quarters of the town, but he manifested so great an idealism that this part of his work remains the most important of his career.
Echoes of the great battle then raging in European architecture began to reach even Bohemia. Those who looked upon the decorative side as essential to architecture, encouraged by the School of Decorative Arts, still thought that a slight reform would suffice. They began to tinge their conventional structures, still conceived in the old spirit, with a surface addition of “modern style,” by clothing them with a rich impressionist decoration, furnished principally by the ornamental sculptor, Celda Klouček. Under the hand of this virtuoso in clay, a copious efflorescence of ornaments began to overspread the houses of Prague. Here Klouček reproduced Nature only in very general features, and mingled with these plant-forms the human figure in all the crudity of his studio naturalism. Thanks to these devices, the crisis was only aggravated, and the younger men who were now coming on the scene speedily realized that this universal chaos could be ended only by a thorough-going operation or even by a revolution.
Josef Fanta, who with the School of Decorative Arts and Koula, represented in 1900 “Czech Decorative Art” at the Paris Universal Exhibition, may be regarded as the typical architect of this stage of crisis. Trained by Zítek, he followed in his youth his master’s ideals, then passed through a “Czech Renaissance” phase and finally based his principal work, the Wilson Station in Prague, on a compromise between the old and the new. In this work, the first of its kind to be entrusted to a Czech artist, he took over the new forms ready-made, without any effort to create, and he let it be clearly seen that he had no intention of joining the younger band of enthusiasts. Moreover, his taste for the picturesque was the governing factor in all his architectural conceptions. This clever designer of sgraffiti and
