Emil Filla

One of the most prominent Czech artists of his generation, the Cubist painter and sculptor Emil Filla also had a significant influence in shaping modern art in Czechoslovakia as an editor, an active member of the prominent Mánes Association, and a collector of non-European art.

Along with the Czech critic and collector Vincenc Kramář, who promoted Cubism through his writings and personal collection, Filla, as an artist and editor, was deeply invested in the legacy of Cubism. His paintings drew heavily on the formal innovations of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whom he met while living in Paris in the years before World War I. For research and inspiration, he assembled and maintained a large collection of reproductions of and photographs documenting Picasso’s work, some of which he likely obtained from the Galerie Kahnweiler and Léonce Rosenberg’s gallery, L’Effort Moderne. In 1909 he served as co-editor of the journal Volné směry (Free Directions), in which he promoted Cubism and published reproductions of Cubist works by Picasso, helping to disseminate news of the movement within Czechoslovakia.

Filla was involved in several influential artist’s groups during this period that were integral to a flourishing modernism in Prague. He became a member of the artist’s collective Osma (The Eight), with whom he exhibited in 1907 and 1908, and in 1911, along with the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, he formed the Skupina výtvarných umělců (Group of Visual Artists). Yet it was within his role at the Mánes Association that Filla had perhaps the most impact in shaping trends in Czech art. Originally formed by a group of art students in the late nineteenth century, the Mánes Association organized exhibitions and supported the work of its artist members. Filla joined the association in 1909 and, after a lapse in participation, took on a prominent position in 1920 as organizer of the major exhibition Poesie 1932 (Poetry 1932), held at the Mánes Gallery. This presentation of international Surrealism, among the earliest and the first in Eastern Europe, featured more than 150 examples. Filla showed his own work in the exhibition alongside other Czech artists, such as Adolf Hoffmeister, Jindřich Štyrský, and Toyen, as well as representatives of Paris Surrealism, including Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst.

Filla held the most expansive art collection of any twentieth-century Czech artist and was one of the first collectors in Czechoslovakia to acquire non-European artworks. While it is difficult to assess the full scope of his collection and to determine its fate, photographic documentation of its contents, maintained by the artist’s family and the Institute of Art History in Prague, permit a partial reconstruction. From the late 1920s Filla actively purchased art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Indigenous peoples of North America, acquiring works from other collectors and at auction. He owned, for instance, a Chinese nephrite axe from between the seventeenth and fifteenth centuries BCE, a painting by the contemporary Chinese artist Qi Bai-Shi, a set of Japanese tsubas (sword handguards), Buddhist sculpture from Thailand, Iranian ceramics, and Egyptian shabtis (burial figures). Additionally, Filla collected European works, including Renaissance bronzes and medieval statuary, as well as art by his Czech contemporaries such as Josef Lada and Bohumil Kubišta.

In 1935 Filla’s own paintings, sculptures, and graphic works were exhibited together with African and Oceanic art from the private holdings of Joe (Josef) Hloucha, a prominent Czech collector. Filla proposed the exhibition to Hloucha in late 1934 and also purchased works from him directly, reserving eight from the exhibition. Emila Filla: plastika, suché jehly, lepty, dřevoryty, litografie, oleje – Černošská a tichomořská plastika: 185 soch ze sbírek Joe Hlouchy (Emil Filla: Sculptures, Drypoints, Etchings, Woodcuts, Lithographs, Oil Paintings — African and Oceanic Sculpture: 185 Sculptures from the Collection of Joe Hloucha) opened on February 5, 1935. The exhibition catalogue featured an introduction by Kramář, which made broad comparisons between the exhibited sculptures from Africa and Oceania and those by Filla, using the language of “primitivism” to reference the artist’s use of primary and natural forms. During the Second World War, Filla was interned in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald for his anti-fascist activism; after the camp’s liberation, he returned to Czechoslovakia to teach at the Vysoká škola uměleckoprůmyslová v Praze (Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design) in Prague.