Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942)

Jindřich Štyrský was an artist of extraordinary versatility and exceptional organisational talent, qualities that enabled him to become one of the central figures of the Czechoslovak interwar avant-garde. His activities encompassed photography, collage, painting, printmaking, book illustration, poetry and stage design. His distinctive Artificialist and Surrealist works, his bold and innovative collages, and his highly individual painterly technique – expressive yet lending his paintings a remarkable delicacy – continue to captivate audiences not only in the Czech Republic but across Europe. His oeuvre remains among the most original and significant achievements of Czech art in the first half of the twentieth century.

Štyrský acquired the formal language of modernism while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the early 1920s under Jakub Obrovský and Karel Krattner. His earliest works were created largely in the spirit of Poetist Naivism and Lyrical Cubism, already hinting at the imaginative qualities that would come to define his later work. In 1922, he met Marie Čermínová, later known by the pseudonym Toyen, who soon became both his closest artistic collaborator and lifelong companion. In 1923, together with the theorist and artist Karel Teige, they joined the avant-garde group Devětsil. During this period, Štyrský developed both theoretically and artistically towards Magical Realism and Poetism, as exemplified by works such as Souvenir (1924), thereby gradually shifting the group’s original emphasis away from its earlier social concerns. Between 1925 and 1928, he and Toyen travelled extensively across Europe before settling in Paris, where they established their own artistic movement, Artificialism – a distinctly Czech variant of Surrealism and the visual counterpart to Poetism. Artificialist painting was conceived as arising from an emotional image, from what they described as a “memory of memories”, deliberately operating beyond the logic of recollection. Their work emphasised lyrical atmosphere, emotional intensity and the refinement of human sensibility, often achieved through the innovative technique of spraying paint through nets and stencils.

After returning to Prague, Štyrský served as head of stage design for the Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated Theatre) between 1928 and 1929, while continuing to exhibit with Toyen both in Czechoslovakia and abroad, including Paris and Vienna. During the creative period culminating in the landmark exhibition Poesie 1932, his attention turned decisively towards Surrealist themes: dreams, their documentation, subjective experience and its reflection. His paintings from this period are populated by enigmatic objects and spectral figures, while he also produced the Roots series alongside numerous colour collages, including the provocative pornographic photomontages published in his self-authored book Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (1933). In 1934, together with Toyen, Bohuslav Brouk, Vítězslav Nezval, Karel Teige and others, Štyrský co-founded the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in Prague. At the invitation of the Paris Surrealists, he returned to Paris in 1935. There, until the early 1940s, he devoted himself in particular to the motifs of eyes and hands and to their rich symbolic associations; themes that had already permeated both his visual art and literary work during the previous decade. While in Paris, Štyrský became seriously ill and did not live to see the end of World War II.