Toyen

(Czechia, 21/09/1902 - 09/11/1980)

Born Marie Čermínová in 1902 in Prague, Toyen was a founding member of Czech Surrealism and a radical innovator within both the avant-garde and feminist traditions, she forged a visual language that defied conventions of gender, sexuality and politics. Adopting the gender-neutral pseudonym ‘Toyen’ (believed to derive from the French ‘citoyen’, or ‘citizen’) and using masculine grammatical forms in Czech, she fashioned her own identity in a commitment to freedom of expression and the dismantling of restrictive boundaries.

Toyen’s artistic education began in 1919 when she enrolled in decorative arts classes at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, but, by 1923, she had distanced herself from academic instruction and joined Devětsil, a collective of avant-garde artists and poets who championed poetism. Even within the group’s exuberant milieu, her work was distinctive and reveals a fascination with eroticism, metamorphosis and dream imagery, themes that would become central to her mature Surrealist practice.

In 1925, Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský, her lifelong friend and collaborator, travelled to Paris where they absorbed the ferment of European modernism and aligned themselves with the Surrealist circle. The partnership between Toyen and Štyrský was deeply symbiotic, marked by shared explorations of eroticism, subconscious desire and the absurd. Seeking to bridge the worlds of painting and poetry, the pair developed Artificialism, a short-lived movement they described as “a poetic art” which anticipated Toyen’s later investigations into the fluid boundaries between language and image.

After Štyrský’s death in 1942, Toyen entered one of the most precarious and productive periods of her life. During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, when Surrealist and ‘degenerate’ art was suppressed, she continued to paint in secret and hid the young Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler in her Prague apartment. Her wartime works, such as the haunting The Shooting Gallery (1940-45), merge erotic and violent imagery in an unsettling dreamscape, conveying both the horror and absurdity of war.

In 1947, Toyen and Heisler relocated to Paris, where she rejoined the Surrealist group and evolved her work into increasingly ambiguous symbolism. Human figures dissolved into fragments or shadows, landscapes became psychological rather than physical spaces, and the interplay of concealment and revelation was intensified in works that she exhibited throughout France and internationally.

During this time, she also reinforced her reputation as a fiercely independent artist, favouring intuition and artistic autonomy over Surrealist ideology of the femme-enfant and the role of women in the art world. Her gender ambiguity and her embrace of queer desire make her a singular figure in a movement dominated by male perspectives and an enduring symbol of resistance against conformity in all its forms.

By the time of her death in 1980, she had established herself as a visionary whose work transcended the binaries of male and female, abstraction and figuration, politics and poetry. Through her haunting dreamscapes, Toyen bridged Czech modernism and international Surrealism to articulate the precariousness of identity and the persistence of desire under oppression.

Image: Toyen, Foundering in a Dream (1934). Oil on canvas, 73 x 100 cm. Private collection.