(1975) Collage III
Toyen

Popis

Double-faced collage, 1970s, 31 x 21 cm, 45 x 35 cm (including frame). Signed in the right lower corner by authorial stamp: SUCCESSION TOYEN
Origin: estate of deceased Toyen, Paris
Published in monograph Toyen, Karel Srp, Galerie hlavního města Prahy, Argo, 2000, page 274-277
The highest achieved price for Toyen´s work (oil on canvas) in the foreign auction sale – 700 thousand €, May 2016, Auction House Thierry-Lannon & Associés in Brest

The highest price achieved in the home auction sale – 36 million CZK in the year 2017, Galerie Kodl
Video record from the auction
The highest price achieved in the home auction sale for print – 216 thousand CZK in the year 2012, Galerie Kodl
The highest price achieved in the home auction sale for drawing – 1.1 million CZK in the year 2009

Toyen occupied herself with collages continuously for her whole life; often she used them in illustrations. Joining together objects, that do not have anything in common except using imagination, was the basic principle of the surrealistic work. In the end of 1960s, Toyen was intensively collecting and sorting newspaper and magazine clippings, her private archive counted thousands of items. In the 1970s she started to create small albums for her private use where she combined in the spirit of her imagination fragments of human bodies, animals, objects, landscapes, illustrations, manuals. For the last fifteen years of her life Toyen was choosing items from the envelopes sorted by themes and she was associatively arranging the clippings to small panels that resemble visual manuals. She did not project any new images but the clippings were additively laid one by one – themes close and distant, antagonistic and related, figural and material, coloured and black-and-white. Most often there are appearing female erotic and sex offering bodies – theorists attribute Toyen´s attitude to female body to her unfulfilled desire. The sexual orientation of Toyen, who used asexual pseudonym and stylized herself as a male, can be only speculated about. We do not know much about her private life, there are no testimonies or diaries. There is only one thing that is clear: The Art was synonymizing the Life itself for Toyen. Her relationships were the part of it.
The front side of this album is Toyen´s the most female and moving confession: the set of female mouths of various colours she could not miss out and therefore they cover almost the whole space of the collage. The mouth was in many paintings the analogy of female sex organ and this slit in the appearance of a smile is present on number of paintings. Nevertheless, the mouths here represent the woman in whole and are amended by the most romantic scenes only. But, the rear side reminds us again of the fact that life is fight and relationships are affected by tragedies. The Art for Toyen meant poetry and poetry is based on no lying. Among many favourite contrast scenes there is, suddenly, a lonely little figure with an umbrella here.
Supposedly there are some three hundred of these albums preserved. After the death of Toyen in 1980 they were stamped “Succession Toyen“ by the administrator of her estate, Vincent Wapler and temporarily deposited in Musée Georges Pompidou. When the estate after deceased Toyen was claimed by Czech heirs, these albums were in 1982 auctioned off in famous auction house in Paris, Drouot.
The albums coming from this private collection were exhibited on retrospective Toyen in the year 2000 in Dům u kamenného zvonu. On the Czech market, they appeared only recently.

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