Toyen, Spící (1937)

Toyen, Spící (1937)
http://kultura.idnes.cz/podivejte-se-jak-vypada-marne-cekani-od-toyen-ktere-se-drazi-za-20-milionu-1ak-/vytvarneum.aspx?c=A090312_102133_vytvarneum_jaz
The title means Sleeping. The referenced source media article’s title says :
Look what futile waiting by Toyen looks like…
Incidentally, Toyen was a rebel, even more so than Margaret Sanger – or rather, Sanger would next to her probably not qualify for the rebel label… See Description of the image file for more about Toyen: https://biozhena.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/why-too-many-young-and-not-so-young-ladies-could-not-receive-flowers-on-mothers-day-why-so-many-trying-to-conceive-why-so-much-infertility/toyen-spici-1937/

It is not likely that Toyen would have had this in mind, but I present her art to highlight the predicament of unfulfilled yearning for a baby.
To highlight this: The probability of becoming pregnant is critically dependent on whether the insemination (natural or artificial) occurs at the right time, within the fertile window. This is because the probability of pregnancy is a combination of four individual probabilities: 1. Probability of being in good health, 2. of successful insemination, 3. of not miscarrying the conceptus, and 4. the probability of correct timing of the conceptive intercourse. For example, a 60% success rate of correct timing brings the overall probability of pregnancy down to a mere 36%, and this goes down to a mere 30% if correct timing probability is only 50%, in healthy fertile couples assuming the probability #3 (not miscarrying the conceptus) at an optimistic 75%. Even if the probability of determining the insemination time correctly were 90%, the resulting probability of successful pregnancy from any one particular insemination event would be only 55%. Get this! Only 55% under perfect ideal conditions, which include a young healthy unstressed woman.

Toyen (Prague 1902 – Paris 1980) was a leading Czech Surrealist who played an important role in the International Surrealist movement.

This Description is quoted from: http://www.galerieart.cz/toyen__zivotopis.htm

From artistic, political and personal points of view, she was one of the most independent creative artists in the last century. Toyen rejected her name (Marie Cerminova) and chose to pursue her career as an artist under an assumed name – a mysterious name without a gender. She broke all links to her family in favour of several friends who were “bound by choice”. Toyen protested against bourgeois tendencies and endorsed the anarchist movement. She disclaimed any suggestion that she play a traditional woman’s role by leading an independent way of life and, on the other hand, displaying no compromise for the quality of her work.

Although Toyen’s life was full of personal turbulences and misfortunes, her work retained authenticity and inner consistency. In the early 1920s, she began her lifelong friendship with the Czech painter, photographer and poet, Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942). This was a remarkable union of two individuals who inspired, influenced and complemented each other. In 1923, they joined a young avantgarde artists’ association Devetsil. In her early works, Toyen played with post-Cubism with puristic impulses. In mid-1920s, however, she created a series of naive paintings with hedonistic motifs. At the end of 1926, Toyen and Styrsky left Prague and moved to Paris. In the following year, they announced their own alternative to both of the leading avantgarde trends in Paris, Abstraction and Surrealism – Artificialism.

By the end of the 1920s, Toyen’s work become sufficiently Surrealist. In 1934, she became one of the founding members of the Czech Surrealist Group in Prague, which was in close cooperation with Breton’s group. In 1935, Andre Breton and the poet Paul Eluard came to Prague and began a lifelong friendship with Toyen, interrupted only by the Nazi invasion and conquest of Czechoslovakia. During the years of the occupation, Toyen’s art went underground as Surrealism was another of the “Degenerate” art movements banned by the Nazis, and Toyen, although she worked throughout the war years, could not exhibit. After the war, she showed her work briefly in Prague before fleeing to Paris in 1947 to escape the Communist takeover. Back in Paris, she worked until the end of her life with Breton and the French poet Benjamin Peret, as well as with Czech poet Jindrich Heisler.

Toyen regarded painting as a natural need free of any ambition. She never conformed to the demands and claims of gallery owners and art critics. Exhibiting her paintings was an opportunity to express her friendship with Surrealist poets, who wrote poems for her or texts for her catalogues. The French edition of Toyen monograph from 1953 includes works by André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Jindřich Heisler.

After her death, a retrospective of her work and of her collaborations with her Czech colleagues was shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and in the following years, a number of important retrospectives were held.

Image from (Zdroj obrazu): http://kultura.idnes.cz/podivejte-se-jak-vypada-marne-cekani-od-toyen-ktere-se-drazi-za-20-milionu-1ak-/vytvarneum.aspx?c=a090312_102133_vytvarneum_jaz