The painting Circus by the painter Toyen was sold in a hall for 65.75 million crowns at a Sunday auction in Prague’s Mánes. Kateřina Sokolová from the organizing auction hall Adolf Loos Apartment and Gallery informed about it. With an auction surcharge of 21 percent, the new owner will pay 79.56 million crowns for the work.
This is a new author’s record of an avant-garde painter in auction sales. The starting price of the painting was 23 million crowns. The work from the 1920s returned to the market 20 years after its first auction sale, in June 2001 it was auctioned for a record record of almost 2.5 million crowns.
The oil painting was created by Toyen in 1925, it comes from her rare, collector’s prized Parisian period. It reflects the author’s painting tendencies on her first trip to the French capital. “It is one of the most important works and an example of progressive art language, with which Toyen has significantly outpaced the development of world painting,” describes the director of the auction hall, Vladimír Lekeš.
Toyen Cirkus first exhibited in 1925 at the world-famous exhibition ‘L’art d’aujourd’hui (Art of Today) in Paris, together with the painting The Harbor, which is now in the collection of the French Center Pompidou.
Toyen’s work, especially from this creative period, reaches world records on the market, and is in demand among collectors. A similar work by Toyen, called the Queen of Spades, which came from the same year last year, was auctioned by the same auction hall for a record 79 million crowns at the time.
The importance of the canvas is also evidenced by the fact that it was included on the cover of the book novel The Magical Age. The painting comes from one of the most important Czech collections.
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