Andrea Sedlackova – Toyen: La baronne subversive du surréalisme AKA, Toyen: The Baroness of Surrealism (2022)
If Leonora Carrington was England’s “lost surrealist” the Czech title must surely go to Marie Cermínová, AKA Toyen or “the baroness” to her friends – a name that characterised her remote and somewhat aloof bearing. Like Leonora Carrington, Toyen’s life contained much hardship and loss and the art of both women reflected their intense inner suffering. Toyen knew hunger and poverty and watched those she loved dying around her, one by one.
In 1947, when she finally inherited a life-changing sum of money from a bequest, she left her native Prague and moved to Paris with her friend, the poet Jindrich Heisler. There, she exhibited with the French Surrealists and renewed the close friendships with Andre Breton and his circle that she’d formed on an earlier visit. But she left her money in the one bank in Prague that allowed foreign withdrawals. After only a year of living free from poverty for the first time in her adult life, she lost all her money when the Communists took over Prague in the Czechoslovak coup d’état of 1948.
Toyen was what we would now call gender fluid. She identified using the Czech language’s masculine form and sometimes dressed in working men’s clothes, although she enjoyed romantic friendships with both sexes. Her interest in sex is evident in much of her art and her exploration of gender stereotypes has made her something of a cult figure in recent years.
Quote:
Long considered a marginal figure, it was not until her death in 1980, when her estate was auctioned off, that Toyen’s masterpieces finally saw the light of day. Marie Cerminova, known as Toyen, was born in 1902 in a working-class neighbourhood of Prague. She left her family at the age of 16 guided by her one true wish: she wanted the freedom to create. A portrait of an important figure of the European artistic avant-garde in the 20th century.
840MB | 54m 52s | 1280×720 | mkv
https://nitro.download/view/83D48D48DA24B39/Toyen_-_The_Baroness_of_Surrealism_(2022).mkv
Language(s):Czech
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)
