The circus is also in third place in the ranking of the most expensive paintings sold at auctions in the Czech Republic, behind the painting Old Prague motif by Bohumil Kubišta, which a buyer gave for 123.6 million crowns this May, and Divertimento II by František Kupka, which was sold in November 2020 for 90.24 million crowns, said Miloš Svoboda on behalf of the organizing company European Arts.

“This was an extraordinary opportunity for domestic collectors or investors. Similar works of this quality are practically unavailable on the market today.” introduced to the picture by Toyen Svoboda.

The work Hidden in their reflections was exhibited at the pan-European Toyen retrospective, which took place in the last two years at the National Gallery in Prague, the Kunsthalle Deutschland in Hamburg and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. “Toyen did a great job to work with dusk and dawn, with the hour between the dog and the wolfas her surrealist friends called this state,” said Karel Srp in his review of the painting.

There is traditionally a lot of interest in Toyen’s works. her painting entitled The Lonely Ones from 1934 was sold at auction this May for 54 million crowns, including a 20 percent auction markup.

Toyen (1902 to 1980), real name Marie Čermínová, is according to experts one of the most remarkable personalities of Czech and European fine arts of the 20th century. Between 1925 and 1929, she worked in Paris, where, together with Jindřich Štyrský, she developed the original Czech painting direction – 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 loyal to the surrealist movement. In her work, she also reflected on war disasters, and the theme of eroticism pervades her entire work.

In 2000, the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague prepared a large retrospective exhibition of her. it was visited by almost 70,000 viewers at the time, which is a number unheard of in domestic gallery operations today. The great collector’s value of Toyen’s work also leads to the fact that the author is one of the artists who are most often counterfeited in the country.

The auction also included a famous painting by Josef Lady called Christmas Day with a starting price of 1.9 million, as well as works by František Kupka and Mikuláš Medek. You can view in the gallery: