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

Popis

Etching combined with aquatint, 1935, 16,7 cm x 16 cm, Denoted right bottom E. F. in circle
Signed right bottom: Emil Filla

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

Filla´s still lives and all his cubism excite and captivate us by his nonviolent and natural merging and harmonic unifying the abstraction of the space to one flat structure on one hand, and how – on the other hand – he could in this abstract space structure give things exceptional intensity of their specific existence – their matter-of-factness.
In the graphic still lives from the years 1930-1936, the whole space of the image is unified into one clear flat structure, which is substantiated in a matter-of-fact way by the desk of the table, visible from the direct perspective. The desk of the table firmly frames and closes the emptiness of the illusive and infinite space that disappears into the infinity. The perception that remotes individual things from existence now takes a much wider radius of reality – it captures the grouping of more things lying on the table in the environment of the room. The things on the table, as whole objects are interpreted by the painter from the point of view of their individual specific features and attributes, which the artist could perceive thanks to his highly active creative and aesthetic relation to the world.

A strange charm and enchantment with the graphic “drawing” still life with its clear, discreet aquatint shadows, with simple shadowed spaces, the Still Life with Fruit and Fish gives us. From the left corner of the table, a big bowl stands on a high leg, full of the fruit of various organic shapes, and it occupies almost the whole height of the image. The tray with the fish and a bunch of grapes is spread out around almost the whole width of the table. The objects that are depicted on the table, of which parts of the legs are visible this time, take the whole space of the image and thus they absorb the spectator completely. The space contracts and focuses into immanent space and into the shape of the thing itself. The whole space of the image and the outer space – the space outside of the things – are only sporadically indicated, so that nothing distracts our attention from the imperative existence of the things.

And in the radiant sunshine, somewhere from the depths of being of all things, a hardly understandable, mysterious and irresistible sadness, a sombre melancholy springs.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, str.: 36,41-42, 270.

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