Borëd | Artist Spotlight | Toyen

Toyen, (born Marie Čermínová in 1902 in Prague) was part of the Czech Surrealist movement in Prague. Toyen left the family home at sixteen, and it has been speculated it was due to sympathy towards anarchism. A sexually ambiguous character, Toyen “spoke only in the masculine gender”, according to her Devětsil peer Jaroslav Seifert. So too, Toyen wore feminine and masculine clothing, and explored sexual imagery in the artwork. This disruption of sexual norms and representations of the body emphasises Toyen’s role as a Surrealist, as these depictions of the human form encompass erotic desire, comedy, tragedy, and political subversion.

From 1919 to 1920, Toyen attended Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague to study the decorative arts. They worked closely with fellow Surrealist poet and artist Jindřich Štyrský. In the early 1920s Toyen traveled to Paris, and soon returned there with Štyrský to live. While living in Paris, the two founded an artistic alternative to Abstraction and Surrealism, which they dubbed Artificialism. Artificialism was defined by Toyen and Štyrský in a leaflet for an exhibition as "The identification of the painter with the poet," where the artist creates poetry without using language.

In 1923, the artist adopted the professional pseudonym Toyen. The name Toyen was derived from the French word 'citoyen,' meaning citizen. Toyen favored the gender-neutral name and would speak Czech in the masculine singular form.

Toyen’s major interest was eroticism as found in their sketchbooks and paintings. In contrast to the Parisian Surrealist experience of the sexually reticent bourgeoisie, in Czechoslovakia there was a greater sense of freedom. Rather than socially seditious, Toyen’s work could at times be whimsical and frivolous. The artist drew small sketches of naked women stroking one another with giant feathers and Young Girl who Dreams, 1930, depicts a girl with a playful smile surrounded by balloons of floating penises. Toyen contributed erotic sketches for Štyrský's Erotická Revue (1930–33). This journal was published on strict subscription terms based on a circulation of 150 copies.

Forced underground during the Nazi occupation and Second World War, Toyen sheltered their second artistic partner, Jindřich Heisler, in 1938. In 1947, when the two emigrated from Czechoslovakia to settle permanently in Paris, they took a great many of their works with them. Thus, now, most of their most important pieces are scattered in public and private collections in France, with the exception of a few works in collections elsewhere in Western Europe, South America and the U.S. Back in Paris, they worked until their death with André Breton, the French poet and anarchist Benjamin Péret, as well as with Czech painter and poet Jindrich Heisler.

After their death in 1980, an exhibition of their work and of the collaboration with their Czech colleagues was shown at the Centre Pompidou, and in the following years, a number of important retrospectives were held.

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