(1935) Still Life with Flowers and Fruit – original graphical sheet bound into bibliophilia no. 28
Emil Filla

Popis

Drypoint with aquatint, 1935, Paper 12 x 18 cm, Signed left bottom: Emil Filla 35

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

About the year 1935, a close adhesion of Filla´s graphics to his painting occurred, which manifested by more and more frequent graphic replicas of his paintings. The close adhesion of the graphics to the painting enabled also a closer and more intimate relation to the optic, sensual realness connected with Filla´s departure from the abstracting tendency, which, besides other things, opened the gates not only to aquatints but to lithographs also.

To Filla´s still lives, again a tender, sensitive poetic penetrates – this time of the dawn, capturing the depicted objects in the morning break of the day. The shapes of the objects are created by soft contours of pure white spaces with light aquatint shadows shining through. This still life is “painted” like some luminous Japanese ink drawings full of light. The engraved line only somewhere circles around the contour of a flower or a fruit by its edge, emphasizes the border between the light and the shadow, and disappears.

The centre of the composition of the Still Life with the Flowers and Fruits is created by a bunch of grapes and an apple. This fruit is complemented by a dark rose and a bouquet consisting of carnations, asters and summer flowers. The apple is traditionally considered to be the symbol of fruitfulness, the grapevine symbolizes, according to the biblical language custom, not only the blessing but also the curse, it can be the expression of peace just as the omen of the judgment in the same way. The rose, for its most common red colour, is the ancient symbol of love.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, pages:43-44, 270.

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