Toyen created the nine-part drawing cycle Hide Away, War! in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. The National Gallery Prague describes a world filled with anxiety, threat and destruction, yet Toyen avoided straightforward documentation of wartime suffering. In the drawings, skeletal animal forms inhabit dry, strangely open landscapes and can appear almost alive. The scenes are rendered with enough precision to feel real while remaining impossible.
That choice interests me. Direct representation can tell us what an event looked like. Surrealism can approach something harder to document: what persistent danger does to imagination. When ordinary reality becomes threatening enough, perhaps the nightmare no longer needs exaggerated monsters. A skeleton behaving as if it were alive can be enough. Toyen’s drawings do not remove themselves from history by becoming dreamlike. They show how history can invade the dream.
