(1935) Woman in Armchair I. original graphical sheet bound into bibliophilia no. 28
Emil Filla

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Emil Filla
Woman in Armchair
(1935)

Denoted left bottom: E. F. v závorce
Signed right bottom: Emil Filla
Etching combined with aquatint
23,2 cm x 16,8 cm

Since the years 1930 – 1936, Filla paints, engraves and in statues portrays his women. The ancestors and in the same time the inseparable guides of the great cubistic cycle of “women” that comes from this period are the traditionalistic, empirically-realistic drawings of the 1930s, engraved by a sharp point of a steel pen. Compared to these, the cubistic Filla´s women are flesh and blood, they have the monumental proportions of giants and they do not conform to our routine conception of beauty.

On Woman in Armchair with one hand folded back behind her head, Filla intersects and connects the members of the body in natural micro and macro dimensions. As if our perception point was moving around the very rounded surface of Earth and as if we could touch just the tiptoes of the monstrous woman. We look up to the vertex of her head – towering like the high mountains behind which the sun sets.
Maybe only an erotic experience can throw us – even today – to the grip of prehistoric forces. They transcendent us in time and space. They throw us like the wave of a stormy sea, and we seek the hiding place in the shelter of the body of this woman – somewhere in her little crinkle or the corner of her eye.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, pages 56, 269 and 280.

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