Pure is the Night: The Alchemy of Toyen

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Of all the visionary artists to fundamentally alter the way I view art, no one shook me quite like Toyen. Where this obscure poet-painter went in the unconscious, to me, is deepest in the ocean of night. Perhaps what she captured through her Surrealist inquiry was that which humanity needs most: radical new modes of imagining.

In 2024, HEXENTEXTE announced the publication of HYENA to mark the centennial of André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism. Edited by Cindy Rehm and Adrienne Walser, the publication includes works that look to the legacy of women’s surrealism, explorations of identity, inner-life, corporeality, ritual, eroticism, animality, and mortality. My writings from The Book of Embers on Toyen were published alongside other contributors.

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“That which inevitably changes mankind and the world,” writes Annie Le Brun in Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel, “also suddenly makes visible, through the strange conditions of happenstance, how pathways determine shapes. But also, how the shapes that matter to us are perhaps born of the confluence of currents that carry us.” The enigma of the image carried Toyen, in Breton’s word’s, to the impregnable core of night, where the enigma, compounded, donned its infinite, other face, which she shaped, on canvas after canvas, into being reclaimed.

Toyen’s desire to know desire, lured as she was to the most hidden recesses of the imagination with unwavering devotion, impassioned even in depictions of vanquished meaning, carried with it an implicit burden—what Le Brun calls savage lucidity.

I wonder how Toyen carried this lucidity in the final arc of her solitary life, after Breton died and the Surrealists disbanded. She was given Breton’s Paris apartment by his family where she would live out the rest of her days. Making and morphing, fed by her loyalty in friendship, fed by the images, I yearn to imagine her free.