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Lot Essay
Suffused by a strange, otherworldly atmosphere, Le devenir de la liberté (The Future of Freedom) is a compelling, elusive painting by the Czech Surrealist Toyen. Marrying suggestive, dream-like imagery with a meticulously detailed technique, the work conjures a curious scene in which the organic, natural world appears to overtake the domestic sphere. Executed in 1946, the composition came at a pivotal moment in Toyen’s career, as she emerged from six years of hiding and confinement, and began to reengage with the avant-garde art circles that had been squashed during the Second World War. As a result, the painting offers an important insight into the ways in which Toyen’s style had matured and changed during the War years, reaching a new level of directness and clarity, as she balanced dream and realism, the fantastic with the familiar, to generate powerful, challenging images.
Born Marie Čermínová in Prague in 1902, the artist left home at the age of sixteen to join an anarchist group, a move that was both a bid for freedom and a defiant rejection of traditional expectations for a young woman her age. Shortly thereafter, she adopted the ambiguous, gender-neutral pseudonym, Toyen. Though no explanation was ever given for this radical shift in identity, the name plays on both the French word citoyen (citizen) and the Czech phrase ‘to je on,’ meaning ‘it is he.’ Toyen frequently dressed in men’s clothing and would use first-person masculine constructions when speaking in Czech, favouring a fluid identity that defied conventional gender norms.
Having initially worked in an abstract idiom, Toyen discovered Surrealism in the early 1930s and quickly carved out a reputation as a purveyor of imaginative landscapes and erotically-tinged works that challenged and subverted reigning social mores and artistic ideals. She was among the founding members of the official Czech Surrealist Group, who were closely associated with their Parisian counterparts during these years, sharing an interest in similar themes and subjects, ideas and techniques. Prague at this time was a flourishing centre for the literary and artistic avant-garde, receptive to the radical ideas and concepts of the Surrealists thanks to the ground-breaking Devětsil group, which had led the charge for the avant-garde a decade prior. In January 1935, the first exhibition of Czech Surrealist art opened at the Mánes gallery and, although Breton did not make the opening as planned, he travelled to Prague later that year to deliver a series of lectures on Surrealism, which were greeted with great enthusiasm. ‘Surrealism finds itself in a fantastic position here, totally exceptional,’ Breton reported in a letter to Salvador Dalí (A. Pradová, A. Le Brun and A. Görgen-Lammers, eds., The Dreaming Rebel: Toyen, exh. cat., Národní Galerie, Prague, 2021, p. 111).
Toyen exhibited 24 works at this ground-breaking show, and decided to travel to Paris that summer to expand her connections, arriving in the French capital in mid-June. There, she met many of her fellow Surrealists for the first time, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, Benjamin Péret and Yves Tanguy, with whom Toyen enjoyed a close friendship for many years. Visiting artists at their studios and taking in exhibitions around the city, Toyen immersed herself in the fervent, imaginative atmosphere of Parisian Surrealist circles. This seminal trip not only reaffirmed Toyen’s visionary aesthetic, it opened her work to a new international audience – over the ensuing years, her paintings and collages were included in a number of seminal publications and important exhibitions dedicated to the Surrealist movement, including The First International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, the Exposition internationale du surréalisme in Paris in 1937, and a touring show organised by Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose and Georges Hugnet, which travelled through Japan before the outbreak of the War.
However, these stimulating exchanges ground to a sudden halt in March 1939, as the German army marched on Czechoslovakia, marking the beginning of a dark six-year period under Occupation that was filled with terror, deprivation, arrests and unpredictable violence. Toyen and her fellow Surrealists in Prague were prohibited from exhibiting their work publicly under the Nazi regime’s repressive cultural policies, and many were forced to go underground, for fear of persecution. Toyen continued to work clandestinely through the War, creating drawings, collages and illustrated books that criticised censorship and the occupying forces in a dangerous, defiant act of resistance. She also sheltered her close friend and artistic collaborator, the Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler, from the authorities for many years during the Occupation, risking her own life by allowing him to hide in the tiny bathroom of her apartment. In light of these oppressive circumstances, Toyen produced only a small number of paintings during the War, which she diligently hid until the end of the conflict. At this time, her work turned increasingly figurative, moving away from the ethereal, phantom-like forms that had populated her canvases during the late 1930s, and instead focusing on an intense realism that heightened the drama and sense of the uncanny in her scenes.
Dating to 1946, Le devenir de la liberté was among the first new works Toyen completed following the end of the Second World War, as Europe emerged from the chaos. There is an unsettling sense of strangeness within the scene, which pivots on the incongruous appearance of the incredibly verdant plant-life at the centre of the composition. Here, a dense mass of peas takes the form of a human being, suggesting a sinuous body has been concealed beneath layers upon layers of the shiny green vegetables. Amid the tight cascade of leaves, tendrils and ripening pods, the character takes shape, though it remains unclear whether this is a hybrid figure (part-human, part-plant), an odd, organic disguise, designed to hide the individual from prying eyes, or simply a strange coincidence in which the natural growth of the plant is merely suggestive of a human form. In a way, Toyen’s character recalls the fantastical portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who moulded his figures from a playful, yet methodically constructed arrangement of foods, plants and objects. Here however, the figure remains startlingly ambiguous, never quite coalescing into a recognisable individual.
Above, a flock of swallows soars through the air, their lithe, dark bodies standing out against a trompe l’oeil sky scattered with wispy clouds. Together, the motifs invoke the idea of springtime, imbuing the picture with an air of renewal and hope. A similar atmosphere suffuses Toyen’s composition L’avant printemps from 1945 (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), where butterflies flutter and settle on stone cairns amid a desolate landscape, a symbol of rebirth and beauty that contrasts sharply with the dark scars of war. In Le devenir de la liberté, however, instead of the vast, open vista the viewer may expect, Toyen paints the scene into a corner, adding a sharp edge or seam that runs vertically through the sky, indicating the juncture between two walls. The bands of clouds appear to angle upwards slightly as they approach this point, while perched high-up in the corner sits a swallow’s nest, built into the sharp recessive point, so that it appears to hang, weightless in mid-air. Conjoining the internal and external worlds in this way, Toyen creates a strange slippage between the two, challenging our understanding of perspective and depth within the picture and suggesting a space that is at once expansive yet constricted.
Born Marie Čermínová in Prague in 1902, the artist left home at the age of sixteen to join an anarchist group, a move that was both a bid for freedom and a defiant rejection of traditional expectations for a young woman her age. Shortly thereafter, she adopted the ambiguous, gender-neutral pseudonym, Toyen. Though no explanation was ever given for this radical shift in identity, the name plays on both the French word citoyen (citizen) and the Czech phrase ‘to je on,’ meaning ‘it is he.’ Toyen frequently dressed in men’s clothing and would use first-person masculine constructions when speaking in Czech, favouring a fluid identity that defied conventional gender norms.
Having initially worked in an abstract idiom, Toyen discovered Surrealism in the early 1930s and quickly carved out a reputation as a purveyor of imaginative landscapes and erotically-tinged works that challenged and subverted reigning social mores and artistic ideals. She was among the founding members of the official Czech Surrealist Group, who were closely associated with their Parisian counterparts during these years, sharing an interest in similar themes and subjects, ideas and techniques. Prague at this time was a flourishing centre for the literary and artistic avant-garde, receptive to the radical ideas and concepts of the Surrealists thanks to the ground-breaking Devětsil group, which had led the charge for the avant-garde a decade prior. In January 1935, the first exhibition of Czech Surrealist art opened at the Mánes gallery and, although Breton did not make the opening as planned, he travelled to Prague later that year to deliver a series of lectures on Surrealism, which were greeted with great enthusiasm. ‘Surrealism finds itself in a fantastic position here, totally exceptional,’ Breton reported in a letter to Salvador Dalí (A. Pradová, A. Le Brun and A. Görgen-Lammers, eds., The Dreaming Rebel: Toyen, exh. cat., Národní Galerie, Prague, 2021, p. 111).
Toyen exhibited 24 works at this ground-breaking show, and decided to travel to Paris that summer to expand her connections, arriving in the French capital in mid-June. There, she met many of her fellow Surrealists for the first time, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, Benjamin Péret and Yves Tanguy, with whom Toyen enjoyed a close friendship for many years. Visiting artists at their studios and taking in exhibitions around the city, Toyen immersed herself in the fervent, imaginative atmosphere of Parisian Surrealist circles. This seminal trip not only reaffirmed Toyen’s visionary aesthetic, it opened her work to a new international audience – over the ensuing years, her paintings and collages were included in a number of seminal publications and important exhibitions dedicated to the Surrealist movement, including The First International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, the Exposition internationale du surréalisme in Paris in 1937, and a touring show organised by Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose and Georges Hugnet, which travelled through Japan before the outbreak of the War.
However, these stimulating exchanges ground to a sudden halt in March 1939, as the German army marched on Czechoslovakia, marking the beginning of a dark six-year period under Occupation that was filled with terror, deprivation, arrests and unpredictable violence. Toyen and her fellow Surrealists in Prague were prohibited from exhibiting their work publicly under the Nazi regime’s repressive cultural policies, and many were forced to go underground, for fear of persecution. Toyen continued to work clandestinely through the War, creating drawings, collages and illustrated books that criticised censorship and the occupying forces in a dangerous, defiant act of resistance. She also sheltered her close friend and artistic collaborator, the Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler, from the authorities for many years during the Occupation, risking her own life by allowing him to hide in the tiny bathroom of her apartment. In light of these oppressive circumstances, Toyen produced only a small number of paintings during the War, which she diligently hid until the end of the conflict. At this time, her work turned increasingly figurative, moving away from the ethereal, phantom-like forms that had populated her canvases during the late 1930s, and instead focusing on an intense realism that heightened the drama and sense of the uncanny in her scenes.
Dating to 1946, Le devenir de la liberté was among the first new works Toyen completed following the end of the Second World War, as Europe emerged from the chaos. There is an unsettling sense of strangeness within the scene, which pivots on the incongruous appearance of the incredibly verdant plant-life at the centre of the composition. Here, a dense mass of peas takes the form of a human being, suggesting a sinuous body has been concealed beneath layers upon layers of the shiny green vegetables. Amid the tight cascade of leaves, tendrils and ripening pods, the character takes shape, though it remains unclear whether this is a hybrid figure (part-human, part-plant), an odd, organic disguise, designed to hide the individual from prying eyes, or simply a strange coincidence in which the natural growth of the plant is merely suggestive of a human form. In a way, Toyen’s character recalls the fantastical portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who moulded his figures from a playful, yet methodically constructed arrangement of foods, plants and objects. Here however, the figure remains startlingly ambiguous, never quite coalescing into a recognisable individual.
Above, a flock of swallows soars through the air, their lithe, dark bodies standing out against a trompe l’oeil sky scattered with wispy clouds. Together, the motifs invoke the idea of springtime, imbuing the picture with an air of renewal and hope. A similar atmosphere suffuses Toyen’s composition L’avant printemps from 1945 (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), where butterflies flutter and settle on stone cairns amid a desolate landscape, a symbol of rebirth and beauty that contrasts sharply with the dark scars of war. In Le devenir de la liberté, however, instead of the vast, open vista the viewer may expect, Toyen paints the scene into a corner, adding a sharp edge or seam that runs vertically through the sky, indicating the juncture between two walls. The bands of clouds appear to angle upwards slightly as they approach this point, while perched high-up in the corner sits a swallow’s nest, built into the sharp recessive point, so that it appears to hang, weightless in mid-air. Conjoining the internal and external worlds in this way, Toyen creates a strange slippage between the two, challenging our understanding of perspective and depth within the picture and suggesting a space that is at once expansive yet constricted.