Glass, Bottle and Rolled-up Newspaper

The painting Glass, Bottle and Rolled-up Newspaper is an exceptionally compelling testament to Emil Filla’s work in the period immediately preceding the First World War. On a broad canvas, the artist developed a still life in which familiar objects are transformed into an arrangement of planes, lines and traces of material. The rolled-up newspaper in the lower left corner, the glass and the bottle gradually emerge as the viewer looks at the painting, only for their forms to merge almost immediately with the surrounding planes. Among the ochre, grey and black tones, a warmer pink comes through, while the heavily applied paint is set against light charcoal drawing and areas where the bare canvas remains exposed. Filla invited the viewer to discover both the objects themselves and the process by which the painting takes shape.

The canvas was very probably painted in Prague before Filla left for Paris in the summer of 1914, where he was caught up in the outbreak of war. The painting’s Prague origin is established not only by its artistic character: in his own entry in the catalogue of his jubilee exhibition at Mánes in 1932, the artist identified it as ‘Praha 1914’ (‘Prague 1914’). The work thus belongs to the final pre-war phase of his career, when he engaged with Picasso’s Cubism with particular intensity. Its composition, the playful alternation between different viewpoints of the objects, and the way real things are transformed into pictorial signs all stem from this Parisian influence. At the same time, the painting does not yet display the more tightly unified, at times almost monochromatic approach that emerged in some of Filla’s still lifes created during his subsequent stay in the Netherlands.

The variety of painterly techniques is particularly striking. Filla juxtaposed smooth and roughened surfaces, incorporated sand into the paint, imitated the grain of wood, and transformed the chequerboard pattern in the right-hand part of the painting into a prominent geometric element. He also incorporated a fragment of lettering, ‘EXP’. Writing, a favoured motif of Pablo Picasso and other Cubists, serves here not merely to convey information, but as a shape and rhythmic accent evoking the world of newspapers, advertisements and everyday printed matter entering modern painting. In this respect, the right half of the canvas is particularly noteworthy, as painting gives way to drawing over much of this area, leaving the visible weave of the support exposed.

The significance of the work is underscored not only by its inclusion in Filla’s jubilee exhibition in 1932 (Jubilejní výstava díla Emila Filly, SVU Mánes, Prague, May 1932, cat. No. 50) and its reproduction in the artist’s first monograph by František Venera (Dílo Emila Filly, Brno, 1936, fig. XXI), but also by its provenance from an important collection of the First Czechoslovak Republic period, belonging to Filla’s friend, the renowned art founder Karel Barták. The painting retains its original period mounting. A Mánes stamp is present on the reverse, while the stretcher bears the artist’s inscription in red pencil, ‘F 46’. A photograph of the work by Josef Sudek is publicly available at sudekproject.cz/s15157b. Its authenticity has been verified by the Filla Foundation, and the painting is included in the foundation’s online catalogue raisonné. The work was assessed during consultations with Prof. J. Zemina and PhDr. K. Srp. An expert opinion by Mgr. T. Mátl Donné is attached.