Photographer and Painter:
Josef Sudek and the Mystery of the Image

At some point in the 1920s, the photographer Josef Sudek met
the Cubist painter Emil Filla (1889 –1953). A commission for a reproduction photograph of a sculpture by Auguste Rodin for the magazine Volné směry, on whose editorial board Filla worked at the time, triggered a complex collaboration between photographer and painter, culminating in Sudek becoming Filla’s go-to photographer. What is more interesting is Filla’s role in this working friendship. Filla did not restrict himself to commissioning Sudek to make reproductions of works by various artists for Volné směry magazine, nor did he simply ask him to document his own paintings, drawings, sculptures or personal archive: he simultaneously introduced Sudek into various aspects of the history of art. It was a sort of selective initiation into a variety of phenomena from the history of art that Filla was preoccupied with at the time. My contribution will therefore focus on selected fields of Filla’s interest and the ways in which these might have found resonance in Sudek’s own work. As we know, Filla would explain to Sudek some questions from the history of art, and painting in particular. In this respect, Sudek regarded Filla as a mentor, who helped open the way for him to discover the mystery of the image. The themes which I regard as parallel in both Filla’s concept of the history of art and within Sudek’s oeuvre include still life painting, 17th century Dutch painting, Caravaggio, Josef Navrátil and Cubism.