The event will take place on October 28, 2021, at 8 p.m. ET (October 29, 2 a.m, CET).

The live streaming will be available at:  https://youtu.be/sNB2_TY4HA0

The program will feature:

• Special guests: Marcus Mucha, great-grandson of the artist Alphonse Mucha; Diana Crane, greatgranddaughter    of Charles Crane, sponsor of Mucha's Slav Epic; & Sasha Suda, Director & CEO of the National Gallery of Canada@National Gallery of Canada; 

• Canadian Premiere of a New Documentary Film: Mucha: The Story of an Artist who Created a Style; trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNe2KcaaEgo

• Live chat

If you want to take part in the live chat, you need to sign in with YouTube in the upper right corner of your screen. You can do that via your gmail account. If you do not have one, please, kindly consider creating it. 

Many thanks to our partner, The Mucha Foundation.

“Since 1620, many generations of Czechs, both at home as well as abroad, dreamt of the re-creation of an independent Czech statehood. That dream was fulfilled only three centuries later on October 28, 1918 with great help from Canada. Czech-Canadians enthusiastically supported the campaign for our national independence led by Professor Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. They raised funds and enlisted in the Canadian and Czechoslovak armies. Moreover, with the United States neutral during the first years of the conflict, many Czech-Americans joined the Canadian army as well. More than 30,000 Czechs from North America fought in Europe.

Czechs in North America just as in Europe looked up to the world-renowned Art Nouveau pioneer Alphonse Mucha as a national hero. Long before World War I, he began fighting for the rights of his nation by other means, through his art. He left his star career in Paris to tell the story of Czechs and other Slavic peoples in a series of monumental paintings, the Slav Epic. After Czechoslovakia was founded, he created the country’s first banknotes and stamps. On the occasion of the 10th birthday of the new country, Alphonse Mucha presented the completed Slav Epic as a gift to his nation. He did so together with Charles Crane, the sponsor of the cycle and Godfather of Czechoslovakia as he was called for his merits for the creation of the country.

Unfortunately, the First Czechoslovak Republic did not live much beyond its 20th birthday. When Nazis seized complete control of the Czech lands in 1939, the eighty-year-old Alphonse Mucha was among the first people interrogated by Gestapo. He passed away soon after that. Through his art, however, Alphonse Mucha continues to live as one of our country’s best ambassadors. His Art Nouveau posters are among the most sought-after symbols of Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The recent Slav Epic presentation in Tokyo became the world’s third most visited art exhibition of the year with more than 650,000 visitors.”
                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                    Ambassador Bořek Lizec