EducationGoing on Assignment in Prague July 2026 – July 11, 2026
An Epic Journey Home
By Sadie Self
21 August 2025 Transitions magazine
After decades of legal disputes, replicas of Mucha’s masterpiece arrive in Prague – while the originals await their promised place in the capital.
The work Alphonse Mucha considered his crowning achievement is coming back to Prague after decades of disputes and lawsuits. The new home for Mucha’s Slav Epic will be Prague’s newest museum devoted to the Czech artist.
From Arty Posters to a Patriotic Epic
Mucha made his reputation in Paris with his flowery posters and illustrations, becoming the most recognized visual artist of the Art Nouveau era at the turn of the 20th century. The 20 enormous paintings of the Slav Epic cycle occupied most of his later career, when he recast the pastel colors and sinuous figures of his earlier work to very different effect, now employing them in illustrating the legends of the early Slavs and climactic moments of Slavic and Czech history.
While Prague boasts of the Moravian-born artist’s strong links to the city in later life, the city’s persistent efforts to bring the Slavic cycle here only bore fruit recently. In 2022, after years of wrangling, the city reached an agreement with Alphonse Mucha’s grandson, John Mucha.
Another step toward returning the works to Prague came at the beginning of this year when a collection of works from the Mucha Foundation was put on display in the Savarin Palace, a stylish Baroque structure on one of the city’s busiest shopping streets.
The Slav Epic is one of the most popular Czech cultural artifacts, said Marie Vivchar, deputy manager of the Mucha Museum. “People want to see it in real life.” They can now, but must travel 200 kilometers to a small town in Moravia.
The public, however, bewildered by the many disputes between Mucha’s family and Prague, and within the family itself, may wonder who really controls Mucha’s legacy. Adding to the uncertainty, Prague’s first Mucha museum continues to operate just a short walk from the Savarin Palace on the side street where it opened its doors in 1998. It now officially does business as “Muchovo Muzeum,” literally “Mucha’s Museum,” displaying posters, illustrations, and other smaller works from the collection of Czechoslovak-born tennis great Ivan Lendl in a more modest setting than the new museum commands.
Balkan Inspiration
“It was as early as 1900, that I decided to devote the second half of my life to work that would help to build up and strengthen the sense of national identity in our country,” Mucha said after completing the cycle he had labored over for 15 years, beginning in 1911.
Visits to the Balkans helped stoke his ambition of capturing the essence of Slavdom on canvas, and five trips to the United States succeeded in winning the patronage of wealthy philanthropist Charles Crane, who became his friend and booster-in-chief.
The finished paintings prominently feature heroes and saints from Slav mythology with a special emphasis on Czech legend and history, depicted across 20 canvases, some as large as six by eight meters.
While the entirety of the cycle can’t be seen in Prague just yet, visitors can still get a sense of its power at the new Mucha Museum, where reduced photographic replicas of four of the paintings are on show. Every year, the replicas will be switched for another four until the actual series is able to be displayed.
“This is something really close to everyone right now,” Vivchar said. “It’s an important part of the exhibition. For the Czech people, it’s an important part of them, the history.”
For many, though, the versions displayed at the museum don’t make up for the experience of the original works. “They get upset, even, that these are just replicas,” Vivchar said.
An Epic Search for Home
While Mucha’s famous posters draw plenty of attention to the new Mucha Museum, visitors often come in asking after the Slav Epic and where to see it. For now, the answer is in Moravsky Krumlov.
Since being given to the city of Prague by Charles Crane, the Slav Epic has never had a fixed home.
The city, Crane, and Mucha agreed in 1913 that the works were to be displayed in a custom-built space. Such a space still lacks a location and a design. The works spent most of the time up to 1939 in Prague, then were moved to a safe location following the Nazi takeover and Mucha’s death that year.
Some years after the war, the small town of Moravsky Krumlov offered to show the works in the town’s Renaissance manor house. They were on show there from 1963 to 2010, when Prague City Hall requested permission to exhibit them in the capital, citing the agreement from 1913.
The city received backlash out of concern for the safety of the paintings, but the Slav Epic traveled to Prague several times nonetheless. In 2017, the cycle was loaned to the National Art Center in Tokyo, eliciting a lawsuit by John Mucha, the founder of the Mucha Foundation, claiming that the city had violated the stipulations set by his grandfather in 1913. The suit was dismissed on the grounds that Crane was the original owner of the works. A series of appeals followed. After much deliberation, the paintings eventually were returned to Moravsky Krumlov.
While the Slav Epic will remain there until at least 2026, the current plan is to install it in the Mucha Museum once the Savarin Palace is fully restored, according to an agreement signed in 2023. The deal awards ownership of the paintings to the city of Prague, which in turn will allow the museum to display them for 25 years, with a five-year extension possible, before they eventually find a permanent home in a purpose-built hall.
Let the Tourists Come. And Locals Too.
“We were looking for a new place to enable as many people as possible to admire Mucha’s work,” Marcus Mucha, great-grandson of Alphonse Mucha and the current executive director of the Mucha Foundation, told Expats.cz. “We want the new location of our collections to attract not only tourists, but also Czechs, and become a popular place for them.”
Interviewed by iDnes, an online news site, Marcus Mucha remarked that tourists typically visit Prague less to see art than to soak up its history and beautiful buildings, and to drink the world’s best beer.
“If we want to see Klimt, we go to Vienna. If we want to see Picasso, we go to Paris. Mucha is unique to Prague,” he said, “and I hope that this exhibition will be a kind of response to the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.”
Sadie Self is a third-year undergraduate studying journalism and electronic media at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She began work on this article while attending Transitions’ Going on Assignment international reporting class in July.
Photos by the author.