Abstract
This article outlines an "anti-ornamental" inclination of Czech artistic avant-garde as present in the literary, visual and architectonic works of art as well as in criticism, especially in the 1920s. This tendency is linked with purism and constructivism.
The emphasis is put not only on analyzing declarations and manifests (by Aldolf Loos, Kazimir Malevich, Karel Teige), where the effort to eliminate the ornament is most obvious, but also on the interpretation of modernist ornament which stands for a restrained but still present figure, and proves an impossible avant-garde project of destrucion of art.