The original House of Artists, the Kaiser Franz Josef-Jubiläums-Künstlerhaus, was built in 1911 according to plans by the Viennese architect Heinrich Karl Ried. Ried’s design was selected by an expert jury whose members included the eminent architects Otto Wagner and Friedrich Ohmann. The facade of the symmetrical building with a rounded avant-corps was richly decorated with stucco floral motifs. The columns by the entrance were a loose reference to the neighbouring theatre building. While the interior exhibition spaces were designed in a distinctly modern manner, with plentiful natural light flowing into the upper halls through the glass roofs, the exterior facade was conservative in nature. Its sculptural decoration was very much influenced by the era’s strong cult of the sanctification of art, which, ‘on the wings of the imagination, detaches itself from all that is earthly and soars into the realm of the ideal.’ A four-metre-high statue of Wieland, the master blacksmith of Germanic mythology, stood on the roof of the avant-corps, guarded by nine centaurs possibly symbolizing the forces of barbarism. This sculptural decoration was the work of Carl Wollek.
The House of Arts was severely damaged by bombing during the Second World War, and its post-war renovation was undertaken by Bohuslav Fuchs in 1946. Above all, Fuchs cleared the facade of its decorative ornamentation and replaced the originally rounded avant-corps with a cube-like mass while largely preserving the building’s internal structure. Initially, Fuchs had envisaged the use of relief decoration on the facade, but this idea was never realized. He apparently also considered collaborating with Vincenc Makovský, whose sculptural work eventually adorned the building’s facade (though not as a relief), where it can still be seen today.
Originally, a sculpture by Franta Úprka entitled Poutníci (Pilgrims) stood on the steps in front of the House of Arts, later joined by a bust of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk by Vincenc Makovský. Both works were removed in 1948 (Poutníci is now located in front of the Zeman Café), and Makovský received a new commission for a bust of Soviet military commander Rodion Malinovsky. Reportedly, he fashioned Marshal Malinovsky’s likeness from a newspaper photograph. Shortly before the Velvet Revolution in 1989, another work by Makovsky, Žena se snopem (Woman with a Sheaf), was placed on a newly built cascading fountain that never went into operation. The current appearance of the House of Arts is the result of Bohuslav Fuchs’s post-war renovation, which was respected during the building’s most recent renovation in 2008–2009 (Markéta Hrůšová, Petr Hrůša and Architekti Hrůša).
Jana Vránová