(1930) Still Life with Clarinet, Mandolin, and Tray
Emil Filla

Popis

Etching combined with aquatint, 1930, size 8,7×12,6 cm, 25,5×28 cm (with frame) signed right bottom Emil Filla 30

The highest achieved price for oil on canvas by Emil Filla on the Czech auction market: 19.5 million CZK, Adolf Loos Apartment and Gallery, Prague, 2010
The highest achieved price for oil on canvas by Emil Filla on the world auction market: 588 thousand €, Sotheby’s, 2011

Emil Filla occupied himself with graphics – with breaks – for his whole life. He created over 170 folios, on which we can illustratively document his artistic evolution with all the transformations from strictly cubistic compositions to the after war folk songs.

Still Life with Clarinet, Mandolin and Tray belongs, together with Still Life with Tray, Glass, Pipe and Grapes and Still Life with Bottle of Cognac, Glass and Tray with Pear (1930), among three most intimate Filla´s “night still lives”, reflecting in cubistic composition his mania for the night.

If we want to read these quite small still lives (Filla´s smallest ones), we must put our eyes to the close proximity to them and to shorten the physical distance that is between us and the image. And, suddenly, we can see and experience something that we never experience at big monumental paintings. The distance between us and the image ceases to exist totally and we can enter by our soul into the image like to a dark universal space that consumes us completely and shuts itself after us.

Even though the Still Life with Clarinet, Mandolin, and Tray is very small by size, we find in it things of great style, modest, even ascetic contours, which are nevertheless completely consumed by the night. Like with Rembrandt, the black darkness is the cosmic foundation of outer existence. Clarinet, mandolin and the tray shine through by their own cold light of matter from the dark northern night. Filla can give us through a small image his vision that the darkness of night has the same variety, span and the same, if not greater, wealth of nuances as the light of the day. He suggests that during the night, all things are more communicative, that the night provides us with greater reconciliation, greater peace and rest.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, pages: 38, 260 and 282.

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