André Breton, Marcel Duchamp: Prière de toucher [Touch, please]

1947

Catalogue of the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 at the Gallery Maeght
Toyen: black and white lithograph (24 × 21 cm)
Published by Maeght Editeur, Éditions Pierre à Feu, Paris, 1947
Print run: 999 copies were printed on vellum paper supérieur, of which 49 copies marked I–XLIX were signed by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp and 950 copies were numbered 1–950. It includes 24 original artworks, including 5 coloured lithographs by Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Jacques Hérold, Wifredo Lama and Joan Miró; 5 etchings by Marcel Jean, Mario, Yves Tanguy and Dorothea Tanning, of which one was coloured by Hans Bellmer; 2 wood engravings by Jean Arp and 12 black and white lithographs by Serge Brignoni, Alexander Calder, Bruno Capacci, Élisabeth van Damm, Julie de Diego, Enrico Donati, David Hare, Jacqueline Lamb, Matta, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy and Toyen. Etchings were printed by Lacourière, wood engravings, coloured and black and white lithographs by the Mourlot brothers. In addition, the full edition includes 44 separate folders with illustrations and 20 drawings.
Printed by the l'Imprimerie Union with the contribution of Jacques Kober on 27 June 1947
The cover is an original of an object by Marcel Duchamp in collaboration with Enrico Donati.
24 × 21 cm, unpaginated
Copy No. 822

TOYEN-ČERMÍNOVÁ MARIE

From 1917 to 1922 she studied at the School of Applied Art in Prague in the studio of decorative painting headed by Professor Emanuel Dítě. From the outset she behaved as an exceptionally free woman and a radical one by the standards of the day. A crucial moment in Toyen’s career was her meeting with her future partner and closest friend, the painter Jindřich Štyrský. In 1923 she joined the Devětsil group and the Mánes artists’ association. In 1925 she and Jindřich Štyrský left together for Paris, where they would soon present their own artistic movement that they called Artificialism. The movement oscillated between abstraction and Surrealism and was also inspired by Imaginative Art. On her return from France in 1934 she and Štyrský established the Surrealist Group. She spent the war years in Prague and was forced to work underground with no opportunity to exhibit. After the war she left Czechoslovakia before the Communist dictatorship was established and settled for good in Paris. She continued to associated with the foremost representatives of Surrealism André Breton and Benjamin Péret and she continued to create in the spirit of late Surrealism until the 1970s.