Toyen (1902–1980)

The phenomenal painter Marie Čermínová, known by the enigmatic pseudonym Toyen (said to be derived from the French word citoyen), is one of the most important and liberated artistic figures of the last century. She was a leading representative of the Surrealist movement, not only in Czech visual art, but also in the broader European context. Her oeuvre is distinguished by its originality and exceptional artistic quality and, at the same time, manages to awaken an ambiguous but all the more powerful feeling of unease thanks to her courageous imagination and an unprecedented intensity of expression. Although her life was very turbulent, she managed to preserve the authenticity and internal consistency of her work throughout all the dynamism. 

 

Toyen studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (1919–1922) with E. Dítě. In the early 1920s, she commenced a lifelong and extremely fruitful creative partnership with the painter Jindřich Štyrský. In 1923, both artists joined Devětsil, the avant-garde association of the emerging generation of Czech artists. In late 1925, they travelled together to Paris, where, one year later, they proclaimed their own artistic movement: Artificialism, an artistic parallel to Poetism and an original alternative to Surrealism and Abstraction, the artistic movements then en vogue amongst the Parisian avant-garde. Reducing the illusory space, she initiated a fascinating play of forms and colours, often inspired by themes of the market, circus or street jugglers. Paintings were to be based on an emotional idea, the “memory of memories.” To induce the desired lyricism and sensibility, they used original techniques, such as spraying paint through nets and stencils and mixing foreign materials into paints.

 

After returning to Prague in the early 1930s, new sculptural forms and mysterious, often vaguely defined objects began to emerge from the flat, non-representational colour structures (mussels, eggs, crystals and eyeballs). This tendency towards Surrealist subject matter culminated in the spring of 1934, when Toyen co-founded the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia, which directly collaborated with André Breton’s Parisian group; in 1935, Breton even visited Prague. From the mid-1930s, the artist’s already quite aggressive imagination took on an even more explicitly political character. Objects appear in unsettling, illogical contexts, thus opening space for the viewer’s subconsciousness (Horror, 1937). Important international contacts and domestic success were seriously disrupted by the war, during which Toyen produced two remarkable sets of drawings, Shooting Gallery (1940) and Hide Away, War! (1944). After the war, in anticipation of the communist coup, Toyen returned to Paris with the poet Jindřich Heisler, remaining in exile there until the end of her life. In Paris, she continued to work in the Surrealist spirit. In this period, the artist’s natural shift toward the dematerialisation of form enabled a more immediate articulation of her visions and worldview, hovering at the threshold between abstraction and reality, while retaining the full integrity of her distinctive painterly language. Embedding her scenes in nocturnal landscapes, Toyen addressed the incomprehensible and mutable atmosphere of dreams, nightmares and her own unconscious.