☛ Mucha Foundation: “Job” (poster) by Alphonse Mucha, colour lithograph, 149.2 x 101, 1898. © Mucha Foundation.

All of Alphonse Mucha artwork is in the public domain (at least in the United-States: see List of countries’ copyright length for more details). Some (but not all) photographic reproductions can still be copyrighted to their respective creators and/or owners. The Alphonse Mucha Foundation holds copyrights to the photographic reproductions it has produced of Alphonse Mucha’s artwork. However, it does not hold the rights on every reproductions available online. For example, Wikimedia Commons offers a 1000 × 1400px image of the famous “Job” poster which is free of copyright. Europeana also offers reproductions of 118 artworks by Mucha, all of which are free of copyrights (see for example the “Job” poster).

Mucha made two advertising posters for Job cigarette papers, both of which feature a woman holding a cigarette whose smoke winds round her head. In both posters Mucha places the central female figure against a background featuring Job monograms. Both posters are notable for the arabesques formed by the curves and swirls of the woman’s exaggeratedly abundant hair, a feature which was much commented on and copied at the time and which was satirized by contemporary wits as “Mucha’s macaroni”.

More about Alphonse Mucha:

Alphonse (Alfons) Mucha (1860-1939) was a prolific Moravian painter of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and a key figure in the Art Nouveau movement. His style of painting influenced an entire generation of painters, graphic artists, draughtsmen and designers and in the minds of many, his work epitomizes the Art Nouveau. He himself came to resent his fame as an artist of the utilitarian, believing that true art should be elevated and epic. (Olga’s Gallery)