna to work for a leading Viennese theatrical design company, while informally furthering his artistic education. Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov hired Mucha to decorate Hrusovany Emmahof Castle with murals, and was impressed enough that he agreed to sponsor Mucha's formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
Mucha moved to Paris in 1887, and continued his studies at Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi while also producing magazine and advertising illustrations. Around Christmas 1894, Mucha happened to drop into a print shop where there was a sudden and unexpected demand for a new poster to advertise a play starring Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in Paris, at the Théatre de la Renaissance on the Boulevard Saint-Martin. Mucha volunteered to produce a lithographed poster within two weeks, and on 1 January 1895, the advertisement for the play Gismonda by Victorien Sardou appeared on the streets of the city. It was an overnight sensation and announced the new artistic style and its creator to the citizens of Paris. Bernhardt was so satisfied with the success of that first poster that she entered into a 6 years contract with Mucha.
Mucha produced a flurry of paintings, posters, advertisements, and book illustrations, as well as designs for jewellery, carpets, wallpaper, and theatre sets in what was initially called the Mucha Style but became known as Art Nouveau (French for 'new art'). Mucha's works frequently featured beautiful healthy young women in flowing vaguely Neoclassical looking robes, often surrounded by lush flowers which sometimes formed haloes behind the women's heads. In contrast with contemporary poster makers he used paler pastel colors. The 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris spread the "Mucha style" internationally, of which Mucha said "I think [the Exposition Universelle] made some contribution toward bringing aesthetic values into arts and crafts." He decorated the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion and collaborated in the Austrian Pavilion. His Art Nouveau style was often imitated. However, this was a style that Mucha attempted to distance himself from throughout his life; he insisted always that, rather than adhering to any fashionable stylistic form, his paintings came purely from within and Czech art. He declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message, and nothing more; hence his frustration at the fame he gained through commercial art, when he wanted always to concentrate on more lofty projects that would ennoble art and his birthplace.
Slav Epic (20 works)
The Slav Epic (Slovanská epopej) is a series of twenty monumental canvases (the largest measuring over 6 by 8 metres) depicting the history of the Slav people and civilisation. Mucha conceived it as a monument for all the Slavonic peoples and he devoted the latter half of his artistic career to the realisation of this work.
The idea of the work was formed in 1899, while Mucha was working on the design for the interior of the Pavilion of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had been commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian government for the Paris Exhibition of 1900. In preparation for the assignment he travelled widely through the Balkans, researching their history and customs as well as observing the lives of the Southern Slavs in the regions that had been annexed by Austria-Hungary two decades earlier. From this experience sprang the inspiration for a new project – the creation of ‘an epic for all the Slavonic peoples’ that would portray the ‘joys and sorrows’ of his own nation and those of all the other Slavs.
Between 1904 and 1909, Mucha visited the United States five times in hopes of finding a benefactor who would support his ambitious project and eventually, on Christmas Day 1909, he secured sponsorship from Charles Richard Crane (1858-1939), a wealthy Chicago-based businessman and philanthropist. Crane was intensely interested in the development of political affairs in Eastern Europe and Slavonic culture and he was to provide financial and emotional sustenance to Mucha for almost twenty years. Mucha returned to his homeland in 1910 to take up his mission.
Between 1911 and 1926 Mucha’s energy was taken up with the creation of the Slav Epic. For this project he rented a studio and an apartment in Zbiroh Castle in Western Bohemia to benefit from the spacious studio enabling him to work on enormous canvases. In the series, he depicted twenty key episodes from the Slavic past, ancient to modern, ten of which depict episodes from Czech history and ten on historical episodes from other Slavonic regions. The first canvas in the series, The Slavs in Their Original Homeland, was finished in 1912 and the entire series was completed in 1926 with the final canvas, The Apotheosis of the Slavs, which celebrates the triumphant victory of all the Slavs whose homelands in 1918 finally became their very own.
With the Slav Epic Mucha wished to unite all the Slavs through their common history and their mutual reverence for peace and learning and eventually to inspire them to work for humanity using their experience and virtue. In 1928, Mucha and Crane officially presented the complete series of the Slav Epic to the City of Prague as a gift to the nation, coinciding with the 10th Anniversary of its independence.
More about the book
Oficial website of the project
