Description
Serigraph (1946), 26 x 36 cm, 53,5 x 63 cm (including frame), signed in print.
Volume Hide Away, War! – 9 black prints on paper with introductory poem by Jindřich Heisler, Publishing House Fr. Borový, 1st Issue, 1000 copies
Graphics with printed signatures of Toyen, in accordance with drawings from the year 1944
Origin: Antiquariat
Published in monograph Toyen, Karel Srp, Galerie hlavního města Prahy, Argo, 2000, pages 173-175 and in number of other publications.
The highest achieved price for Toyen´s work (oil on canvas) in the 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
While many respected artists became for the time of the war silent, Toyen, although she left her painting behind she all the more and intensively occupied herself by drawing.
These were coming to being always in bigger thematic cycles and after the war Toyen decided to print some of them due to their importance in small series.
In later years, when the surrealistic group more or less fell apart and the Art Scene was dominated by Abstraction and New Realism, Toyen stayed in her thinking a bit solitary.
During the World War II when Toyen still lived in Czechoslovakia (she left Prague to live permanently in Paris where she had her background and friends in the year 1947), the drawing cycles Shooting Gallery, Day and Night, Animals sleep, Hide Away, War! and illustrations to poetry Only Kestrels Piss on the Ten Commandments with Equanimity of Jindřich Heisler, were created.
The name Hide Away, War! is a quotation of poet Isidor Ducass de Lautréamont, who was admired by Prague surrealists to whom Toyen belonged since 1920s. According to the theorists of her time, Toyen´s drawings that were created between the years 1941 and 1945 are related directly to the time line of war events. The theorist Jan Mukařovský said in the introductory word to after war exhibition:”Toyen´s drawings react directly not only to the reality as a whole but also to individual moments of the timeline in which this reality moves, to specific times and turns of the war “. Although the reality of life was metaphorically hidden by surrealism, the drawings were absolutely understandable to the spectators of that time. In the cycle Hide Away, War! Toyen reached the ultimate in her interest in skeletons of animals, with which she works just the same way as if she was drawing the world of living animals. The skeletons are not complete, one could say they are wounded, but still they cry out their legacy to the world. Toyen had been depicting the end of the world by disintegrating of objects, humans and animals, in this cycle she started to animate corpses and by doing this she brought a great force to this theme. The introductory loose poem of Jindřich Heisler is full of mysterious metaphors and surrealistic references, which are for the reader of our time too distant already. But in certain moments he uses word pictures identical with the drawings of Toyen – both of them are full of insinuations and implicit meanings.
8 The Elk, Partridges
The most beautiful and the least morbid sheet of the cycle presents standing skeleton of the elk with monumental antlers, which looks very lively. As if survived its own death it is grazing now on a field together with living and content partridges and from the stump of a cut down tree there is a new sprout with buds growing. It may be possible that with the time distance this scenes looks like a breath of hope, maybe there is much more of tragedy in its deep levels. According to Heisler´s poem, the tragedy is “like an echo that comes back four times”.
Individual sheets of the cycle Hide Away, War! appear on the Art market only sporadically.
The whole bibliophile supposedly published in 1000 copies (this number is doubted by experts and it is assumed that there were many less copies) does not appear in auction houses at all.
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