42EmilFilla1882 – 1953Still life with mandolin and bowl of fruit, 1930
Still life with mandolin and bowl of fruit, 1930
Created
1930
Technique
Ink, charcoal, white, paper, mount, frame, glass
Dimensions
in the cutout 25,5 × 37,5 cm
Signature
sign. in pencil RD Emil Filla 30
Short item description
Authenticity confirmed by PhDr. Rea Michalová, Ph.D.
After disagreements with older members of the SVU Mánes (of which he had been a member since 1909), he became a determining author
and co-founder of a new avant-garde association, the
Group of Visual Artists. His reading was
respectable, he edited the magazine Volné směry and the edition
Prameny. In the years 1914–1919 he lived in Holland, where
he participated in resistance activities. He met van
Doesburg and Mondrian, with whom he collaborated
on the publication of the first issue of their magazine De Stijl. In the
twenties and thirties he was significantly involved
in the SVU Mánes. His work developed the principles of Cubism,
and after the exhibition Poetry in 1932 he was also open to surrealist,
libidorous inspiration. During the occupation, his style again became expressive, emphasized by deformations of form. He worked on the series Fights and Struggles, which reflected his feelings of anxiety and terror at the threat to his homeland. During the war, he was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
After returning home, when he had recovered, he returned to sensual Cubist Expressionism. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he created large paintings based on Slavic folk songs and, under the influence of Chinese ink painting, created a cycle of landscape paintings of the Czech Central Highlands. Although Filla closely followed the leading example of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from 1910, due to his exceptional talent he was able to modify Cubist principles in his own way on home soil. He went through a remarkable development from analytical and synthetic Cubism through lyrical Cubism, to subsequently cultivate forms returning to expressive abbreviation associated with Cubist deformation. The completely dominant subject on which Filla verified and confirmed his artistic research and theories was the still life. The surface of the painting became a kind of stage for him,
on which he followed the stories of various objects.
He built a universe of "beautiful things" as part of
the new cubist order, part of the sophisticated
"architecture" of pictorial space.
The presented work "Still Life with Mandolin and Bowl of Fruit" can be described as one of the quality finalizations of Filla's famous cycle of so-called white still lifes, still lifes brilliantly played out in painting, based on the "taste" and quality of color (with dominant shades of white). The shapes became more organic, the use of color took on a more immediate and sensual character. The intensity of the painterly gesture increased. Filla became one of the main representatives of lyrical cubism, which, with its refined artistic composition, fit perfectly into the context of hedonism, celebrating the beauty of life in the second half of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. The assessed work "Still Life with Mandolin and Bowl of Fruit" is a beautiful example of the spontaneity of Filla's drawing hand. The ink, gouache or charcoal line is sovereign, dense and generous. As it unfolds, it models the individual shapes of the bearers of hedonistic pleasures (auditory and gustatory) in the environment of the home table, converts them into planar plans and combines them into an internally interconnected optical whole. Intentionally admitted graphic details, whether in the form of hatching or stippling, are combined here with smooth gouache surfaces, framed by a more or less distinct ink or angular line.
This still life, created at the peak of the painter's creative and vital forces (in two years he celebrated his jubilee with a group exhibition at the SVU Mánes in Prague and participated in the proto-surrealist exhibition Poetry 1932), is a beautiful testament to Filla's extraordinary creative potency, which was able to extract maximum expressive power from the black-and-white contrast and unerringly guided line. The presented work "Still Life with Mandolin and Bowl of Fruit" is an original, highly synthetic cubist work, classified in the famous series of so-called white still lifes, by Emil Filla, a leading figure of the Czech avant-garde and one of the legends of our modern art. His personality is marked by a number of characteristics and attributes that create a contradictory image of the author: a humanist for whom a work of art was a means of achieving absolute freedom, but also an authoritative personality who fiercely asserted his human and artistic convictions. This duality embodies the strife of a colossal figure who had a far-reaching significance for the development of Czech modern art.
Emil Filla had the gift of creating with ease like few other Czech painters. It is significant that he put this ease at the service of the artistic law and order, which was Cubism. Emil Filla was born on April 4, 1882 in Chropyň. In 1903-1906 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with professors František Thiele and Vlaho Bukovac, where he met B. Feigel, B. Kubišta, V. Beneš and A. Procházka and together with them initiated the formation of the group "Osma" (exhibitions in 1907 and 1908). His painting "The Reader of Dostoevsky", influenced by E. Munch, was understood as the painting credo of an entire generation.
PhDr. Rea Michalová, Ph.D. Art historian and curator
