Surrealist Oeuvre of Toyen: Fragmented and Dissolving Bodies

By Gustė Matulionytė

Toyen (born Marie Čermínová, 1902-1980) was a Czech surrealist artist and a prominent member of Czech and French avant-garde. Toyen was a member of the 1920s Czech avant-garde association Devětsil, and the founding member of both the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia and the Surrealist Movement in France. The Prague-born artist visited Paris for the first time in 1923, and since then frequently travelled between the two cities, before definitively relocating to Paris in 1947. Toyen, the gender-neutral pseudonym of the artist, originated in 1923. It is thought to be derived from the French word citoyen, meaning “citizen”, but has also been connected to the Czech expression to je on, meaning “it is he”. Toyen preferred the gender-neutral pseudonym to their real name, spoke Czech in single masculine form, and alternated between traditionally masculine and feminine fashion throughout their entire life.

Throughout their artistic career, Toyen seamlessly employed a variety of media and artistic subjects and experimented with both abstract and naturalistic styles of expression. Toyen was an extremely prolific book illustrator – they provided images for a variety of textual sources, from children’s storybooks to the poetry of their contemporaries and erotic novels. However, Toyen is arguably best known for their surrealist works of art. One of the main themes of Toyen’s entire artistic production was sexuality and eroticism – their treatment of erotic subject matter oscillated between explicitly graphic to more veiled and obscured. Toyen’s focus on sexuality aligned with the surrealist belief in sexuality as a liberatory force, and with the artistic production of their Czech and French surrealist contemporaries.

In the exploration of sexuality and eroticism, Toyen often engaged with the depiction of both male and female bodies. A subset of Toyen’s works from the 1930s and 40s focused on the fragmentation and dissolution of female bodies. In paintings of the 1930s, body parts and bodiless garments appear in haunting dreamscape settings and are occasionally accompanied by animals and broken toys, suggesting a link to childhood. In the works from this period Toyen repeatedly explored a motif of a lone girl – potentially a figure of a dreamer, or a reflection of the artist’s own psyche. The arid, deserted landscapes of these paintings create a sense of disorientation, unease, and unsettling disquiet that may embody both the personal anxieties of the artist and the broader zeitgeist of interwar Europe.

Toyen, Dream, 1937, oil on canvas, 81.1 x 100 cm, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague.

Dream, 1937, showcases a barren aquatic landscape with scarce vegetation. A pink coat stands on its own – no part of a girl’s body can be seen either inside or outside it. The figure is headless, and the empty garment stands like a haunting phantom of the past, creating a sense of the uncanny. A dark, thick, blood-like substance drips down the collar of the coat, sinisterly outlining where the missing head of a girl would be. At the centre of the image stands a thick crumbling square column – its exposed brick and cracking sides emphasise the sense of decay that permeates the whole image. Two sausage-shaped items hang from the column, seemingly slowly swinging in the air like pendulums. Their shape and positioning are reminiscent of a jump rope, alongside the coat evoking a sense of a distorted, haunted childhood. The flat, open expanse of the landscape and the straight horizon line create a sense of disorienting and unsettling exposure, and a feeling of solitude in this haunting dreamscape scene.

Toyen, After the Performance (Relâche), 1943, oil on canvas, 110 x 55 cm, Aleš South Bohemian Gallery, Hluboká nad Vltavou.

After the Performance or Relâche, 1943, is a large vertical painting that too shows a headless female figure. A young woman dressed in a white shirt and underwear hangs upside-down, suspended above the ground. She holds herself up from a wooden railing fixed to the wall in a pose evocative of difficult gymnastic feats. The white shirt of the woman is flipped upside down by the force of gravity, revealing her bare stomach and covering her head – that is, if her head exists in the first place. The feet of the woman are melting into the wall behind her – the performer is consumed by the environment, or perhaps intentionally hiding herself and fading away. The cracking fragmentation of the Dream is replaced by fluid, vaporous melding of forms. Echoing the verticality of the woman, the wall is covered by drips of a dark liquid reminiscent of the blood-like substance covering the coat from the Dream. On the ground below the woman lies a half-open grey bag; to its right, a flyswatter is propped up against the wall. The unsettling staging imbues the scene with a sense of an unpleasant ritual that has just been interrupted, or perhaps a punishment that has just ended. The space of the painting is oppressive, creating a sense of claustrophobia through the close-up views of the objects – though constricted as opposed to exposed, it creates a similar sense of disquieting solitude as the vast expanse of the Dream. It is unclear if the woman is in control of the situation and her precarious pose, if her dissolving form is a conscious choice or a signifier of a loss of control. In the context of the concurrently raging World War II, the pose of the woman evokes the torture endured by the victims of war. At the same time, however, it also recalls ballet. The French name of the painting, Relâche, is a title of a 1924 French ballet by Francis Picabia. A Dadaist film by René Clair titled Entr’acte was shown between the two acts of the ballet, and featured Kiki de Montparnasse dancing ballet in a white dress reminiscent to that of the woman in Toyen’s Relâche.

René Clair (director), Still from Entr’acte, 1924.

Toyen, Through the Balmy Night, 1968, collage, 58 x 35 cm, Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Rome.

Toyen’s surrealist works of the 1960s echo the focus on dissolution and fragmentation. Collages such as Through a Balmy Night, 1968, show fragments of the female body, most prominently hands, hair, and lips. In contrast to the works of the 1930s and 40s, such as Dream and After the Performance, the image is less unsettling and more erotic. The cut-outs of photographed hair, lips, and hands are combined into a strange structure, but the individual elements remain recognisable in their own right. The overall mood of Through a Balmy Night is poignantly erotic, specifically evocative of female sexuality: the body parts are combined with traditionally feminine objects such as lipsticks into a structure of beauty and physical appeal. In contrast to the otherworldly landscapes and unsettling interiors of the 1930s and 40s, the composition is distinctly worldly, suggestive of earthly pleasures and opulence. Gone are the dissolving dreamer girls and empty garments – through the metonymies of the open mouths and hands, Toyen creates an image of a fully realised sexual adult woman.

Over several decades of artistic production, Toyen repeatedly returned to the motif of a fragmented or dissolving body. The exploration of the motif evolved from missing bodies and empty garments in haunting landscapes in the 1930s, to melting bodies being consumed by the environment in the 1940s, to fragmented, sensual collages of the 1960s. Though the theme of fragmentation was not uncommon in contemporary avant-garde circles, Toyen’s exploration of it showcases remarkable range and a certain sensitivity to the rapidly changing realities of life in Europe in the twentieth century.

Notes:

Dmitrieva, Marina. ‘Transcending Gender: Cross-Dressing as a Performative Practice of Women Artists of the Avant-Garde’. In Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle, edited by Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche (Leiden: Brill, 2017): pp.123–36

Huebner, Karla. ‘In Pursuit of Toyen: Feminist Biography in an Art-Historical Context’. Journal of Women’s History, Vol.25, No.1 (2013): pp.14–36

Huebner, Karla. Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic. Russia and East European Studies (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Pravdová, Anna, Annie Le Brun, Annabelle Görgen, Národní galerie v Praze, Valdštejnská jízdárna, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, and Association Paris musées, eds. Toyen 1902-1908: The Dreaming Rebel (Praha: Národní galerie, 2021)