| Pt. 1 of 4 | Genderless vision and the quiet radicalism of desire. Surrealist Toyen: sixty years of painting, from Artificialism in Paris to wartime resistance and the erotic imagination.
The painting that stopped me during research was not one of the famous ones. It was Chinese Tea Shop, 1927; made before Surrealism, before the war, before everything. I keep coming back to it. What about you?
Interesting body of work. I recognised Screen, but was unfamiliar with her other pieces. Sleeping, At La Coste Castle, and Safes stand out for me: paintings that one 'feels' rather than sees - love the eeriness particularly the snake-creatures in Safes. Another discovery. Look forward to learning more
It's a gigantic output. I didn't hear of her before; it's another example of how an artist can be overlooked, but also an example of how an artist can maintain a ferocious dedication for an entire lifetime, recognition or not. The mastery of painting and drawing takes one's breath away, and yet it isn't what you think of first. You get immediately drawn into her message and then you backtrack and go, wait, but the mastery! I appreciated seeing Abandoned Burrow. It's not well known in music history that corsets were a really significant discomfort and hurdle to women pianists. I've never seen this problem addressed in visual art before and she nails it. Safes, and Approaching Footsteps, both provoke deep thoughts and feelings about history and one's place in it.
Heather, the corset point is one I hadn’t seen addressed in visual art either before I started working on this arc. There’s so much more to say about it, and about Approaching Footsteps specifically. More in the next posts.
Safes is very much of its time, as the meticulous architecture of Nazi bureaucracy is dismantled to reveal a seething mass of primitive cruelty and evil writhing within. In its own way, I find it as powerful a depiction of the Neuremberg trials as Laura Knights epic realist depiction situated before the ruins of Germany.
Screen is one of her most unsettling works from that period, and one of my favorite as well. The face is held inside the fabric of the dress as if the material itself has become a kind of membrane between states. Those elongated, almost boneless forms are completely characteristic of her surrealist vocabulary, you begin to recognize them as a signature once you’ve spent time with her work. I love it.
I have never heard of Toyen before, never, not once. It now seems like such an injustice because all that was presented in this first look is fascinating. Two things stood out for me as I read. First, I am wondering about this Croatian connection. Early paintings of Dalmatia, Dubrovnik and later close collaboration with Radovan Ivšić. I am not accustomed to seeing Croatia mentioned this way beyond our well-known house names (like Meštrović, etc.) Second, when my husband and I read Murakami’s After Dark for our bookclub we didn’t know what to think of it really (the club’s discussion helped immensely to shift our perception of it and deepen our understanding). Your reference about Toyen’s Chinese Tea Shop added to this for me. It clicked immediately as something linked to it, in its own strange way. And, I guess, there is also a third, I keep going back to several pieces posted here. The pull is irresistible and I have no clue why. Maybe that’s the Toyen-effect? Maybe it is also the slow-looking effect, something that happens as the eye adjusts to sitting with patience and curiosity. Just this weekend I went to the Art Institute of Chicago to finally see the Nighthawkes and Bacon’s Figure with Meat, and unexpectedly, so many other artpieces drew my attention along the way. I plan to go back when there’s less crowd and have a field day of it. ;)
The Croatian thread is genuinely underexplored. One of the reasons was that Toyen could not live without swimming in the sea, and they also had a network of friends that extended there. And yes, the Toyen-effect being inseparable from the slow-looking effect is a very good point, and I am glad that you went back to the Art Institute and found yourself pulled sideways by unexpected pieces. I completely agree about the Chinese Tea Shop impression. This is why I am diving deeper into her work from the late 20s; it’s an absolute treasure trove and needs to be looked at more closely. Coincidentally, (just as a side note) I was online checking the auctions for her work, and paintings from this period and her early cubism are scoring quite high.
I am intrigued by the journey ahead, I planned something else entirely for May but that can be said for this whole year (and I am glad for it.) I am chuffed to bits by this faint Croatian connection, even underexplored as it is. Can’t say I wouldn’t be thrilled if there was a diary of sorts to consult and dig into. But learning to live with a bit of mystery and letting the art exist in its own power has been equally powerful.
Sadly there is no diary, as far as anyone knows. Toyen was almost pathologically private, she destroyed a great deal, and what personal archive survives is scattered and not fully accessible. Which is frustrating but also somehow consistent with her whole project. On plans going sideways: yours are in good company. I’ve been researching the power of distraction; the main argument being that it is precisely when we stop thinking about something that inspiration finds us. There will definitely be a post about it at some stage next month.
"Do we respect the artist's wishes and award them their privacy or does their art at some point start to belong to the world at large?" - a tricky question that at times I find myself trying to untangle. Kafka and such, come to mind. And his friend who preserved his work so that we, the posterity, could enjoy and benefit from now.
Power of distraction sounds like a fantastic topic to dig one's teeth in! One of those things that could use a fresh take, away from the anxiety-inducing-hyper-focus-and-productivity perspective. It makes me think of a book called "Tiny Experiments" and the need to reframe how we think about such things as goals, growth, learning, purpose, even living.
The Kafka case is so complex because Max Brod’s betrayal was also an act of love, and we still can’t fully resolve it. With Toyen it’s harder in a way: she wasn’t asking a friend to burn her work, she was burning it herself. That feels less like a question about posterity’s rights and more like a statement about what she wanted her work to be, which is: incomplete, resistant, not fully possessed. I’m not sure the world’s claim wins against that. It’s a difficult question overall, I don’t have a universal answer that would fit because each case that I have looked at so far is different. I have posted Toyen’s sketchbook today in the notes and I am still not sure what to make of it. There is this very interesting playfulness that exists alongside very serious and deep thinking in her work that i am still pondering.
I am finding these things infinately fascinating and I very much enjoyed your take on it. There are complexities and nuances in each case that, even though they initially seem small on the outside, are significant factors that set them apart from one another. Sitting with mystery, I am learning, has its charms and benefits even if final answers are never discovered. Thank you for taking the time to ponder it briefly with me. :)
The spectre of Emily Bronte's second novel, quite possibly destroyed burnt by Charlotte after her death to preotect her reputation, haunts me even though I find Wuthering Heights repulsive to read.
The painting that stopped me during research was not one of the famous ones. It was Chinese Tea Shop, 1927; made before Surrealism, before the war, before everything. I keep coming back to it. What about you?
Interesting body of work. I recognised Screen, but was unfamiliar with her other pieces. Sleeping, At La Coste Castle, and Safes stand out for me: paintings that one 'feels' rather than sees - love the eeriness particularly the snake-creatures in Safes. Another discovery. Look forward to learning more
Safes does that to people. The next post goes straight into why.
It's a gigantic output. I didn't hear of her before; it's another example of how an artist can be overlooked, but also an example of how an artist can maintain a ferocious dedication for an entire lifetime, recognition or not. The mastery of painting and drawing takes one's breath away, and yet it isn't what you think of first. You get immediately drawn into her message and then you backtrack and go, wait, but the mastery! I appreciated seeing Abandoned Burrow. It's not well known in music history that corsets were a really significant discomfort and hurdle to women pianists. I've never seen this problem addressed in visual art before and she nails it. Safes, and Approaching Footsteps, both provoke deep thoughts and feelings about history and one's place in it.
Heather, the corset point is one I hadn’t seen addressed in visual art either before I started working on this arc. There’s so much more to say about it, and about Approaching Footsteps specifically. More in the next posts.
Safes is very much of its time, as the meticulous architecture of Nazi bureaucracy is dismantled to reveal a seething mass of primitive cruelty and evil writhing within. In its own way, I find it as powerful a depiction of the Neuremberg trials as Laura Knights epic realist depiction situated before the ruins of Germany.
I am totally amazed… and so grateful to you for this opportunity to discover such a body of works of art.
Thank k you for sharing this fascinating body of work. The image that stuck in my mind was ' Screen' as it stimulated my imagination the most.
Screen is one of her most unsettling works from that period, and one of my favorite as well. The face is held inside the fabric of the dress as if the material itself has become a kind of membrane between states. Those elongated, almost boneless forms are completely characteristic of her surrealist vocabulary, you begin to recognize them as a signature once you’ve spent time with her work. I love it.
I have never heard of Toyen before, never, not once. It now seems like such an injustice because all that was presented in this first look is fascinating. Two things stood out for me as I read. First, I am wondering about this Croatian connection. Early paintings of Dalmatia, Dubrovnik and later close collaboration with Radovan Ivšić. I am not accustomed to seeing Croatia mentioned this way beyond our well-known house names (like Meštrović, etc.) Second, when my husband and I read Murakami’s After Dark for our bookclub we didn’t know what to think of it really (the club’s discussion helped immensely to shift our perception of it and deepen our understanding). Your reference about Toyen’s Chinese Tea Shop added to this for me. It clicked immediately as something linked to it, in its own strange way. And, I guess, there is also a third, I keep going back to several pieces posted here. The pull is irresistible and I have no clue why. Maybe that’s the Toyen-effect? Maybe it is also the slow-looking effect, something that happens as the eye adjusts to sitting with patience and curiosity. Just this weekend I went to the Art Institute of Chicago to finally see the Nighthawkes and Bacon’s Figure with Meat, and unexpectedly, so many other artpieces drew my attention along the way. I plan to go back when there’s less crowd and have a field day of it. ;)
The Croatian thread is genuinely underexplored. One of the reasons was that Toyen could not live without swimming in the sea, and they also had a network of friends that extended there. And yes, the Toyen-effect being inseparable from the slow-looking effect is a very good point, and I am glad that you went back to the Art Institute and found yourself pulled sideways by unexpected pieces. I completely agree about the Chinese Tea Shop impression. This is why I am diving deeper into her work from the late 20s; it’s an absolute treasure trove and needs to be looked at more closely. Coincidentally, (just as a side note) I was online checking the auctions for her work, and paintings from this period and her early cubism are scoring quite high.
I am intrigued by the journey ahead, I planned something else entirely for May but that can be said for this whole year (and I am glad for it.) I am chuffed to bits by this faint Croatian connection, even underexplored as it is. Can’t say I wouldn’t be thrilled if there was a diary of sorts to consult and dig into. But learning to live with a bit of mystery and letting the art exist in its own power has been equally powerful.
Sadly there is no diary, as far as anyone knows. Toyen was almost pathologically private, she destroyed a great deal, and what personal archive survives is scattered and not fully accessible. Which is frustrating but also somehow consistent with her whole project. On plans going sideways: yours are in good company. I’ve been researching the power of distraction; the main argument being that it is precisely when we stop thinking about something that inspiration finds us. There will definitely be a post about it at some stage next month.
"Do we respect the artist's wishes and award them their privacy or does their art at some point start to belong to the world at large?" - a tricky question that at times I find myself trying to untangle. Kafka and such, come to mind. And his friend who preserved his work so that we, the posterity, could enjoy and benefit from now.
Power of distraction sounds like a fantastic topic to dig one's teeth in! One of those things that could use a fresh take, away from the anxiety-inducing-hyper-focus-and-productivity perspective. It makes me think of a book called "Tiny Experiments" and the need to reframe how we think about such things as goals, growth, learning, purpose, even living.
The Kafka case is so complex because Max Brod’s betrayal was also an act of love, and we still can’t fully resolve it. With Toyen it’s harder in a way: she wasn’t asking a friend to burn her work, she was burning it herself. That feels less like a question about posterity’s rights and more like a statement about what she wanted her work to be, which is: incomplete, resistant, not fully possessed. I’m not sure the world’s claim wins against that. It’s a difficult question overall, I don’t have a universal answer that would fit because each case that I have looked at so far is different. I have posted Toyen’s sketchbook today in the notes and I am still not sure what to make of it. There is this very interesting playfulness that exists alongside very serious and deep thinking in her work that i am still pondering.
I am finding these things infinately fascinating and I very much enjoyed your take on it. There are complexities and nuances in each case that, even though they initially seem small on the outside, are significant factors that set them apart from one another. Sitting with mystery, I am learning, has its charms and benefits even if final answers are never discovered. Thank you for taking the time to ponder it briefly with me. :)
The spectre of Emily Bronte's second novel, quite possibly destroyed burnt by Charlotte after her death to preotect her reputation, haunts me even though I find Wuthering Heights repulsive to read.