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

The motif of a woman holding a boxer puppy on her lap was used by Filla in total on three graphic folios. These women in their shape and space layout foundation and in the layout and contours of the matter come out of the basic type of Madonna of Mercy, representing Beautiful Madonna Style of the Bohemian Gothic.
The closed flat shape, later concave relief, closed plastic pyramidal contour, its release form the outer environment and space and its print on the absolute abstract surface, is really similar to the Beautiful Bohemian Gothic Madonna. Only, Filla´s Madonna full of tenderness and mercy images have, instead of the golden background, the white background, and on their lap, they tenderly hold a little boxer puppy instead of a little Jesus.
Filla deposited into this woman with a dog on her lap all his pantheistic love to an animal – the dog. To this dog, during the six years of imprisonment in the concentration camp, Filla spoke long lonely monologues about the Man, about the fate of men, about the fathomless measure of humiliation and inhuman suffering that can be caused to the man and to the animal by a human being only. Graphics of these „dog Madonnas“ carry in themselves as the omen of the evil times a new graphic order, where the linear style is replaced by the plastic form. The contour line does not abstractly highlight the whole inner volume anymore. This volume is now painted with phenomenon completeness of the painting tools of aquatint. At the same time, the painter’s picture of shape is replaced by the purely sculptural picture, where the extremely concave shape is in the true meaning of this word carved into the metal desk by the point of the slate-pencil as if it was the sculptor´s pickaxe. This sculptural style will soon be elaborated in the cycle “Fights and struggles”.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, pages: 60-61, 280.

22,8 cm x 17 cm

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.

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

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.

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.