The Polish-born painter Willy Mucha was born in Warsaw in 1905; his precise biography remains unclear, however, and he himself left doubt as to a possible relationship with Alfons Mucha, his Czech namesake. Willy Mucha began his studies of drawing and music in Poland and continued them in Austria-Bohemia, then in Russia and Germany. After the death of his father in the early 1920s, he abruptly left...

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  Biography of Willy Mucha

  The Polish-born painter Willy Mucha was born in Warsaw in 1905; his precise biography remains unclear, however, and he himself left doubt as to a possible relationship with Alfons Mucha, his Czech namesake. Willy Mucha began his studies of drawing and music in Poland and continued them in Austria-Bohemia, then in Russia and Germany. After the death of his father in the early 1920s, he abruptly left his family and Poland. He undertook trips all over Europe (he was a pupil of the Polish painter and engraver Ladislas Zkoczylas), then settled in France, which all artists dreamed of at the time; after enrolling at the University of Caen, he moved to the capital, where he joined the ranks of the Ecole de Paris.
  Mobilized in tanks in 1939, Willy Mucha suffered the debacle and settled in Collioure, which he discovered in 1936 "on the road to the Spanish War". With the Torcatis group, he encouraged the passage of antifascists through the Col de Banyuls. In 1943, threatened with denunciation, he was sent to the maquis in Aveyron. After the liberation, he returned to Collioure.
  Mucha kept his Parisian atelier in Montparnasse. His exhibitions take him all over the world. His greatest successes, the artist will meet them in the United States, the "new homeland of painting" where many of his friends urge him to settle.  He claims this wandering as well as the nomadism of his life and his style. Dismissing the figurative-abstract quarrel, Willy Mucha made Jean Bazaine's formula his own: "The destiny of the world is not played out between the figurative and the non-figurative, but between the incarnate and the non-incarnate, which is quite different. »
  In Paris, but also in Collioure, the artist frequented Raoul Dufy, Dorothéa Tanning and Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Camille Bryen, André Masson, Edouard Pignon, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Serge Poliakoff and most of the important painters of his time. He is thought to be worldly, yet he is solitary and contemplative.
  Mucha will remain unfailingly linked to his elective land of Collioure, whose landscape he admired but, beyond the image, the light and the infinite horizon that will never cease to nourish his work.
  His career was marked by numerous exhibitions, both collective (Salon de Mai, Salon des comparaisons, Salon des Artistes indépendants, Sao Paulo, Art Gallery of Toronto, Royal Academy of London, Nantes, Tokyo, etc.) and personal.
  In addition to his line drawings, his painted work is truly a hymn to light and colour, inspired by the reality of places which he transfigures into almost abstract dazzle where the theme of the sphere (rising or setting sun) is recurrent.
  

  

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