Tir I - number 1 from "The Shooting Gallery" series

 

Marie Cerminova Toyen

 

1939 /1973 

photo-lithograph after drawing 

9 3/8 x 14 1/2" image size 

signed in the stone, lower right 

unnumbered, from an editioned of 575 

dated in the stone after signature 

 

buff wove 

pub;ished 

 

22443 

SOLD

"The Shooting Gallery" was a series of twelve drawings that Toyen drew after she and her fellow Surrealists/Artificialists were forced to go underground during the Nazi occupation of Prague. Unable to exhibit her personal works for the duration of the occupation, she worked as a book illustrator from 1938 until she fled in 1944 to Paris. Her drawings of a dark and forbidding alternate world, depicted as a surreal shooting gallery, were inspired by Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass". The drawings were published in Paris in 1973 in an edition of 575, with the first 10 sets hand-colored by Toyen in a special edition.