The Lord’s Prayer by František Bílek and Alfons Mucha

This small-scale exhibition of drawings and prints presents two different approaches to the seminal Christian prayer, The Lordְ’s Prayer, which occupies a pivotal place in the oeuvres of the sculptor, František Bílek, and the painter, Alfons Mucha. František Bílek set out to work on his first artist book, The Lord’s Prayer, as early as 1900. It was published in the following year, with an introduction by Otokar Březina, by Nový život in Nový Jičín. For its part, Alfons Mucha’s The Lord’s Prayer was published in book form in Paris, in 1899, and a limited edition was issued at the same time by Prague publisher Bedřich Kočí. The parts of both collections on display here attest to the two artists’ wealth of individual invention which enabled them to create suggestive mystic allegories pointing towards the moral reawakening of humankind.