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

Emil Filla was the great pioneer of the Czech cubism already during his study at the Academy, where, at the beginning of the 20th century, totally conservative schooling prevailed. Therefore, Filla had not even completed his studies and started to examine, in a diligent, even art-historian way, the theory and practice of the fast-developing painting art on the West. He sensed the new era of the modern art and he started his own journey to freedom of the expression in painting and he became literally the star of the new Czech art of the 20th century.

Already in the 1930s, he occupied himself in his work with the topic of animal fights, which were the metaphors of the historical war conflicts, but also of the personal creative and mental fights. Filla recorded in his notes that his mission is to achieve an individualistic expression, the manifestation of which is the form in Barbaric nakedness. The painter, throughout his life, even gathered a large archive of various materials, primarily the photographs of art starting from the ancient times. There were many historical pictures of various fights and struggles in his collection, including Picasso´s drawings from the illustrations of Metamorphoses by Ovid, but also for instance the photographs of Romanesque reliefs depicting the fight of an archangel with a dragon, and many confrontations of a bull and a horse, a bull and a man, a lion and a man, a lion and a horse. The motif of struggle and fight was personal to him and therefore he focused on it also in his private collection of photographs, from which he drew the inspiration.
The fight of a man with a bull is also repeated in Filla´s work. Metaphorically, it is the interpretation of the fight with the Cretan bull, which played a significant role in the Cretan religious cult, and appears in many forms in the history of Art. The graphic depicts the figure of a naked man, who kneels under the weight of a defeated bull lying on his shoulders. The face of the man on the graphic has sharp features, typical for the cubistic sculptures – as if it was drawn after the statue of Rodin; next, oversized extremities resemble Picasso´s stylization.
The graphic is one on the first fifty prints, in the end, there were 306 pieces, this is why it belongs to the most valuable and requested ones.
“Filla … is a beautiful example of the seeker for innovative ways, the pioneer yesterday, a mature fine-artist and the creator of a certain typical view on life and the world today.” F.X.Šalda wrote about him and one hundred years later we can only agree with him.
Always, when Filla´s work appears in the auction, the records in the price for sold picture grow up. However, Filla´s artwork is valued not only in the Czech Republic, but there is a great interest in it also in the world auctions.

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 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 went through his „HEADS “ by his fingers first, felt them from every side and created them as statues at first (for instance Head I., 1913 and Head II., 1914). What is special about them is that they are built as big, free, and closed three-dimensional statues, which were nevertheless created from building stones that were obtained from simultaneous views in movement around all sides of a real head.

On the contrary, the graphic folio Head of a Man from the year 1935 represents a maverick organic shape, it is a phantasy of an erotic organism, which contains in itself the phallic element (the nose) and the vaginal element (the open mouth). The drawing is characterized by the linearity emphasized to the maximum “by one draw”, typical for the graphics of figures and heads of Filla´s latter period.

Bibliography:
Čestmír Berka: Emil Filla, grafické dílo, Odeon 1968, pages: 23, 269.
Vojtěch Lahoda: Emil Filla, Academia Praha 2007, pages 455-456.

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

By the beginning of 1930s, Filla starts to show in his creation the erotica and hungry sexuality much more openly, in the shape of the gigantic women. Filla´s “monster women” create the impression of an evolution anomaly, however, in the same time, they symbolize the fruitful massiveness of the Mother Earth, that is based on the male and female principles. “Mother Earth” is the foundation and the source of existence – without her, there is no life.
This period of Filla´s creation is also characterized by the accurate term „monster Titanism” where the carnality that is experienced by the senses and expressed by a fantasy form changes into shapes of fully self-sufficient plastic, which, by its erotic content attain – under the influence of surrealism – the fantastic emotionality of prehistorically primitive idols and imaginations. The pictures of women in oversized proportions, based on anatomic deformations speak – they are telling us that this is a figure, but from a strange world of modern mythology.
Woman in Armchair is monster-like, ugly and primitive. Suddenly, she emerged from the depths of the Earth and decide to sit down in our living room on the armchair. Absolutely shamelessly, she scratches her naked breast by one of her hands, and at the same time, paradoxically, she covers her gaping mouth by the other hand. The fat legs, in spite of their gigantic proportions, can´t hide the clearly contoured lap of this woman. The whole body of this female giant from the tribe of Titans, is melting on the armchair that hardly contains her. She is a woman from a different world, from the world before and after the human existence, and this is why she is special.
Bibliography:
Vojtěch Lahoda: Emil Filla, Academia Praha 2007, page. 348.