Jindřich Štyrský

For much of his life the Czech artist Jindrich Styrsky kept a record of his dreams, writing them down on waking and then turning them into paintings and collages. He was treating the dream as working material years before that became a Surrealist habit, and the notebooks appeared only long after his death, as a book simply called Dreams.

Styrsky rarely worked alone. From the early 1920s he was paired with the painter Toyen, born Marie Cerminova, and the two moved together through Devetsil, the Prague avant-garde group, and then on to Paris. There, late in the decade, they announced a movement of their own they named Artificialism, painting meant to work the way poetry does, without describing a thing. Back in Prague in 1934 they helped found the Czech Surrealist group.

He also ran a small erotic publishing venture and edited its magazine, and wrote studies of the poet Rimbaud and the Marquis de Sade. Weakened by a long heart condition, he died in Prague in 1942, at 42, during the German occupation, with much of his most personal work still unpublished.