Toyen With Idea(l)s

Marie Čermínová Toyen, Messages de la forêt, 1936

This actually happened to me once, but because I am not so wise and not so near a real forest, instead of an owl I had a pigeon dive onto my head and dig its claws into my skull, as I walked home from the Champ de Mars, still walking on the gravelly paths, but so near the pavement.

A few days before that happened, I dreamt an eagle or hawk or another menacing flying predator was about to attack my face, coming in the living room window as I slept.

So when I saw this painting for the first time in the Dark Romanticism exhibit in the Orsay (l'Ange du Bizarre), I knew the feeling it conveyed and the idea Toyen played with in it.

Quite apart from that, the painting itself is pretty exceptional, the contrast of this shade of blue, usually so soothing and here suddenly menacing, in the dark background... the disembodied head of a woman, head claimed by nature's "wisdom".

I like it loadsly.    

I looked up Toyen's paintings/drawings after I saw this one, was v impressed by some of them, and wondered why she's not mentioned in the same breath as Miro' and Dalì and Ernst, Tanguy and Picasso.  Well, she is now.