Brno has recently joined the Mucha Trail, a project by the Mucha Foundation – which maintains the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of works by Alfons Mucha – to connect and valorise important places connected to Alfons Mucha’s youth.
Every year from May to October, the Mucha Trail presents Mucha’s work from different thematic points of view. Last year, 70,000 visitors in the Czech Republic and 30,000 visitors in Slovakia saw the “Alfons Mucha: Flower Worlds” exhibition.
Mucha, one of the most famous Czech artists, was born and lived his early years in Moravia. A native of Ivančice, he was inspired by the landscapes around Moravský Krumlov, where one of his most renowned works, the Slav Epic, is now exhibited, and educated in Brno.
The Moravian capital will therefore join the other cities and locations linked to the life of the artist, including Mikulov, Piešťany in Slovakia, and Zbiroh Castle to the west of Prague.
The cooperation between the City of Brno and the Mucha Foundation will show its first major results during the city’s presentation at EXPO 2025 in Osaka, Japan.
To coincide with the addition of two new members to the project (Brno and Zbiroh), the current exhibition “Mucha and photography: a personal vision” was launched on 10 May as part of the Mucha trail. It includes approximately 120 photographic works, as well as iconic Mucha posters, drawings, and personal items, and will be open to the public until 31 October in six locations: Ivančice, Moravský Krumlov, Hrušovany nad Jevišovkou, Doubravice nad Svitavou, Zbiroh Castle, and Piešťany (Slovakia).
Brno had an experience with Mucha’s works as recently as 2018, when the Brno Exhibition Center hosted nine screens of the Slav Epic for seven months as part of the RE:publika festival. The screens were viewed by 75,000 visitors. The Moravian Gallery collection in Brno also owns Mucha’s series of six Beatitudes, though they are now temporarily inaccessible to the public due to the restoration work at the Governor’s Palace.
“Brno is associated with the early period of Mucha’s life,” said Markéta Vaňková, Mayor of Brno. “It was in our city that, as a student of the Slovanské Gymnázium, he was apparently directed to painting, and was able to embark on his stellar career as an artist. As a boy, he was also interested in music, and his first traces in Brno lead to the church in Petrov, where he sang in the choir.”
“One of the important goals for urban tourism at the moment is to increase the number of nights that visitors spend here,” continued Vaňková. “Brno has sufficient capacity in terms of accommodation and other services to provide tourists with a base even for a few days, during which they can go out into the surroundings and discover a huge number of remarkable places in our region, from natural monuments to historical ones. From this point of view, it is natural for us to be part of projects such as the Mucha trail.”
