Toyen and her paintings.

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This is just short blog on Toyen (artistic name of Marie Cerminova) a famous female painter, whom I like very much, mostly her painting of flowers and surrealistic visions of heavy clouds and butterflies.

One can rarely see her drawings and paintings, as majority of them are in France. This year it was 110th anniversary of her birth.
She referred to herself in the masculine gender, what gave her artistic name Toyen (In Czech it means “that´s he”). Many of her colourful sketches and paintings were enormously erotic and I was really surprised what was possible to publish in thirties, lol. She also illustrated Marquis de Sade’s Justine of which Styrsky, her partner, was the Czech publisher…by the way :)
Toyen was important member of Czechoslovak Surrealistic movement. Forced underground during the Nazi occupation she and her partner fled to Paris before the Communist takeover Czechoslovakia (1948). She died in Paris in 1980.

• 22 Dec, 2012
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