|
|
Art of the 20th Century
Toyen
Toyen(Marie Cerminova)
(b Prague, 21 Sept 1902; d Paris, 9 Nov 1980). Bohemian painter, draughtsman and illustrator. She attended the School of Fine Arts in Prague (1919–20). In 1922 she met the painter Jindrich Styrsky with whom she collaborated until his death in 1942. In 1923 the couple joined the avant-garde Devetsil group in Prague. The group numbered artists, photographers, writers and architects among its members. During a three-year stay in Paris from 1925 to 1928 Toyen abandoned the Cubist syntax of her early work and began a series of impastoed semi-abstract paintings. Fjord (1928; Prague, N.G., Sternberk Pal.), along with other works of those years, attempted to realize visually the doctrines of poetic Artificialism in which impressions, feelings and images leave their imprint in abstract traces and vibrating colour sensations. Work of this type was given its label by Toyen and Styrsky to differentiate it from their earlier work and from other abstract forms of contemporary art. They exhibited their first Artificialist compositions in Paris at the Galerie de l’Art Contemporain in 1926.
