Reconstructing Toyen

A prominent female member of the prewar Czech avant-garde, the painter Toyen had a richly various career that took her from Cubism, through the painterly abstraction of "Artificialism, "to an extended Surrealist period. A recent museum retrospective in Prague offered a rare look at her work.

The history of Czech avant-garde art is largely a story written by men about men. While a number of remarkable women artists worked in the decorative arts, the field of so-called high art, including painting and sculpture, was, until recently, almost exclusively a male domain. The only woman who was a fully respected member of prewar Czech avant-garde circles was the painter Marie Cerminova (1902-1980), known by her nickname, Toyen. Appropriating this gender-neutral pseudonym and referring to herself as "he," the artist often wore men's suits and ties. Even more provocative than her appearance, the works she produced were pervaded by frankly erotic motifs.

In 1947, when Toyen emigrated from Czechoslovakia to settle permanently in Paris, she took a great many of her works with her. Thus, most of her 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. It remained for the Prague City Gallery, however, to organize this Toyen museum retrospective. Curated by Karel Srp, the show is a comprehensive survey of the artist's 60-year career, including paintings, drawings, collages, illustrations and a selection of book covers that she designed. Filling the City Gallery exhibition spaces at both the House at the Stone Bell and the Old-Town City Hall, the show appeared in Prague this past summer and did not travel.

The exhibition began with works Toyen produced in the early 1920s, when she was a member of the foremost Czech avant-garde group, Devetsil. At that time, the artist was primarily influenced by Cubism. However, just before her first visit to Paris in 1925, she went through a brief yet remarkable "primitivist" phase. Among the oil paintings and works on paper from this period is Paradise of the Blacks, a medium-sized canvas that shows a group of naked black men and women making love and, in general, enjoying the freedom of nature far from civilization. What today might seem like an eroticization of ethnic "otherness" was in the mid-1920s an expression of both Toyen's hedonism and her desire to overcome social and sexual taboos in the petit bourgeois world of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia. Throughout the exhibition were numerous drawings with explicit sexual content; those with homoerotic imagery may help to break the critical silence regarding the artist's sexual orientation.

In the late 1920s and early '30s, Toyen's work was dominated by a unique style of abstraction called "Artificialism," which she developed along with friend and fellow painter Jindrich Styrsky. Works from this period were extensively represented in the show. In theoretical statements issued in conjunction with 1927 exhibitions of their works in Paris and Prague, Toyen and Styrsky described Artificialism as "an abstract consciousness of reality ... defined by poetic perceptions of memories." Marked by innovative painterly techniques, such as dripping or spray painting through grids, stencils and various objects, or layering in thick and tactile structures, Toyen's Artificialist style emphasized the material properties of paint, thus radicalizing the conventions of painterly abstraction at the time.

These works gained the attention of avant-gardists in Paris, where Toyen soon became a prominent figure in the Surrealist movement. Her art has been admired not only by Andre Breton but also by a host of recent scholars such as Whitney Chadwick, Renee Riese Hubert and Annie Le Brun. The largest part of the exhibition was devoted to works of Toyen's Surrealist period, in which specters of nature, disintegrating human torsos, war machines and vestiges of everyday reality seem to merge in phantasmagoric dream images.

Elements of Surrealism recur in pieces she produced throughout the remainder of her life, and this exhibition reaffirmed Toyen's position as an important Surrealist painter. The show's most enduring impact, however, will likely be the way it uncovered the hitherto little-known complexity of the artist's long career.

By Martina Pachmanova
Art in America, April, 2001