COURAGE

connecting collections

Emil Filla was a Czech cubist painter, graphic designer and sculptor. He was influenced by the work of Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. He was a member of the Osm (Eight) group, who he exhibited with in 1907 and 1908. From 1909 he was a member of the Mánes Association of Artists. Before the First World War he travelled to Paris and spent the war in the Netherlands. During the interwar period he was one of the most important representatives of the Czechoslovak avant-garde. He spent the Second World War in German concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald. After the Second World War he worked as a lecturer at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague.

Olivija Fištrović was born in the village of Reka near Koprivnica in 1931. She is the daughter of Ustasha soldier Stjepan Fištrović, who, along with his son, left Croatia and settled in Peru at the end of World War II. Olivija remained with her mother in their homeland. She studied medicine, and occasionally worked for a publishing company. After receiving permission to visit a book fair in Greece on the behalf of the publishing company, she legally left Yugoslavia in the mid-1950s. For several years she lived with her father and brother in Peru, and then went to the United States and settled in Chicago, where she still lives today. She has been variously employed in her life, among other things as a librarian at the St. Mary Hospital, developing a love for books that is best reflected in her library, most of which she donated to the Fran Galović Library and Reading Room in Koprivnica.