"It is He": Gender, Ambiguity, and Anxiety in Toyen's Oeuvre
The body is often dislocated, de-framed, or otherwise removed from its occupant in Surrealist compositions. One might think of Dalí's nurse, gazing into the distance absent a stomach, or the various "clever" uses of female breast and buttock in collage and painting. Surrealism spanned a global style, movement, or ideology, depending on perspective. Though western Europe, and particularly France, is seen as Surrealism's center, with inferior regional assertions radiating outwards, there is a vast array of culturally informed, theoretically tethered, visually differentiated manifestations of the movement throughout the world. These Surrealist forms — not merely simple variations of a larger style — may be alternately inspired by local traditions, poetry, and politics over Freudian psychoanalysis or the unconscious state.
In Prague, interwar avant garde groups took up the mantle of Surrealism somewhat begrudgingly, only after initial critiques of the movement. Toyen, who had previously worked with the Devětsil (Nine Forces) group and started a movement called Artificialism, moved to Paris in the early 1930s and thereafter became known as one of the leading Czech Surrealists. Assigned female at birth, Toyen has also been frequently included in academic works and anthologies of great women Surrealists. While an intensely private person who left very little primary documentation or information at death, there is an indication, through an assessment of correspondence and interviews with contemporaries, that this inclusion in explicitly female compilations or sources may be erroneous. Without retroactively assigning a modern identity to the artist — who I refer to with neutral singular "they/them" pronouns in this essay as a gesture of caution and intended respect — I would like to problematize, or recontextualize, existing scholarship and further explore the themes of anxiety and ambiguity in Surrealism, particularly as it relates to Toyen's art and life, and through the lens of gender and the erotic at the height of European Surrealism.
Before thinking specifically about Toyen's work, it is necessary to understand the context of their life and of Surrealism in Prague during the interwar period, as well as the social conventions (and critical or subversive goals found in modern art movements) that either drove or inhibited the production of art during this period. Toyen was born in 1902, and left home at 16 to join an anarchist milieu in Prague. The more cosmopolitan context of Prague allowed Toyen to become involved with various art movements, including Poetism and Artificialism, which published manifestos and operated under a stated goal of "maximum imaginativeness", positive continuity, and marrying the roles of painter and poet. Artificialism, which Toyen was especially involved with, was innovative in its emphasis on reminiscence and connection to imagination and the memory. Toyen worked extensively with Jindřich Štyrský independently and in Devětsil, itself one of the longest-running and most interdisciplinary interwar avant garde groups,and the two were artistic partners and close collaborators until Štyrský's death in 1942. Given Toyen's conflation with other female artists, this is all the more notable as only three women — a dancer, a columnist, and early Surrealist supporter Katy King — were known members of Devětsil.
Influenced and encouraged by Breton and other working Surrealists outside of Prague, Toyen became a charter member of the Czech Surrealist group in 1934. Roberts argues that the utopian Parisian influence was modified in Czech contexts, where artistic and literary works focused on themes of anxiety, imagination, and the grounding between external and internal realities. While elsewhere in Europe a renewed interest in the mind and psychoanalytical theory prompted experiments with the subconscious and automatism, the political turmoil faced by Czechs seems to be a more potent and tangible influence in the art produced there. The difficulty Czech Surrealism faced in the interwar period — what Sternstein calls, ultimately, its "demise" — was tied to the Nazi invasion and occupation and subsequent failure to assert the importance of Surrealism in more governmental and bureaucratic contexts. As a result, after a 1938 exhibition in Prague, all public activity was forbidden for Toyen and other artists and intellectuals; they fled to Paris in order to escape further persecution and keep producing art, and were thus under more direct influence by the French groups working at the time.
Despite having produced prolific and diverse forms of art including children's book illustrations, paintings, and collages, Toyen is probably best known for their erotic drawings, produced mainly from the 20s to 40s, and often used to illustrate novels, poetry collections, and journals. These works typically featured fragmented images of women or sexual acts, including depictions of women touching or in proximity to disembodied phalluses. The relationship between the entirely depicted woman figure and the phallus is often complicated or connotated negatively through the use of a particular visual shorthand; for example, one piece depicts a woman, shown in a mirror, window, or frame of some kind, partially bisected by a large phallus, crossing her hands in front of her face as if in disgust; in another, the phalluses are locked away in a cage or barred window, with disembodied hands reaching out to touch them and a torso of a woman apparently watching and masturbating. Despite the anonymity or inexplicability of many of these images, they are often accompanied by a sense of humor or playfulness, such as the inclusion of clowns or thought bubbles picturing a array of penises. The tempering of the unsettling or almost violent with an unexpected, bizarre element might be read as a deflection of felt anxiety or, related to the subversive attitude of the time, a celebration and liberation of sex, desire, and the erotic.
Other drawings from the same period are more overtly Surrealist in tone: they incorporate barren landscapes and wastelands akin to some of Dalí's paintings, and may feature both skeletonized and fleshed animals and humans, often in fragmentary states. Common motifs also include empty or abandoned buildings, shattered mirrors, amorphous detritus, and cages or bars, including those in the illustrated poetry book Les spectres du désert. The absence of complete or wholly identifiable human figures in many of their works, and the apparent context of a wasteland or compromised Earth — if it is Earth — contributes to the "visualization of anxiety" and isolation alluded to and formulated in much of the Czech Surrealist output from this time, but also feels empty and uncertain in a more personalized way. Because primary writing from Toyen about their work is rather lacking, these drawings and their greater meaning must be taken in tandem largely with the visual evidence and social context we can glean from other sources. Although some of these illustrations are explicitly associated with Toyen, others are unsigned or otherwise slightly anonymized. Art historians have been able to show, for example, that published illustrations in The Erotic Review under the pseudonym X.X. are attributable to Toyen based on comparisons to their earlier work produced in the 1920s. The resistance or hesitance to outwardly claim some of these illustrations with a signature may be an attempt to create more privacy or mystery around their work, protect themself from further political persecution, or imply a greater personal attachment or connection to the content (especially given previous connections with memory-based movements like Artificialism).
Much of the contemporary scholarship on Surrealism and gender has focused on the projection of woman as muse or Other by male artists and critics; when women artists are the focus of research, it is often through an oppositional lens which examines their use of the objectifying framework or the delineation of a "women's" language or visual style which works to dismantle or subvert the more patriarchal version. Many of these ideas are extended to Toyen's work, and rightfully so; they worked under an external assumption or perception of a female identity. At the same time, many of the conclusions drawn by this scholarship about female artists working in Surrealism are challenged by facets of Toyen's art and existence, and warrant further scrutinization. Belton writes that the use of common Surrealist symbols or tropes in the production of art by women is a result of dual processes of "accommodation and subordination"; essentially, that women's art required a kind of linguistic (or in this case, visual) accommodation in order for it to be noticed and legitimized. Similarly, Chadwick writes that women's experiences in Surrealism were largely inhibited by a "lack of an erotic pictorial language" which required the adoption of male themes, motifs, or personally derived images.
The challenge posed by Toyen is their mixture of both "male" erotic imagery and the use of new metaphors and associations that do not fit cleanly within any existing gendered category — and even serve as evidence that these categories are limiting and reinforce antiquated ideas rather than seek new truths or readings. To attempt to bring the erotic and gender-oriented research on Toyen and their work into the 21st century, and to do due diligence to the goal of this paper, I will compare two pieces — a painting from the late 30s and an illustration from 1932 — and situate it within the social context and larger trends of Surrealism at the time. In so doing, I want to emphasize that these readings are simply postulations, extensions of the existing scholarship and my own formal analysis, and are in no way an attempt to historicize newer understandings of gender identity or essentialize the reading of gender in art — particularly a form that is known for celebrating the imagination, the internal, and the unconscious — which prioritize possibilities beyond the "real", or previously known.
The Abandoned Corset [see Fig. 1], a painting produced in 1937, has also been translated from the Czech as The Abandoned Burrow. Though the object in the foreground is clearly a corset, the rest of the details are rather murky. When examining the background, in particular, one might think of the decalcomania technique, coral, the structure of the brain, mold or fungi; it is grey, barren, and riddled with holes, creating an eerie tone that is underscored by the floating, empty garment. This recalls the human
body and its occupation of space and the external while emphasizing its absence. Sternstein describes such paintings as being able to "leverage the visual vocabulary of domestic femininity — the sometimes literal cages of women's garments — female uniforms whose purpose is to announce gender, effectively trapping the human as Woman — against primeval and barren backgrounds." The content is reminiscent of other Surrealist uses or explorations of corsets — Kahlo's own, that she decorated and wore throughout her lifetime, and that depicted in Remedios Varo's 1938 painting Memory of the Valkyrie — but unlike these, does not suggest a self-fashioning of power or triumph from struggle.
Toyen's method of depiction, a heightened objectification and concealment, might fall under a technique that Chadwick describes as a "self strategy": a simultaneously affirmed and denied embodiment that is relayed through the relationship of the interior (that is, the self) and the exterior (the surrounding world) through "traces, absences, or disguises". Recalling Butlerian ideas of gender — as performance, masking, or masquerade — this interpretation could be used as evidence of self-conceptualizing and commenting on the limitations of traditional gender categories or conventions, a discomfort with these expectations (as evidenced by the theme of abandonment in this particular piece), and the tension between the existence of the natural world (however ambiguously defined, or disintegrated) and the laws or rules of "nature" that are actually socially contrived. The abandoned "burrow" referred to in the original title of the piece also underscores the idea of a site to hide or conceal that has since been left; the "melting" appearance of the background and the sutured or cracked front of the corset contribute to an understanding of resistance or disintegration to the confines, real and imagined, that they symbolize.
The illustration produced in 1932, which in English sources has been untitled but in French sometimes subtitled as Hermaphrodite au coquillage (Hermaphrodite with shell), features a humanoid figure with segmented torso, limbs, and bottom half, touching a shell-vagina hybrid and gazing outward to the sea [See Fig. 2]. The person depicted is sparsely detailed, and recalls a recovered Classical Greek statue or shattered Art Deco figure; the hermaphroditic association can be attributed to the presence of breasts in the torso portion and a penis and scrotum in the lower portion — although it is possible that these segments belong to different individuals. Besides the use of bodily fragmentation and the conflation of the natural with genitals, Toyen also employs an open space that is visually distinct from the otherwise empty background to
demarcate another plane, another negotiation between the internal and the external. The "shell" seems to bring these two planes or atmospheres together by being both a bodily form and a naturally occurring object by the seashore, and may bring together the disparate bodily elements of the scene through the suggestion of erotic contact, a connection to the whole, or — most conjecturally — a suggestion of reconciliation between the seemingly disparate elements.
The interplay between masculine and feminine, and their associated artistic roles, was explored by male Surrealists, such as in Man Ray's portrait of Méret Oppenheim from 1933, but this illustration seems to gesture to something beyond an objectifying lens, and the strict binary explored in alterity and an exchange between One and Other. In this case, the "relational body," as employed by Cottenet-Hage to describe women's works specifically, might instead be at stake. The representation of the body is partially absent, with some features missing; and the elements of the body that are present are separated from one another through visible breakage. Integrity is created through this disconnect, but rather than Cottenet-Hage's suggestion that this confers a lack of "access to something beyond the parts", Toyen's image is imbued with a sensibility of transcendence beyond the material, perceived in the subject's gaze or longing towards something beyond the visual or physical plane.
Toyen's art provokes a feeling of intrigue and anxiety, often simultaneously, that is representative of the political and social climate in which they worked and a greater Surrealist interest in exploring the unknown. The Czech Surrealist group was also, as demonstrated previously, influenced by contemporaneous poetry and erotica movements. For Toyen, arguably, another influence is of gender and personal experience, though this is still a contested point due to the lack of resources on the subject. A survey of what information is available, as demonstrated through personal observations and writings by their contemporaries, is prudent to consider before making any assertive conclusions. Huebner has written most extensively on this subject, chronicling the various periods of Toyen's life with accompanying context on the political stakes and movements occurring simultaneously. Toyen's assumption of the pseudonym and their self-identification with the masculine Czech pronouns (what contemporary Karel Honzík described as "odd" and Jaroslav Seifert noted as a "little unusual and grotesque," but eventually accepted by their associates), for example, came in the midst of a burgeoning feminist movement — though the crusade for expanded women's rights was enveloped in and often took a backseat to more explicitly nationalist concerns. Sternstein argues that Toyen's use of alternately-gendered language and clothing was an act of performativity, describing them as a "transvestite of uncertain sexual orientation." Though an antiquated interpretation, this perspective also ignores that Toyen was relatively vocal about their attraction to women — despite keeping their life relatively private, they were decidedly not of a self-defined uncertain sexual orientation.
Huebner explores, instead, the idea of utilizing a pseudonym and masculine grammar as a de-gendering technique, which potentially worked to legitimize Toyen's art in a majority male sphere that, despite any purported interest in the synchronicity of collaboration between genders, often precluded the full participation of women. Polarity was occasionally used as a way of describing the complementary partnership between Toyen and Štyrský, such that their work was considered a result of an exchange of gender attributes between them. Even Toyen's assumption of the pseudonym has been linked to masculinization: either in reference to the French masculine "citoyen" ("citizen") or the Czech phrase "to je on" ("it is he"). Huebener, however, taking into account the changing social landscape — the image of the 20th century "New Woman" springs to mind — as well as the interpretations of Toyen's appearance, behavior, and self-fashioning, asserts that
"...as Toyen resisted making statements that would allow us to categorize her
more specifically than a queer artist interested in transgressive sexuality, it is
best not to try and pigeonhole her… considered biologically female but who
chose, with fairly strong social acceptance, to present herself as
gender-ambiguous."
Indeed, it might be essentialist or revisionist to make definitive statements about Toyen's identity using contemporary understandings and framings of gender. As has been shown, a lack of documentation and autobiographical material or correspondence impedes any clear, unilateral interpretation of the role of personal experience or gender identity in their art and life. The reanalysis or reimagination of queer lives in the historical and material record has been a fraught and controversial task, despite the legacy of institutional exclusion or erasure of these identities and the demonstrated need for this representation reflected throughout history. Ultimately, Toyen and their position within Surrealism and the avant-garde might best be represented using Szcześniak's framework of queerness in the visual form: of "construction, form, circulation and social function" of art rather than explicitly by the purported identity of its creator. Still, the potentialities, fracturings, and ambiguities of gender as reflected in their work is worth considering in the context of Toyen's personally enigmatic identity.
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