Still Life with Book (Jack London, "Son of the Wolf")

The canvas is dated 1921, three years after Austria-Hungary broke apart and the painter's native Moravia became part of the new Czechoslovakia. Everything in this still life sits inside a circle: a sheet of music with a treble clef, a glass, a band of turquoise, and a book lettered in capitals, BÍLÝ TESÁK. That is the Czech title of White Fang, Jack London's novel about a wolf-dog, although the picture's title names another of London's books, Son of the Wolf.

Filla worked his name and the year into the painted scene itself, low down, as Emil Filla 21. In 2018 the Belvedere hung the picture in an exhibition on art in Central Europe between 1918 and 1938, much of it from the states that took the old monarchy's place.