Chapters of the Exhibition

In 1922, after a short period of studies at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, Marie Čermínová meets the painter Jindřich Štyrský on Korčula Island, Dalmatia. Štyrský would be her artistic partner and friend until his death in 1942. In 1923 the two join the avant-garde movement Devětsil, which also includes poets, designers and architects. At the Bazaar of Modern Art she presents abstract paintings, some of them in the Constructivist mode, and uses the name Toyen for the first time.

In late 1924, Toyen sets out for a trip of several months around France, which she depicts in detail in a sketchbook. Her exhilarating experiences utterly change her artistic style, and she begins to capture the street, circus, and folk entertainment in a poetic »naive« style reminiscent of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), with humorous and erotic undertones typical of her art.

In the autumn of 1925, Štyrský and Toyen leave for Paris for three years. Rather than following the local artistic movements, they create their own – Artificialism – whose basic postulate was the »painter’s identification with the poet«. In a published manifesto, they distance themselves theoretically from Cubism, abstraction and Surrealism and stress the role of poetry. In fact, however, their style was a synthesis of the two latest trends on the art scene – non-figurative painting and Surrealism. They definitely know the inventions by Paul Klee or Max Ernst. In order to let »souvenirs of memories« emerge in the picture, their œuvres from 1926 onwards manifest an unparalleled freedom in painting technique. Inventive in her use of stencils and airbrush guns, and in the use of colour spaces and layers – some of them thickened with sand – as well as in the structuring of surfaces with a palette knife, Toyen creates pictures of great sensual presence. On the occasion of an exhibition of Artificialist paintings in a Parisian gallery in 1927, the poet Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) remarks on a new and disturbing depth in her work.

In the early 1930s, Toyen began to explore the theme of the night as a place of dreams, the unconscious and eroticism. Seductive and disturbing motifs seem to “emerge” from the impasto structures of the Artificialist paintings as if from a primeval ground. Shapes resembling shells, flowers or corals float across the paintings as if through underwater worlds. The inclusion of (marine) plants and fruits may have been inspired by Toyen’s encounter with the Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814) »pansexual« concept of nature, which glorified its overabundance and saw the world as permeated with excitement.

These canvases, which can be regarded as heralds of Surrealism, were presented at the international exhibition Poesie 1932 in Prague next to works by Paris Surrealists like Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. For the Czech avant-garde, this first group exhibition was a significant milestone on their path towards the adoption of Surrealism.

In March 1934, the first Czechoslovak Surrealist Group is formed. Toyen is a founding member and takes part in their first exhibition in 1935. Alongside Jindřich Štyrský and the sculptor Vincenc Makovský (1900-1906), she presents 24 paintings (see film). All created in 1934, an enormously productive year for her, they reveal an essential trans­formation in her œuvre. Objects and bodies emerge from the lake-like landscapes, which now themselves seem rocky and fissured. Deep cracks suggest processes of decay and transition; the (mostly female) human body mineralises, becoming an empty shell. With the Surrealists’ focus on the unconscious, on man’s hidden passions, the conventional depiction of the exterior is questioned. The emptying of the human bodily form allows larvae, or spectres to emerge. In depicting fragile forms and pictorial grounds, Toyen ultimately sets them in an ambivalent relationship to each other, confounding the viewer’s perception.

Toyen lends many of the forms she conceives in the mid-1930s a volume that has a seductively tactile quality, and yet they seem empty inside. Hidden beneath the surface is something uncanny. The artist seeks to capture apparent paradoxes in her images: How can the presentation of a mere shell suggest what is concealed, how can a picture hint at what is absent? Such thinking in analogies is linked with a faculty for recognising one thing in another and transforming what is seemingly familiar: Toyen thus pushes commonly accepted boundaries.

The historical, personal and conceptual context for her pictorial investigations can be found in Surrealist art in Prague as well as Paris. Salvador Dalí in particular emphasises in his works and theories the suggestive power of what is hidden and a kind of seeing that is activated through phantom-like forms. Yves Tanguy’s œuvre likewise reveals a whole spectrum of ongoing processes of change.

In the late 1930s, Toyen addresses in images that presage the horrors of the coming war how such an imaginative, animated gaze can become numb and frozen.

Erotic themes run like a thread through Toyen’s entire œuvre, from her earliest works to her late career. At the age of 20, she already painted a brothel scene titled
Pillow in which a multitude of small couples frolic with evident delight. Humour is an essential characteristic distinguishing much of Toyen’s erotica from the many
corresponding explorations by her male colleagues. In sketches and drawings she develops a disarmingly open erotic magical world, samples of which she publishes
between 1931 and 1933 in the magazine Erotická revue edited by Jindřich Štyrský. She also illustrates erotic literature, such as that of the Marquis de Sade.

Toyen unfurls in her images wide-ranging forms of love, between affection and violence, passion, play and dream. Animals, fruits and shells are also sometimes added, which, as Annie Le Brun puts it, »spirit us away to a world where desire reigns supreme«.

During the German occupation, the Surrealists go underground. Toyen spends the war in her one-room flat, where she hides Jindřich Heisler from 1941. Now they both run a huge risk, but the close quarters give them an opportunity for further collaboration.

Alongside paintings that seem like outcries in the trauma of war, Toyen creates with her precisely drawn cycles haunting testimonies to a world in which life and vision, previously staged by her as metamorphotic, have come to a standstill. The Shooting Gallery renders palpable how the war has left behind not only physical but also psychological wounds, showing the world of fairs transformed into a military firing range like the one the Nazis had set up practically under the artist’s window. In Hide yourself, war! Toyen expresses by means of errant animal skeletons the heavy blow dealt to nature and to existence itself.

After liberation, she figuratively turns towards the light again with Myth of Light and resumes her correspondence with the Paris Surrealists.

After the war, Toyen resumes contact with André Breton, who arranges an exhibition at a Parisian gallery in 1947. She leaves for Paris under this pretext, knowing that she will not return to Prague. Her paintings of this period reflect her lively exchanges with the Surrealist Group and her new sense of freedom.

Toyen takes several trips to Brittany in the company of the Surrealist Group and becomes interested in alchemy with its underlying themes of transformation and metamorphosis. The title of her drawing cycle Neither Wings Nor Stones: Wings and Stones is a direct reference to an alchemy tract that describes the unceasing movement of the elements. Toyen experiences such movement on the Brittany shore and cliffs, constantly lashed by the ocean as well as the wind, accompanied by screaming seagulls. She creates poetic images, searching for visual analogies in the encounter between fragments of living beings (feathers, a human profile) with »inanimate« nature (waves, pebbles, agates). Her interest in alchemy is also evidenced by paintings featuring scenes from old Prague, including the sign for the »Alchemists’ Alley« in the area of Prague Castle.

In the 1950s, the Surrealist Group comes into contact with the Tachisme movement. As a result, Toyen moves to the very edge of lyrical abstraction but not beyond as she explores the unconscious and tries to visualise sensations in pictorial form.

Plant and mineral elements or details of mysterious beings emerge from her seemingly abstract canvases, as in the cycle Seven Unsheathed Swords, which comprises seven vertical- format canvases. Seven poets wrote poems for each of the cycle’s paintings. The title was proposed by Georges Goldfayn, who drew inspiration from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem Seven Swords in which the poet associates seven blades with seven female names. The addition of »unsheathed« creates further chains of association. Toyen focuses on the depiction of a gown-like garment with an absent body, similar to her earlier paintings from the 1930s. But this time, the women/swords are both disturbing and alluring, and their absent bodies can be spotted in the ingeniously exposed details (the tip of a foot, a finger).

Collaboration and friendship would always be vital for Toyen, whether with Jindřich Štyrský, Karel Teige, Jindřich Heisler, André Breton or Benjamin Péret, and starting in the 1960s with Radovan Ivšić, Georges Goldfayn and Annie Le Brun. Most of them are poets, and she illustrates many of their texts, while they in turn help her to find titles for her works.

During the 1920s and 30s, Toyen makes her living designing book covers and doing illustrations – often in collaboration with Štyrský – which are in no way inferior to her independent works. In 1966, she asks Ivšić to compose a poem for her cycle of twelve drawings, resulting in a unique book-object called The Well in the Tower – Debris of Dreams. For the Éditions Maintenant publishing house, which she founded with Radovan Ivšić, Annie Le Brun and Georges Goldfayn, Toyen creates her last cycle of collages, Vis-à-vis. Here she reinvents her formal language and once again makes it clear that she has always seen »high« and »applied art« as belonging together.

The silhouettes or details of real or mysterious beings found in Toyen’s œuvre since the 1950s gradually become spectres looming up from an indeterminate landscape, similar to the way images appear in our dreams.

In the early 1960s, Toyen also increasingly returns to the collage method. She inserts fragments of reality directly into her paintings, as she had already started in 1946, for example in Screen. She also explores night and its magic, analogously to Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841) in his Gaspard de la Nuit. Midnight, the Blazoned Hour is inspired by a verse in this book where a fantasy-tinged text describes a procession of grotesque and frightening apparitions that materialises to the narrator when on the verge of sleep. Toyen envisions this night-time world as a stage observed from a theatre loge, expressing the connection between wild desire and the enchanting and luxurious theatre world on the one hand, and a metaphor of the unconscious, play-acting before our very eyes, on the other.

In the late 1960s, Toyen explores in her works the delimitation of space and the body as well its shadow, undertaking an elementary investigation of how presentation relates to representation when depicting reality. She executes her last oil painting in 1971, giving it the telling title The Trap of Reality.

Toyen focuses on analogies between the human and the vegetal, animal or object worlds, proceeding from the assumption that in a world in which everything belongs together, every object or being can represent the qualities of a different one. In 1954, she already characterised herself in the Surrealist collaborative game »The Object of Identity« through five favourite objects, which she also defines further: a projection screen, a lash, a stiletto heel, a suitcase and shutters. These five objects together comprise Toyen’s poetic self-portrait, symbolising her innermost desires: imagination, freedom, eroticism, travel and mystery.

Toyen produces collages, including masks for Radovan Ivšić’s play King Gordogan that manage with just a few incisive details to capture the personalities of the various characters hidden behind. Thus until her death, Toyen continues in her own inimitable way to set traps for perception and for the unquestioning premises of identity.