This Impossible Toyen

Malynne Sternstein

Abstract: With the highly successful retrospective of her art at Prague’s City Gallery (2000), the life and work of Toyen (née Marie Čermínová) has finally become more well-known outside of Czech- or Surrealist-specific circles. Though some forward movement has begun in the dissemination of Toyen’s reputation as a leading artist of her generation, and one who has had a lasting influence on currents in art today, her legacy continues to be constrained by readings of her work that focus on her gender (e.g., she is often called one of the great female artists of the Surrealist movement, as if this category were one that piggy-backed the greater category of “Surrealist artist”). In spite of her life-long efforts at overcoming the gender gap, she still seems to be subsumed by the very art criticism that could instead restore a fruitful dialogue to her complex art. In conceptualizing Toyen’s art in terms of its historicity and in understanding her use of anamorphosis as a hyper-realism, I add my voice to a progressive conversation.

With the highly successful retrospective of her art at Prague’s City Gallery in 2000, the life and work of Toyen (née Marie Čermínová, 1902-1980) has finally become more well known outside of highly Czech- or Surrealist-specific circles, although much has yet to be done to gain the world recognition Toyen’s art clearly deserves. While some forward movement has begun with regard to restoring Toyen’s reputation as a leading artist of her generation, as well as one who had a lasting influence on currents in art today, her legacy continues to be constrained by readings of her work that focus almost exclusively or conclusively on her gender. After Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, Toyen is often called one of the greatest female artists of the Surrealist movement, as if this category were one that piggy-backed the greater category of “Surrealist artist.” As an object of art history, gender issues and sexual politics are obvious components of the Toyen identity—parts that I would not wish to deny. Yet in spite of her life-long efforts to overcome the gender trap, Toyen remains far too subsumed under this category in the very art criticism that could potentially restore a more 42 Malynne Sternstein fruitful dialogue to her complex art. My modest ambition is to read Toyen’s work not as a gendered, sexual, or geopolitical curiosity, but rather as art that engages the situation of being-in-the-world. My goal is to read the work as art and, in so doing, add my voice to the progressive dialogue that has been undertaken to free Toyen from the limitations of such “special” considerations. Haunted by the war and the loss of her friend and artistic collaborator Jindřich Štyrský (who died in 1942 of pneumonia), and wracked by the anxiety and depression brought on by witnessing the Nazi occupation of her homeland (her compatriots incarcerated, murdered, and hunted), the art Toyen produced during World War II discovers a place that at once occupies localized concerns about selfhood and the universal “unhistorical kernel” of being. In her magnum opus, Surrealism and Sexuality (1971), Xavière Gauthier announced to the world that the “Surrealist revolution” had failed. The failure, in her account, was instigated in large measure by the movement’s inability to cope responsibly with the “second sex.” The “Surrealist woman,” she concludes, “is a male forgery” (qtd. in Belton 1995: xxi). With that judgment, Gauthier effectively rendered the abiding scholarly opinion—which eventually became a popular one—that Surrealism is consubstantial with sexism and misogyny. This hegemonic version of Surrealism reinscribes two notions/misconceptions: first, that the romantic fetishization of woman prevails in the movement’s creative manipulations; and second, that male Surrealist artists dominate their female counterparts, partitioning them from the presumed main chancel of the church of Modernity. Despite the fact that both feminist theory and feminist art criticism have moved beyond Gauthier’s formulations, the foundational misogyny that she attributed to Surrealism is still taken for granted. When the idea of Surrealism’s native gynephobia—its constitutive phallocentrism—is put on trial, the movement must seek its acquittal before study of the movement can proceed. If fault for the doggedness of the linkage between misogyny and Surrealism lies anywhere, it is with Surrealism’s critics, whose limited vistas color the movement “sexist” instead of with the (perhaps) sexist members of the movement. And so a slew of research aimed at recuperating the women of Surrealism have followed in the spirit of Gauthier’s declaration. Well-meaning academics sever women Surrealists from the movement proper and segregate them into a forever hyphenated state of being: the female Surrealist. Out of a score of possible