Painter Toyen’s 1956 work Hidden in their paintings sold at Sunday’s auction in Prague’s Municipal House for 34.7 million SEK, including a 24% auction margin. The starting price was 18 million crowns. The most expensive Toyen work sold at a home auction remains the Circus painting, for which the new owner paid the final price of 79.56 million crowns last year.
Several online and telephone bidders fought for Hidden in their Reflections in the auction. “This was an extraordinary opportunity for domestic collectors or investors. Similar works of this quality are practically unobtainable on the market today,” said Miloš Svoboda of European Arts, which organized the auction.
The work Hidden in their reflections has been exhibited in Toyen’s pan-European retrospective, which has taken place over the past two years at the National Gallery in Prague, the Kunsthalle Deutschland in Hamburg and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.
“Toyen was able to work brilliantly with dusk and dawn, with the hour between dog and wolf, as her surrealist friends called this state,” said Karel Srp in his assessment of the painting.
Sunday’s auction in the Sala Grégro of the Municipal House offered collectors and the public a total of 250 classic and modern art objects. Collectors spent nearly 117 million kronor and 82% of the items offered were successfully auctioned. Among other million-dollar items, works by František Kupka, Václav Brožík, Mikuláš Medek and Josef Šíma were auctioned. A total of 21 guns passed the one million mark.
There is traditionally much interest in Toyen’s works. His painting titled The Lonely Ones from 1934 was auctioned in May this year for SEK 54 million, including a 20% auction margin.
The most expensive Toyen work sold at a domestic auction remains the Circus painting, which also ranks third in the ranking of the most expensive paintings sold at auctions in the Czech Republic. And the one behind Bohumil Kubišta’s Old Prague motive, for which a buyer paid 123.6 million SEK this May, and František Kupka’s opera Divertimento II, which was sold in November 2020 for 90.24 million SEK.
Toyen (1902-1980), real name Marie Čermínová, is, according to experts, one of the most extraordinary personalities of the Czech and European visual arts of the 20th century.
Between 1925 and 1929 he worked in Paris, where, together with Jindřich Štyrský, he developed the original direction of Czech painting – artificialism, which represented a unique and poetic alternative to the geometric abstraction and surrealism of the time. Toyen finally returned to the metropolis above the Seine in 1947 and remained faithful to the Surrealist movement. In his work he also reflects on the disasters of war and the theme of eroticism pervades all of his work.
In 2000, the Prague Capital Gallery prepared a major retrospective exhibition of his. It was visited by almost 70,000 spectators at the time, a number unheard of in national gallery operations today. The great collectible value of Toyen’s work also leads to the fact that the author is one of the most frequently counterfeited artists in the country.
