Design

Kroha started his applied art design encompassing furniture, interior, stage set designs, sculptures and pictures in the similar fashion as his house, influenced by cubism. Pictures intended for his villa were often motivated by architecture or by memories of his friends and events connected with his life. Drawing plans and paintings were immanently connected.

Several times Kroha’s designs received international awards. In 1925 he obtained a bronze medal at the Exhibit of Decorated Arts in Paris. In 1933 he got a diploma because of participating in the Fifth Triennial Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and Modern Architecture in Milan, Italy. In 1959 was awarded the gold medal at the Second Biennale in Sao Paulo for the Czechoslovak stage set design that presented Kroha’s design.

Left picture: interior crematorium - 1920, right picture: the Montmartre cabaret in Prague,CZ - 1918                 

Highlights:

“Alladin’s Lamp” was installed in the villa in 1932. The lamp had a slide projector built in. Hanging from the ceiling, the lamp projected 4 pictures on four walls and on the table with fruits or flowers. The slides Kroha selected represented the Czech modern art. This Alladin’s Lamp showed illuminated paintings as a new solution of the problem referred to as “the painting in the flat.”

Kroha´s paintings were just partly introduced.