Emil Filla

Galerie Mary Šnoblové, Prague (Mary Šnoblové organised an exhibition of works by the Osma group, including works by Emil Filla, in 1937)

Original canvas. There are some minor very thin vertical lines of craquelure notably in the light grey pigments above the bowl and in some of the thicker white pigments, and some minor scattered spots of paint flaking at the extreme edges, primarily the lower part of the left edge. Ultraviolet light reveals no visible signs of retouching. This painting is in good original condition. Presented in a modern frame, the edges of the canvas visible.
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Emil Filla was at the epicentre of the avant-garde in Bohemia, and it is predominantly as a result of his impact that Prague has come to be recognised as the second most important centre for Cubism after Paris.

Following extensive travels across the continent, he pioneered an idiosyncratic Czech national style at the confluence of European modern art movements. This so-called ‘Cubo-Expressionism’ synthesised the troubled spiritual atmosphere of central Europe, as exemplified by Edvard Munch and the Die Brücke artists, with the pictorial structure of the Paris Cubists. It soon became the hallmark of the group Osma (the Eight) and the Group of Fine Artists, co-founded by Filla in 1911.

By the end of the 1920s, Filla had joined the S.V.U. Mánes group and was adopting a more orthodox Cubist technique to deconstruct the surrounding world, evident in Still life with Fruit and Flowers. In such works, the artist moves away from the metaphysical and focuses on expressing his affinity for the concrete and physical realm. This was indebted to the influence of El Greco, whose transcendental works were very much grounded in the real, as well as that of seventeenth-century still life masters, studied by Filla whilst residing in the Netherlands during World War I and regarded by the artist as having ‘the blessed virtue of not disdaining small everyday things… they have been able to find all the wisdom, nobility and beauty of the universe in the objects which surrounded them.’

The present work retains the essence of these seventeenth-century still lifes, yet viewed stylistically through the lens of the synthetic Cubism of Picasso, Braque and Gris, who Filla had befriended during visits to Paris from 1910-1912.