(1935) Still LIfe with Glass and Medlar – original graphical sheet bound into bibliophilia no. 28
Emil Filla

Popis

Etching combined with aquatint, 1935, 23 cm x 17,8 cm, Denoted left bottom E. F. 35 in oval
Signed right bottom: Emil Filla

The all-time high price for oil by Emil Filla in Czech auctions – 19,5 million CZK, Adolf Loos Apartment and Gallery, Prague, 2010
The all-time high price for oil by Emil Filla in the world auctions – 588 thousand €, Sotheby’s, 2011

Emil Filla created and developed a graphic cubistic still life as a whole, individual, specific in style, and richly advanced category, which is a unique and exceptional phenomenon not only in the history of the Czech graphics but also in the history of the European graphics. Throughout his life, he engraved and etched altogether 64 individual graphic folios with the motif of a still life.

In Filla´s graphic still lives from the years 1930-1936 is the whole space of the picture unified into one pure flat structure. The whole space of this still life 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 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

The Still Life with Glass and Medlar belongs to the peak period of Filla´s graphic still lives, in which Filla liked to depict things of natural organic shapes. Here it is the medlar, which has a rough, even serrated surface, and the organic arch is cut open so that the juicy dark pulp is visible – in which the white ripe seeds glisten like gems, the foundation of future vegetation. Next to the fruit, a little glass of cone shape stands. This still life is thus dominated by two different, heterogeneous orders, that are in logical agreement: nature remade, newly made by the human, and the nature given to humans, grown up in itself, organic.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, pages: 31, 36-37, 270

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