On the Verge of Divergence

From March to July of 2022, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) presented the largest retrospective to date of the Czech surrealist Toyen (b. Marie Čermínová, 1902–1980). Toyen: l’écart absolu was the last iteration of the retrospective that, born of the desire to present Toyen’s oeuvre across Europe, began its tournée at the National Gallery in Prague as Toyen: Snící rebelka/Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel from 9 April to 22 August 2021. Subsequently presented at the Hamburger Kunsthalle from 24 September 2021 to 13 February 2022 under the title TOYEN, the exhibit finally reached Paris.

Toyen: l’écart absolu aimed to present Toyen as an artist who, “never having yielded either on her revolt or on her dreams,”1 has “penetrated as far as possible into the enigma of beings and things at the same time as that of the image,”2 in the words of the exhibition co-curator, French writer and longtime friend of the artist, Annie Le Brun. This retrospective, a fruit of an ambitious, transnational collaboration, further established the importance of the Czech surrealist on French soil, reflecting the substantial scholarly interest in her work over recent years. In that sense, L’écart absolu should be viewed as the long-awaited gesture of recognition of Toyen’s constant inquiry into all that hides itself underneath the skin of reality. And that gesture was sufficiently grand; 150 works—paintings, drawings, collages, and books from museums and private collections were divided into five sections, arranged chronologically, tracing the artist’s “absolute divergence” in art and life.

In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue (published in Czech, English, German, and French), Annie Le Brun explains the exhibition’s title, L’écart absolu/The Absolute Divergence by referring to Charles Fourier’s concept of isolating oneself from all the known routes of experience, embarking upon a voyage into the unknown—or as is the case of Toyen, into the poetic/erotic unconscious.3 The 2022 retrospective invited us on that unprecedented journey, “during which painting [is] the pretext to venture into the continual movements of representation.” The visitors were encouraged to let themselves be carried away, “beyond that what is held to be real” through the art of Toyen, honoring this unique chance to experience her images of indefinite sentiments, imbued with a mysterious power that resonates throughout the exhibition space.4

Toyen has, at times, fallen victim to the revisionist art-historical narrative that seeks out neglected women artists, deeming them “subtle revolutionaries” when placed in comparison with their male collaborators/friends/lovers. The issue of Toyen’s gender ambiguity and androgynous self-presentation as well as her insistent self-identification as a poet, not a painter, complicates that “woman artist” attribution.5 Hence, the first section of the exhibit, Mirages 1919–1929, focused on Toyen’s background and creative collaboration with Jindřich Štyrský and the Prague avant-garde group Devětsil, which they joined in 1923. The exhibition gently omits the discussions of androgyny, visible in works such as Les Danseuses (1925), where the empty chair hints at Toyen’s gender self-positioning. The curatorial team highlighted Toyen and Štyrský’s fruitful collaborations, featuring their illustrations and collages side by side, amid their Artificialist paintings, borne of the mutual ambition to produce a form of plastic poetry. The stark contrast between Toyen’s explicit, erotically charged sketches and lyrical abstractions emphasized the artist’s constant search for suggestive means of expression. It is important to note that many of the documents in this section were presented for the first time, including private notebooks, some of which are reproduced in the catalogue.

Throughout the exhibit, substantial effort was made to highlight Toyen and Štyrský’s frequent travels to France and across Europe. The numerous exhibitions featuring Toyen’s pre-surrealist work in Prague and in Paris were discussed in the second section, La Femme Magnétique 1930–1938, dispelling the myth of the forgotten artist. Here, the curatorial spotlight turned to Toyen as an artist on a quest for the unexpected and the transformative, where forms become “dark, dazzling, trembling or frothy,”6 like nightmarish souvenirs picked up during her many voyages. In works like Femme magnétique and La Reste de la nuit (1934) those natural forms emanate a strange and malevolent energy; they crack and break, caught on the verge of decomposition or disappearance. A more in-depth analysis of this tendency in Toyen’s work can be found in co-curator Annabelle Görgen-Lammers’ essay “Between Folds and Cracks: Ghosts and Apparitions,” featured in the exhibition catalogue.7

The following section, Cache-Toi, Guerre! 1939–1946 mostly consisted of the drawings for the cycle Tir/The Shooting Gallery (1939). The original twelve sketches from this series are dispersed throughout private and public collections around the world, and L’écart absolu provided the rare opportunity of seeing them together. As Karla Huebner observes in her meticulous contextual monograph, Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (2020), Toyen’s drawings from this period “show intense brittleness, fragmentation, and aridity, with many references to childhood in her imagery of animals (mostly dead) and toys (often broken).”8 However, the visitors were not met with excessive contextual discussion, as the exhibit adopted a show-don’t-tell approach, referring the viewers to external sources and the wide-ranging accompanying catalogue. It seems that in hopes of making Toyen more accessible to a larger audience, a toned-down, chronological arrangement was preferred.

This curatorial choice of a quite careful, understated layout took the form of a traditional retrospective, with each self-contained section being marked by a strict timeframe. For an uninitiated viewer, this made L’écart absolu a good entry-point to her work, yet both the title and the exhibit’s main thesis of absolute divergence seemed a bit puzzling. From room to room, the suggested progression of ideas culminated in the fourth section, Le Devenir de la Liberté 1946–1965, the largest collection of Toyen’s late, surrealist works, produced largely after her exile to France in 1947. For such a multifaceted artist, one would expect to see a more engaged display, encouraging the viewer to seek visual reverberations across Toyen’s oeuvre, one that would diverge just a bit more, instead of settling for the customary format.

The two last rooms of the exhibition devoted to her later artistic activity felt like a very personal curatorial touch from Annie Le Brun, whose friendship with Toyen manifested itself in a series of illustrations for Le Brun’s collection of poetry Sur le champ and that of Le Brun’s husband, the poet and playwright Radovan Ivšić, Le puits dans la tour. Débris de rêves, both published by Éditions surréalistes in 1967. The exhibit’s epilogue Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux 1966–1980 centered around a large display of cut-outs from popular magazines Toyen had accumulated throughout her life and used for collages, such as the Midi/Minuit (1966). The final room was devoted to the series of masks she executed for Ivšić’s play Le Roi Gordogane in 1976.

In her review of the Prague iteration of the exhibit, Karla Huebner points out the absence of discussions of Toyen’s preoccupation with gender ambiguity and sexuality “that is so evident in her work [and thus] deserves serious consideration in such a major exhibition.”9 The exposition in Paris highlights the transgressive subtext within works from the series Les Sept Épées hors du fourreau (1957) and Le Paravent (1966), the latter of which features on the poster and is the only work by Toyen in the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris’ permanent collection. In her book, Magnetic Woman, Huebner argues that Toyen’s “determination to use art to explore multiple forms of sexuality reveals that she sought to unearth a deep understanding of eroticism and desire.”10 Huebner dissects the myth of Toyen as androgyne, claiming that “gender ambiguity was part of what made her mysterious and Other,” essentially what made her diverge from social codes, traditions and gender-assigned roles.11 Toyen’s haunting imagery of “the head-less, the faceless, the empty, and the fragmented female body” exemplifies erotic and terrifying undertones of Surrealism; a true meditation on the nature of the ghostlike, vanishing body, simultaneously restrictive and restricted.12 These are critical points for understanding Toyen’s oeuvre that warrant a more substantial acknowledgement in such an exhibition.

Toyen: l’écart absolu is the artist’s first international retrospective of such magnitude, a long-awaited and emphatic homage to Toyen. The breadth of research and the collaboration between the National Gallery in Prague, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is quite remarkable. This exhibition was the second most visited show at the MAM in 2022, with 50 600 visitors in total, averaging 487 visitors per day.13 Placing Toyen as an important figure of the 20th century avant-garde, whose absolute divergence and insistence on revolt and the transcendent power of dream, resonates with audiences today. It doubtless succeeded in familiarizing the public with her fierce exploration of the erotic/poetic unconscious, inciting more popular interest in women surrealists, and planting the seeds for her inclusion in another breakthrough exhibit, Surréalisme au féminin? at the Musée de Montmartre, open from 31 March to 10 September 2023.

That being said, L’écart absolu settled for what felt like a rather safe mode of display due to its emphasis on the biographical. Though it served its purpose, one cannot help but feel that the exhibition did not make the best of the opportunities presented by its unprecedented scale and ambitious catalogue, under the direction of Annie Le Brun, Dr. Annabelle Görgen-Lammers and Dr. Anna Pravdová, stopping short of establishing specific themes with equal vigor. This dissonance results in a divergence that is compromised, rather than absolute.

Agata Ida Kozuchowska is a recent graduate from the American University of Paris, where she obtained her BA in Art History with Comparative Literature. She is currently pursuing an MA in History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent School of Paris on the topic of Surrealism and Art Déco, with a particular focus on the crossings of the avant-garde with music, photography, and design.