A Portrait of a Young Man
Framed: 33 1/2 × 29 3/4 in. (85.1 × 75.6 cm)
The beginnings of Czech Cubist painting and sculpture are inextricably linked with Emil Filla. Filla had travelled extensively before joining other young artists to found the vanguard Group of Eight (Osma), which shared an aesthetic ideology with the French Fauves and had direct ties to The Bridge (Die Brücke) group of German Expressionists.
Visiting Paris regularly, Filla turned to a Cubist manner in 1910. The following year he co-founded the Group of Fine Artists (Skupina výtvarných umĕlců), which formed the center of Czech Cubist activity in Prague. In 1914 he moved to Paris, where he met both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, but left for the Netherlands when World War I broke out.
Filla’s greatest contribution to Czech modernist art before World War I was his ability to elaborate in a highly inventive way the poetics of French Cubism. This painting exemplifies Filla’s mixing the geometrics and earth-toned palette of French Analytic Cubism with expressly brushed surfaces and curvilinear arabesques.
![Head with Pipe (Self-Portrait) (Kopf mit Pfeiffer [Selbstbildnis])](/internal/media/dispatcher/38971/thumbnail)
