Toyen

For the residential area in Oslo, Norway, see Tøyen.

Toyen in 1930

Two Girls with Flowers lithograph, 1932

Marie Čermínová (September 21, 1902, Prague – November 9, 1980, Paris), known as Toyen, was a Czech painter, draftsperson and illustrator and a member of the surrealist movement.

Biography

From 1919 to 1920, she attended UMPRŮM (the School of Decorative Arts) in Prague. She worked closely with fellow Surrealist poet and artist Jindřich Štyrský until his death. They joined the Devětsil group in 1923 and exhibited with the group. In the early 1920s she travelled to Paris, and soon returned there with Štyrský. While living in Paris, the two founded an artistic alternative to Abstraction and Surrealism, which they dubbed Artificialism. They returned to Prague in 1928.

She referred to herself in the masculine case. Her sketches, book illustrations, and paintings were frequently erotic.

Toyen and Štyrský gradually grew more interested in Surrealism. After their associates Vítězslav Nezval and Jindřich Honzl met with André Breton in Paris, they founded the Czech Surrealist Group along with other artists, writers, and the composer Jaroslav Ježek.

Forced underground during the Nazi occupation and Second World War, she and her second artistic partner, Jindřich Heisler, fled to Paris before the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia (1948). She worked with Breton, Benjamin Péret, and other surrealists.

Scholarship

• Huebner, Karla Tonine. "Eroticism, Identity, and Cultural Context: Toyen and the Prague Avant-garde." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2008.

External links

• Biography in Czech and English

Persondata
Name	Toyen
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 21, 1902
Place of birth
Date of death	November 9, 1980
Place of death