Jarušek House

The writer Marie Podešvová (1901–1994), daughter of Karel Jarušek, recalled her childhood home thusly: ‘My father always craved new things and was the first person in Brno to hire the most modern and most talented Prague architect, Josef Gočár, who designed a three-storey cube with six apartments and an artistically conceived facade: a ground floor made of grey marble, two columns supporting a massive oriel clad in black tiles and four arched windows. (…) Of course, no one could have known that all the tiles would fly off when Brno was bombed during the Second World War.’ Karel Jarušek (1877–1944) was born in Slapy nad Vltavou into a family of nineteen children. He attended grammar school in Prague, but left school for financial reasons and began working. He joined the Young Czechs political party, where he met Karel Baxa, the publisher of Radikální listy, who offered him a well-paid position with the newspaper. After marrying in 1900, Jarušek moved to Brno the following year with his wife and six-month-old daughter upon an invitation from Adolf Stránský, owner of the Lidové noviny newspaper, to take up the post of office director. The culturally oriented young Jarušek attended any premiere, concert or exhibition he could. His home was decorated with works of art by Ludvík Kuba, Oldřich Blažíček, Mikoláš Aleš, Bohumír Jaroněk, Hanuš Schweiger and Bohuslav Schnirch. He also introduced his daughter Marie to the world of art. At Lidové noviny, he met and became friends with members of the editorial staff such as Arnošt Heinrich, Rudolf Těsnohlídek and Jiří Mahen. In 1906, the enterprising Jarušek opened Brno’s first gramophone and phonograph shop on Velké náměstí (today náměstí Svobody). He published the summer magazine Prázdníny (Holidays), which he modelled along American lines, with sensationalist content, polls and contests. For many years, he was head of Královo Pole’s Sokol association, from which he bought the plot of land for his apartment building on Palackého. He entrusted the project to the architect Josef Gočár. The plans for the building, most of which are signed by Gočár and dated 25 August 1909, are held in the architecture collection of the National Technical Museum in Prague. They are accompanied by photographs of the new building taken in 1910 that were published the following year in the magazines Styl and Der Architekt. The plans show that some modifications were made during building phase. The original design for black-and-white cladding on the ground floor and the oriel was only done in black (square opaxite tiles). The socle, the door frame and the polygonal pillars (circular in the plans) were done in light marble. The building’s significance stems from its use of reinforced concrete and, above all, the artistic rendering of the facade: a symmetrical composition with a distinctive cornice that is enlivened by the crystal-shaped windows on the lateral bays and the oval cellar windows with decorative grilles. The first and second floors are accentuated by an oriel with arched windows featuring the motif a ‘Renaissance’ arch and a medallion. Similar patterns can be found on the glass door to the secretary desk in the salon of Julius Grégr, for whom Gočár also designed an interior around the same time. In fact, Karel Jarušek may well have met the ambitious young architect through the Grégrs, a family of politicians and journalists associated with Národní listy. Within the context of Gočár’s work, the Jarušek House ranks alongside the stairs leading to the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Hradec Králové and the Wenke department store in Jaroměř (today the town’s museum) as one of his best works from his brief pre-Cubist period. It is also an important work of Czech architectural modernism. During the First World War, Jarušek and several of his siblings were actively involved at home and in the United States in plans for proclaiming Czechoslovak independence. After the war, he left Lidové noviny and became chairman of the board of the newly founded Lloyd-Film company. Appearing under the stage name Máňa Jensenová, in 1922 his daughter Marie played the starring role (with Karel Lamač) in the first three Czech fairy-tale films. Jarušek went on to own the Sociencal film company and also opened the small Kino Republika on Brno’s Česká Street. Due to the lack of interest in science films, however, the company went bankrupt. In the spring of 1925, the family moved to Prague, where Jarušek managed the central office of the Novina publishing company. In September 1936, the Jaruška family sold their house in Brno to Dr. Zdenek Kubeš. The rest of the family history is described in the writing of Jarušek’s oldest daughter, Marie Podešvová, who married the painter František Podešva (1893–1979) in 1926. Notably, Marie and František’s daughter – i.e., Karel Jarušek’s granddaughter – was the well-known photographer Eva Fuková (1927–2015). Fuková and her husband, the artist Vladimír Fuka (1926–1977), were successful in the United States, where they had emigrated in 1967. The writer Jiří Kratochvil, who has often written about Brno’s modern architecture, expressed his admiration for the refined beauty and sophistication of the Jarušek House in his novel Avion: ‘I raised my head and came face to face with that miracle. The Jarušek House on Palackého! (…) A wholly unique link between the classical principles of architecture and the discharge of their avant-garde. Refined simple elegance, concentrated in an extraordinarily impressive square oriel, composed of four black-framed squares, reminiscent of a domino. It’s as if Baroque and modernism had come together posthumously in paradise.’ Dagmar Černoušková