of overloaded interiors was scarcely capable of investing his creations with nobility and strength.
Near the close of the century, Friedrich Ohmann, a teacher at the School of Decorative Arts, Polish by birth and Austrian by naturalization, hastened the end of the crisis by a decisive thrust. Of a lively temperament, but a thorough artist, he demonstrated, by his unscrupulous perversion of historic styles, his ingenious re-casting of their various features in his own mould, and by his boldness in the invention of decorative motifs hitherto unknown, that the supremacy of archaic styles was on the wane, and that a new order was already forming here and there out of the general chaos. Ohmann did but little building in Bohemia, but his imagination, which found an abundant outlet on paper, delighted the younger men, and above all, his pupils. Remarkably skilful in adapting his art to the genius loci, he renovated the Prague Baroque at his will. He saturated his mind with its local colour, re-handled its elements in accordance with the demands of the new sensitiveness to impressions, and covered the old forms with the quivering tracery of his modern decoration, often called at the time by the name of “secession style.” The fulness and luxuriance of his plastic ornamentation of façades and interiors, his use of every kind of material, metal, wood, glass and porcelain, in order to strengthen the general effect, as well as a cheerful and discreet colouring, won him warm approval from Praguers when he decorated the interiors of the Industrial Exhibition of 1891, built the Central Hotel in co-operation with his pupils Bendelmayer and Dryák, and above all, when he improvised the dazzling ornamentation of the auditorium at the Theatre of Varieties. His pupils disseminated his art in the provinces, and the “Secession” began to be a serious rival to official architecture. This decade, marked by the nervousness and tension of a transitional period, during which Ohmann played the part of
