2024-05-10 11:14:45
When she died in Paris in 1980, no one knew her. It did not receive its first retrospective until two decades later in Prague. Today, Toyen’s paintings are among the most prized Czech paintings from the 20th century. Her private life has recently become the subject of two productions presented in the basement studio of the Švand Theater and the attic of the Kolowrat Theater in Prague. They blend reality with a dream, but with a different aesthetic result.
In addition to the increasing value of Toyena’s paintings on the auction market, as when her oil painting was auctioned for almost 50 million crowns this Sunday, interest in the mysterious surrealist is growing even outside of fine art connoisseurs. The 2021 exhibition Snící rebelka, which the Prague National Gallery prepared with the Hamburg Kunsthalle and the Paris Museum of Modern Art, and last year’s monograph by Andrea Sedláčková with the subtitle The First Lady of Surrealism, which became the book of the year in the Lidové noviny poll, contributed to this.
The broad artistic legacy of the painter contrasts with the non-existent verbal interpretation that could be reconstructed from diaries, interviews or letters. Toyen did not give an interview on the program, she deliberately mythologized her personal life, including her origin, when she claimed that she was a child without a family. She also styled herself, as Sedláčková states at the beginning of her publication, in the role of a poor artist, a mysterious being and a woman without a love relationship, while none of these clichés were based on the truth.
Questions are also raised by the very transformation of a girl with the civil name of Marie Čermínová into an androgynous, independent artistic being called Toyen, who provoked society at the time by playing with gender. She dressed as a man and switched from feminine to masculine during the call. However, this was not so unusual for modern, emancipated female artists. The Russian symbolist Zinaida Gippius, using a male pseudonym, appeared in public under a changed identity.
Both new stage depictions of Toyen’s life work with the principle of the gradual merging of reality and dream. At the same time, it is based on the premises of the artistic direction and lifestyle that Toyen subscribed to, surrealism emphasizing the subconscious. The Štyrský/Toyen/Heisler production of the Švand Theater is signed by the director Martina Kinská, factually inspired by the book by Andrea Sedláčková, but also working with texts by the artist Jindřich Štyrský, the writer Jindřich Heisler and the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Letter to the Seer. Milena Štráfeldová wrote a monodrama based on her three-year-old novel about Toyen for the Kolowrat novelty Toyen – All the colors of solitude, or rather for its lead actress Milena Steinmasslova. To a large extent, the director of the production, Tereza Karpianus, is based on it, although she also refers to Sedláčková and other sources.
Styrian/Toyen/Heisler
Smíchovská Toyen is a woman moving between two men and apartments, studios in Radlice and Žižkov. In one, the sick painter Jindřich Štyrský lives, whom the artist takes care of shortly before his death, in the other, at her home, the poet of Jewish origin Jindřich Heisler hides from the Nazis. After the war, the artist leaves Czechoslovakia with him in anticipation of an impending communist coup, after which, after his sudden death in the early 1950s, she decides to remain completely alone in exile in Paris.
Smíchovská Toyen is played by Anežka Šťastná. | Photo: Alena Hrbková
Director Kinská has set her play in the wartime year 1942, while the initial situation of Toyena’s conversation with Heisler huddled in the bathtub of her small residence starts a series of images on the border between reality and dream.
The material distress, imbued with the fear of disclosure, but also with the exciting mutual closeness of the heroes, turns into a fever dream, in which fragments of never-realized dialogues between Toyen, Štyrský and Heisler intermingle, and the names or micro-stories of their peers from the Devětsil group or Osvobozené theater come to life. The daily life of the Nazi occupation seeps through them intensely. And that is until the finale, in which Toyen is confronted with that “terrible adventure” called solitude.
Seemingly random situations hide an internal dramatic gradation, which together with the text is formed by individual scenographic layers. The opening image works with a real bathtub, behind which there is a wall composed of white canvases of various sizes. Its deconstruction reveals a theater curtain onto which key surrealist slogans are projected. In the end, the exposed bowels of the hall, the brick surface of the walls holding the narrow longitudinal stage, will be used by the revue output of the three participants. The gradual sinking into the depth of the stage serves as a metaphor for falling into a dream or moving from a state of consciousness to the unconscious or subconscious.
In addition to the fates of the trio of artists, specific motifs pervade the scenes, such as the opening bathroom associated with hygiene – it refers to the soap factory where Toyen worked as a young worker.
Jacob Erftemeijer as Jindřich Štyrský, Mark Kristián Hochman as Jindřich Heisler and Anežka Šťastná as Toyen are pictured in the picture from the Smích production. | Photo: Alena Hrbková
The text did not avoid certain factual afterthoughts from the lives of the protagonists, but as a result, it is a fragile, poetic material, with which the director, and especially the actors, deal with the utmost empathy. With mostly subtle, intuitive performances, they make words sound in the spirit of poetry. For Toyen, although a painter, poetry was key, which she expressed through paintings, collages, illustrations, or her own life.
The main character in Švand’s theater seems to have been written on the body of the actress Anežka Šťastná, although there is a difference of 14 years between her and the painter’s age in the given period. With sharply cut features and deep dark eyes, Šťastná resembles Toyena’s face, in which tenderness is combined with determination. For the needs of the production, she chose a deeper chest tone that completes the masculine element of her figure. Jindřich Heisler, played by Mark Kristián Hochman, is a gentle, emotional young man, while Styria, played by Jacob Erftemeijer, is rather a noisier, expressively more robust man.
Everyone on stage is in perfect harmony, and in their simple costumes – with the exception of Toyen’s opening work blues – consisting of white shirts and parts of a dark suit, they look like a period black-and-white photograph. The ethereal meets the aesthetic.
Theatre
Martina Kinská: Štyrský/Toyen/Heisler
Directed by: Martina Kinská
Švandovo Theater, Prague, premiere on March 27, next reruns on May 9, 27 and 31.
All the colors of solitude
Loneliness is also a central theme in the Kolowrat Theater production. Toyen has aged significantly and turned cynical. We see her at the end of her stay in Paris as a woman in seclusion, endlessly cutting out, and above all, fabulating her story.
A letter from a French journalist eager for details from her life becomes the detonator. Several questions that he asks her in the letter cause a chain of random, seemingly unrelated images, modeled on the Surrealist method. The painter’s desires, dreams and memories come to life through her description or depiction penetrate into them. Together with Toyen representative Milena Steinmasslova, they are enlivened by a mysterious being in a green elastic leotard, played by acrobat and performer Klára Hajdinová. In the text, she is labeled as the Monster, and when she is not speaking, she swings on hanging scarves or otherwise oscillates around the scene.
In the Kolowrat production, Klára Hajdinová and Milena Steinmasslová play the role of Toyen. | Photo: Petr Florián
Avant-gardists including Toyen believed that culture would change the world. With their work, they often demonstrated the erasure of art forms and disciplines, but it had to be done with proper artistry. The Kolowrat theater is located in the attic, the distance from the floor to the ceiling is not very large, and simulating new circus aerial acrobatics in such conditions is more than unfortunate.
The moments in which Hajdinová, struggling with verbal expression, tries to fulfill a dramatic situation are similarly eccentric. But the original contains a minimum of these, and the direction further dilutes them with often incomprehensible, volatile solutions from one idea to another. Bizarre fads will not justify the argument of free association.
The stage actions kill the text so much that in the end even the character of Toyen herself disappears. Which is a shame, because if the production has a support in anything, it is precisely in the casting of Milena Steinmasslová, the recent winner of the Czech Lion for her performance in the film Silent Secret. Moments in which she is not forced to physically overpower her body and try to involve hanging scarves in the action, when instead she relies on years of chiseled verbal expression, evoke a completely different, believable stage face of Toyena.
If the Smích version is harmony for the eyes, the Kolowrat version disturbs them with its eclectic dissonance. White scarves – rolled up as if symbolizing hanged men – along with a massive, slowly melting ice cube hanging from the ceiling are complemented by a ship’s trunk covered with a non-specific furry fabric, plush toys reminiscent of genitalia or an almost contemporary issue of a porn magazine.
In the end, the production disrupts the boundary between the stage and the auditorium, when Hajdinová, as a cabaret performer or presenter, invites the audience to a surreal play. The hall collectively bids whether the tomato is more of a woman or a man, and to what animal would Toyen be compared on first impression.
However, as is well known, the surrealists were not exactly forged theater artists. The desire of this production to get as close as possible to their non-dramatic perception of the theater appears to be wrong in the finale.
Theatre
Milena Štráfeldová: Toyen – All colors of solitude
Directed by: Tereza Karpianus
Kolowrat Theatre, Prague, premiere April 26, next rerun June 19.