The aim of the Mucha Trail is long-term cooperation in the presentation and promotion of the artistic legacy and works of the important painter Alfonse Mucha in places that are associated with his life and work. The ambition of the project is to involve more widely the places associated with the life of Alfonse Mucha around the world. The Mucha Trail project was initiated by the Mucha Foundation and formally confirmed by a Memorandum of Cooperation on the occasion of the return of the Slav Epic to Moravský Krumlov on 10 September 2021.

Every year, between May and October, the Mucha Trail presents the work of Alfons Mucha from various thematic angles.

The Mucha Trail 2024 will discover Mucha as a brilliant photographer and will be a compelling record of the personal life visions of the artist, a true and genuine master of the camera.

As the previous series, the exhibitions Timeless Mucha: Connecting the World (2022) and Alfonse Mucha: Flower Worlds (2023) demonstrated, Mucha was a leading exponent of Art Nouveau, best known for his posters and the wide range of decorative works he produced in Paris in the late 19th century. What is, however, less well known, is that Mucha took up photography long before he made his name in the French capital, a passion that followed him into the final phase of his artistic career in the 1930s. Today, the Mucha Foundation preserves some 2,500 of his photographs. They survive as period prints or as negatives on glass plates/celluloid and cover an extraordinarily wide range of subjects: not only studio models, images of his family and friends, portraits, landscapes, nature and architectural studies but also documentary and staged photographs (mise-en-scène).

The exhibition Mucha and Photography: a Personal Vision will present 120 photographic works, as well as iconic posters by Alfonse Mucha, drawings, sketches, personal belongings, sculptures and paintings from Mucha’s family collection, and will visit a total of six venues: Ivančice, Moravský Krumlov, Hrušovany nad Jevišovkou and Doubravice nad Svitavou in South Moravia, Zbiroh Castle in Bohemia and Piešt’any in Slovakia.