TOYEN, THE ABSOLUTE GAP
July 3, 2022
at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris
Presented in Prague, Hamburg and Paris, the exhibition dedicated to the work of Toyen (1902-1980) is an event. The art of this major artist who sought in her own way, through painting, drawing, collages and books, to apprehend the meaning and value of the image, illuminates the surrealist movement in a singular way. The exhibition's journey unfolds in five stages that mark the steps of a singular approach at "absolute distance" from the conventional practices of part of the art world.
A Destiny Between Dream and Passion
Born in Prague, Toyen from her beginnings took a personal path, inhabited by her inner dreams and a powerful feeling of revolt. She left her family to join anarchist and communist circles and briefly attended the School of Decorative Arts, which she quickly abandoned, finding the teaching too academic. She met the young painter Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942) in 1922. Both were attracted by the spirit that animated the Czech avant-garde of the Devetsil group. They participated in exhibitions showing their works marked by an aesthetic between purism and constructivism, traveled, particularly staying in Paris. Between 1925 and 1927, Toyen produced "primitivist" paintings and drawings where the erotic component is sensitive.
In 1926, the two artists created the concept of "artificialism" which brings together the language of painting and poetry in the same creative approach of transcending an immediately perceptible reality. Toyen and Styrsky offer remarkable works, nourished by renewed inspiration that are not without announcing the lyrical abstraction that would impose itself some decades later.
In the Surrealist Movement
However, for Toyen, subjects touching on the domains of eroticism and the desire to explore unprecedented spaces to discover continue to inhabit a creation where flora and fauna intertwine, bearers of a sexual dimension that is reinforced by reading Sade. This aesthetic commitment brings her closer to the surrealist universe whose ontological and aesthetic values she shares. She will be part of the founders of Czech surrealism in 1934 and will forge friendships with André Breton and Paul Eluard. At the end of the 1930s, the sets of drawings she creates testify to the apprehension of the catastrophe that is looming.
A Free and Committed Artist
During the Second World War, Toyen's works show a world where horror has shattered all hope. From 1941, she hides the young Jewish poet Jindrich Heisler (1914-1953) and composes cycles of drawings on his poems to ward off despair. From 1942, she begins again to paint powerful and tragic paintings that question the mystery of representation.
André Breton organized in 1947 at the Denise René gallery an exhibition dedicated to Toyen who decides to live with Heisler in Paris to flee the totalitarianism that is settling in Czechoslovakia and to find Breton and the surrealist group again. She participates in their various manifestations while affirming her fascinating personality as a free and solitary artist. Within the surrealist constellation through disturbing creations where beings and nature combine in unprecedented spaces dominated by the suggestive poetic feeling of an amorous and erotic imaginary.
The New Amorous World
In the wake of May 68, Toyen draws inspiration from Charles Fourier's text to give the title "new amorous world" to one of her canvases. Thus, the proof of her eternal state of sensual passion is emphasized, which finds its form through the act of painting and creating collages, so many images that reveal a secret and mysterious inner reality beyond what is immediately perceptible.
Such appears to us today the visionary work of an exceptional artist that the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris allows us to discover in order to give her back the part that belongs to her, that of a painter whose thought questions the meaning and scope of images emerged from the occulted depths of the psyche.
June 2022
MAM of Paris
11 Avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris
Tuesday to Sunday, 10am-6pm, late night Thursday until 9:30pm
Until July 24 Catalog under the direction of Annie Le Brun