Toyen - Surrealist Artist

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Marie Čermínová (21 September 1902, Prague – 9 November 1980, Paris), known as Toyen, was a Czech painter, drafter and illustrator and a member of the surrealist movement.

From 1919 to 1920, Toyen attended UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design) in Prague. She worked closely with fellow Surrealist poet and artist Jindřich Štyrský until Štyrský's death. They joined the Devětsil group in 1923 and exhibited with the group. In the early 1920s Toyen travelled to Paris, and soon returned there with Štyrský. While living in Paris, the two founded an artistic alternative to Abstraction and Surrealism, which they dubbed Artificialism. They returned to Prague in 1928.
Toyen referred to herself/himself in the masculine case out of rejection for gender in true avant-garde fashion. She purposefully cast aside the confining trappings of femininity in order to access the almost exclusively male modernist art world. Toyen's sketches, book illustrations, and paintings were frequently erotic and she contributed erotic sketches for Štyrský's Eroticka Revue (1930–33)
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