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

Popis

Etching, 1935, 22,6 cm x 16,8 cm, 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

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.

Filla especially likes to depict naked women, who read or sleep; both in vertical and horizontal positions. His giant sleeping women are as if enchanted into immobility by the fine-art law. The thing is; the peaceful shapes of giant sizes, volumes, and contours, appear fuller and more compelling than small shapes in movement. These modern successors of Michelangelo´s “Night” are created to sleep, to give us by their big shapes of Titans the sense compelling and sad poetry of the shapes of the living matter.
The woman sleeping and sitting in the armchair holds her head with the gaping mouth up by her right hand. The knees are pressed together by her left hand, and the giant feet are twisted to such extent, that the toes of her monster feet are touching each other.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, pages: 45, 59-60,269

Další informace