Head of a woman

Emil Filla was a versatile painter, graphic artist and sculptor at the epicentre of the Czech avant-garde. It is thanks to Filla’s innovation and influence that Prague earned the position of the second most important centre for Cubism after Paris. Initially a member of the Osma group (“The Eight”), a group which bore many similarities with the German Expressionist group Die Brücke, Filla joined the Mánes Union of Fine Arts in 1909, which he later left and then re-joined in 1920. Two years later co-founded the Group of Fine Artists, an association of Czech artists and intellectuals within the field of Cubism. Filla’s purist interpretation of Cubism, which was so heavily influenced by the work of Picasso, was to become the hallmark style of the group.

Chropyně, Czechia