 Hello and welcome everybody. Thank you all for coming to today's program, which features author and art historian Carla Huebner discussing her latest book, Magnetic Woman, Toyin and the Surrealist Erotic. While we're waiting for the two people to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a few of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the public library, we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone tribal people and to acknowledge the many Ramatish Ohlone tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside and work. Our libraries committed to uplifting the names of these families and community members and we encourage you to learn more about First Person Rights. SFPL Summer Stride Literacy Program is continuing through August. Summer Stride is the library's annual summer learning, reading and exploration program for all ages and abilities. Join us for author talks, reading us book giveaways, nature experiences and more. You can register today by visiting our website, sfpl.org. This Tuesday, August 10th, author Devi Laskar reads from her acclaimed novel The Atlas of Reds and Bloons. She'll also discuss how to build a sustainable writing practice. The talk will be followed by a Q&A. On Wednesday, August 18th, San Francisco Chronicle Film Critic, Mick LaSalle will discuss his new book, Dream State, California and the Movies. Referencing such films as The Wizard of Oz and La La Land, LaSalle will take us on a freewheeling, humorous journey through big screen versions of The Golden State. And on August 23rd, NPR editor Malika Garri leads a workshop on the ins and outs of creating your own zine. The next day, August 24th, please come to SFPL's Total SF Book Hub program when authors Daniel Handler and Gary Kamiah discuss their new anthology, The End of the Golden Gate. On August 25th, Jim Van Buskirk and co-hosts present illustrated talk on neon's luminous presence in cinematic representations of San Francisco. At the end of the month on August 30th, SFPL's on the same page book club meets to discuss award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson's new novel, Red at the Bone. Lastly on August 31st, author and photographer John Lander shares his evocative images of temples from Japan's Shikoku pilgrimage trail. He will discuss the origins of the trail and the trail significance for its thousands of annual pilgrims. This concludes my announcements. Before I turn the program over to the featured author, Carla Huebner, I'd like to say a few words of introduction about her and about our program. Author and art historian Carla Huebner is a former Bay Area resident. She is currently professor of art history at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. And her research focuses on Czech modernism, feminism and gender, surrealism and visual culture. She's an expert on Czech surrealism and her book on Toyin is the first English language book on this landmark artist. Carla's talk today will be followed by a brief Q and A with the author. If you have any questions or comments for her, please put them in the chat and she will try to address these during the Q and A. Now let's please welcome Carla Huebner. Thank you, John, for the very kind introduction. And should I start sharing my screen with the slides or say a bit first? Up to you. All right. Well, I think probably I should start sharing my screen so that you can see some images. All right. So, is everybody seeing that well? We don't see it. We're not, okay. Let's get this back to, how about now? I've still not seen it. Okay, that's odd because I thought I was doing exactly the same thing as we did when we were doing our little test run. All right. I'm gonna go to share screen again. Yeah. All right, all right, excellent. Now I'm not seeing it. Okay, so everybody is seeing it, but me, I take it. Correct. Carla, you can, if you go under share screen again, stop sharing and then go under share screen and then advanced at the top, there should be an advanced tab. Okay, I'm gonna go at this again. We see it again. Okay, you see it again. All right. Okay, I'm gonna assume that everything is okay and that I can go ahead and start. All right, well apologies to everyone for the slightly buggy start. Didn't happen this way on a talk that I gave a couple of days ago for the Czech Center in New York, even though it was the same software, same computer, et cetera, but that's life. All right, so I am speaking about this founding Czech surrealist, Toyin, someone who was assigned female at birth as Maria Charminova born 1902 in the Smichov suburb of Prague, which is now part of Prague proper. And the reason that I mentioned that Toyin was assigned female at birth, some of you may be wondering whether Toyin may be considered trans or something like that. And there the answer is, I think we can say that Toyin is someone who is definitely gender ambiguous, but I think we cannot for certain state that Toyin was trans. And I'll try to kind of address that a little bit more as we go on. But this is part of why I'm gonna be referring to Toyin as she, Toyin's friends, both in Czechoslovakia and in France always use the feminine to refer to Toyin, even though Toyin used the masculine when speaking Czech. So I think that if Toyin really objected to friends using the feminine, Toyin would have let them know. And so that's why I'm using those pronouns. But it is possible that if Toyin were alive today, Toyin might possibly be trans, Toyin might be something else. Toyin in some ways is a very interesting mysterious figure. So all right, Toyin born 1902, growing up, studied at a school called Umprum, which was kind of a school of design in Prague, known best as a design school rather than an art academy, but nonetheless was the training grounds for some of the most important, most interesting Czech artists of the 20th century. So not purely learning design, also painting, sculpture, a wide range of different things. And let's get a good look at Toyin. I'm hoping this has gone on to the next slide. We're not seeing your slides in presenter view. We're seeing them. Oh, okay. That's what I was afraid of. Are you now? Yes. Okay, good. We'll hope that the arrow keys work for me properly. All right. And this is looking now for me like it's supposed to. All right. So here we have a couple of early, early adult photographs of Toyin. One of the things that we wanna know about Toyin in terms of the first half of Toyin's career is that in 1922, Toyin met her first artistic partner and another artist known as Jindržek Šterski. And curiously enough, she met him not in Prague where they both lived, but in Yugoslavia on the island of Korčula where they had both gone on vacation. And they very quickly saw that they had very similar interests. They were aspiring young artists. They formed a really close bond and were artistic partners until Šterski's premature death during World War II. And so together they joined the avant-garde group Deviacil in 1923. And Deviacil was kind of the major Czech interdisciplinary avant-garde group of the 1920s. It was very large, it was very lively. It had members that were active in literature, in journalism, in theater, the fine arts, design, architecture, music, pretty much anything you could think of. And the name Deviacil, while it comes from a plant, the name is a composite of the words for nine, Deviacil and seal, which means strength or force. We don't really know why they chose this name, but nine forces sounds kind of cool. So there are two of the young artists joining this group, which had been formed in 1920 by Carl Tige, a future surrealist and quite a few other people. So very quickly they're beginning to exhibit with the Deviacil group and really make themselves known as an artistic pair. And here we've got kind of a little bit of information about the Deviacil group. They also gave honorary memberships to people that they liked, like Douglas Fairbanks. They had some members as far away as Paris, most of whom were Czech. And they were very interested in what was going on in the rest of the world. So not just in Czechoslovakia, but also in France, in England, the Soviet Union, the United States, anywhere that had a happening cultural scene, the members of Deviacil were interested in it. So early on, Toyin's work tended to take ideas from Cubism, like the work that we're seeing over to the left, whose title translates to Oddball or Weirdo. So Toyin is along with Stirsky exploring, well, what might Cubism teach us in the 1920s? Cubism has already been around then for over 10 years. And soon they're kind of moving away from that, although they certainly learned a lot from Cubism. And Toyin for a brief period began to do what are sometimes called her primitiveist works, like the painting over on the right, where she's emphasizing the pleasures of life in a kind of a childlike illustrative sort of way, a lot of simplification, but nonetheless very careful about how she's placing things on the canvas. But that's something that she's not doing for real long. Now in 1925, the two artists decided that they were going to move to Paris, where the major action in the art scene was at that time. And they stayed there basically for about three years, 1925 to 28. And there they came up with their own unique little two-person movement called artificialism. And we'll be looking at some work of that movement in just a moment. But first I wanna show you a work that's really early from Toyin's career. And here I should say that if explicit imagery is a problem for you, this is the time to gently leave. But I think most of you will not be disturbed by the things that I'm gonna show that are somewhat more sexually explicit. So this is a very early work for Toyin. She is about 20 years old when she did this. It's around the time that she met Stirsky, but apparently she had a version of this from before she met Stirsky. Toyin was fascinated by all facets of sexuality. She did imagery that involved all kinds of different sexual positions, sexual combinations, same sex, opposite sex, various fetishes, kind of you name it, she was interested. Whether she was practicing any of this in her personal life is a whole other question. It's entirely possible that her interest was purely voyeuristic. We do not know that she necessarily had direct sexual contact with any other human. But we do know that she and Stirsky were both interested in sexuality and collected an entire trove of erotica between the two of them. So that's something that they were doing. And Toyin also did a lot of sketches in terms of, especially when she was first in Paris kind of documenting what she was seeing. And of course, this was a period when elaborate musical reviews with numerous dancers were very, very popular. What we would now refer to as showgirls. And so it's clear that Toyin was very interested in some of these troops, like the Gertrude Hoffman girls. We've got an illustration of one of their routines down at the bottom. And I know these are quite pale, and I apologize for that. But it seems like she may also have gone to places that may have been more strip clubs or possibly even brothels in Paris. And if she was doing that, she would not have been the only woman in the avant-garde that was doing that. We know that the writer Anayis Nin visited brothels with friends of hers in a voyeuristic kind of way. So Toyin may have been doing that as well. So she did lots of different sketches of many different kinds of things in this somewhat simplified, primitivist sort of style. And also turning some of this work into oil paintings like three dancers over on the left of the screen. It's one of her quite famous paintings from this period. And if you look closely at it, and that's gonna depend on what your screen is like, you'll notice that there is that empty chair down at the bottom right. That is where Toyin signed her name. So it's kind of like she's reserving a little space for herself at the performance. And the painting bound to unbound that we're seeing with this woman all tied up appears to have been based on kind of this outdoor performance kinds of activities that she may have seen in France where you'd have like magicians or sword swallowers, things like that. Cause there are some sketches that relate to that. But it is interesting that she's choosing to show this image of the tied up woman just lying there on the ground. Now, the major way that Toyin and Shtiorsky appear to have supported themselves in Paris was by doing book design and book illustration for publishers back in Prague. Now, Prague was a very lively cultural place at this time. Maybe they felt like it was not quite as active as Paris, but nonetheless, there was a lot happening there. Very interesting place and lots of exciting modernist book design and illustration happening. And they're part of this scene, even though they're living in Paris while they're doing these book designs. So these are a couple of examples from kind of the mid 1920s. You can see that they're using a lot of collage. They're getting a certain amount of ideas maybe from dadaism, but also from Bauhaus design and also from a type of collage that was being done a lot back in Czechoslovakia known as picture poems where you've got this more peaceful looking kind of organization of often rectangular forms like we're seeing on the cover for Tonneau Bunger by H.G. Wells. And here we have another couple of their early collaborative book cover illustrations. The one over on the left with the robotic figure and the dancer is for a theoretical book on stagecraft by a major theoretician of the theater and someone that they knew personally named J.G. Hunzel who is a founding surrealist with them with the Prague surrealist group in the 1930s. And the cover over on the right is for a novel that translates to woman or lady at the fountain. The other cover translates to whorling stage. So I mentioned artificialism as this movement that they came up with all of their own. So this is something they began doing around 1926 and that they continue to do into the early 1930s. And it's not the same as surrealism but it had many things in common with surrealism and to the extent that they actually would often say that, well, no, we're not surrealists. We have, there are all these things that we don't have in common with surrealism which is kind of humorous because they ended up deciding that they were going to be surrealists. But from 1926 through the early 30s, they were not surrealists. They were making these kind of moody lyrical abstractions that nonetheless give you suggestions of landscapes and objects. So for instance, with tent, we look at that. And yeah, it's very abstract, but at the same time we get kind of a sense of an old-fashioned pup tent, a sense of maybe some greenery, maybe a sleeping bag or other objects. And with Chinese tea house, we get the sense of some of the lights and the architecture but these artificialist works were not based really closely on actual things that they observed. The idea was to kind of take memories, take imagination, take dreams and then get out of, remove from that to keep moving farther away from those memories and those dreams and produce something different. And of course, like so many artists of this period they wrote manifestos about it. Pretty densely written manifestos but definitely writing a bit about what they had in mind. And here we have another couple of examples of their artificialist work and you'll see that they're very interested at this period in exploring a lot of things relating to texture and application of paint. You can see that they're doing things relating to spattering paint, even working with airbrush, also gripping the paint, which was not something very many artists were doing at this period. It's usually associated with like Jackson Pollock 30 years later, but they're experimenting with ripping paint in the 1920s and just doing all kinds of interesting things with their texture. They're also doing things like putting sand in their paint, apparently crushed seashells, all kinds of different things to provide different three-dimensional textures as well as textural looking kinds of things. So these paintings are really interesting to look at if you have a chance to see them in person. And the slide that we're looking at here is one that I took just at the end of last month when I was able to go to Prague and see the big Toyan retrospective that is on view there right now. It's getting ready to close. It is going to go on to Hamburg in Germany and then to Paris in France. And then I think that it is going to eventually make its way to the Chicago Art Institute but I was not able to confirm that before today's talk. So it may be making its way to the United States but it's a really interesting, amazing show goes through all the different periods of Toyan's work, all the different media. You really get to see wonderful stuff there. So I was very excited to get to see it and to be able to show you a few pictures from that show. These are artificialist works that are from just a few years later than what we were just looking at. So with these more intense kinds of colors but still lots of experimentation with the texturing of the paint and titles that suggest world travel, not that they were embarking on world travel but Czechoslovakia was a land-bound nation as are the Czech Republic and Slovakia today. And so the Czechs and the Slovaks definitely had a romantic view of the oceans, the things from the other side of the world. And so a lot of things got titled relating to the oceans, the deserts, shipwrecks, et cetera. And here we have another couple of works. Over on the left we've got sea anemones and over to the right we have a work called In the Mist. So still in this artificialist period just before they're becoming open to becoming surrealists. Now, Toyan's also doing a lot of drawing and these are a couple of drawings from the same period. A lot of very sensitively rendered moody kinds of drawings, particularly of female faces, often in combination with leaves and bark and other natural elements. And she was doing a lot of book illustration that involved imagery like this. A lot of the illustration also would have kind of bibliophile editions where Toyan would hand color the illustrations for the people that were willing to pay more for these specially touched up copies. Now, in 1928, Toyan and Styrsky returned to Prague and they were starting to make their name not just in book design and illustration but they were coming back as, hey, people that have exhibited in Paris and that have a lot of friends in the Prague cultural scene. And so they were starting to get exhibitions in Prague and their friend Adolf Hofmeister who was a major caricaturist and also a writer did these two caricatures of them for the covers of an arts newspaper called Ros Pravi Aventina which kind of translates to Aventina discourses. Basically it was a kind of tabloid sized paper that had a lot of coverage of art, literature, theater, dance, music. And so they're both appearing on the cover, they're becoming quite well known to people at home. And you can see where Hofmeister with his image of Toyan is really getting at this idea of her gender ambiguity that yes, in most of the photographs from her life in Prague, she's wearing dresses and she was actually attracting lots of male admirers all of whom she seems to have said no to but she also would dress in a more masculine fashion and was kind of known for that among her friends. So Hofmeister is kind of getting at that with the way that he's depicting her also in the title that he's giving it, Tantá Toyan. Czech is a language that has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. And so he's basically giving us playing the role with the first part of her pseudonym by giving us the masculine, the feminine and the neuter of the article. So definitely playing with her gender there and definitely something that was part of her public persona at this time which seems to have been accepted quite well at least in the cultural world at the time. She had lots of friends, she was quite popular among other artists, writers, musicians, et cetera seen as a very likable, lively person at that point in her life. And here we have Toyan with Stersky in front of her CNM and these that we were just seeing in color as they're exhibiting their work and becoming known. So let's look a little bit at her book illustrations. Toyan was doing book illustrations for quite a wide range of types of book. On the one hand, she was doing a lot of illustration for poetry and literature of various kinds, both Czech literature and literature in translation. And so we're kind of getting more of a sense of the styles she was using for that kind of illustration on these open pages here. She was also doing a lot of more photographic kinds of covers for books. We are seeing the Czech edition of Kafka's castle, Zamek with her cover for that. So very different style there. And for some of her illustration, she's going in a more erotic direction, particularly with the female body. We get that a certain amount in the upper left with her illustrations for the classic French book, The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre. It's not something that she was illustrating in an incredibly explicit way. This was something that could be publicly exhibited and seen and sold in bookstores and everything. Nudity was okay, but then there were other kinds of things where she was doing much more explicit kinds of illustrations and those had to be privately published and sold by subscription. They couldn't be displayed in libraries, for instance. So we see a lot of abstraction here, also the female figure. Children's books was also an area that she did a lot of work in. This is one of the most famous examples. It's called Nash Svjet, which means our world. And it's kind of a picture book about various things in the modern world that children are encountering like the telephone in the household, as opposed to only like at the post office, trucks and buses, dirigibles, electric light. There's an image of a phonograph. So all kinds of things relating to modern industrial culture and children's relationship to it. So a really beautiful book and one of her best known, but she did lots and lots of children's books. Some of them were fairy tales, some of them were books by other surrealists. They really run the gamut. And so here we have some examples of the erotic illustrations. Some of them were done originally just as sketches for her own amusement, but in the 1930s, mid 1930s, kind of right before becoming surrealists, Stirsky decided that he was going to publish a basically an erotic magazine on erotic journal where he was emphasizing translations of erotic literature and then also including various erotic illustrations, whether by Toyin or by mostly I think other friends of theirs in the Prague artistic scene. So most of these, not all of them, but most of them are works that were published in this erotic review and you can see that there is interest both in heterosexual and same-sex sexuality. There's playfulness about the phallic imagery. There is interest in people from other cultures and other ethnicities. So kind of a little cross-section of some of the things that she was doing in that vein and some additional works from this period. So the French's piece for a Czech version of a French work all about sexuality and then a sketch with this sort of hermaphroditic figure and then a sketch of this sort of face with vaginal eyes and mouth with this bird. And that sketch really kind of looks toward the future of what Toyin would do a lot of in her surrealist work in terms of a kind of mysterious haunting eroticism and also bringing animals into her imagery. So now in 1932, there was an important exhibition called Poesie, 1932. This was at the Monas Exhibition Hall in Prague. Monas Association was a major artistic group that Toyin and Stirsky belong to. And this exhibition emphasized surrealism and Toyin and Stirsky were on the committee. Toyin was one of the people arranging getting surrealist work from a broad to Prague. And then there were a certain number of Czech artists who were not yet surrealists but whose work had affinities with surrealism that were displayed at Poesie, 1932. And this was a pretty important exhibition. It really familiarized the Czech public with surrealist art and kind of paved the way for surrealism to become a really major direction in Czech art in the 1930s. And so in 1934, the Prague Surrealist Group was founded, particularly by the writer Vyacheslav Nezval, a major poet and close friend of Toyin's at that time. He and the theater director Yvonne de Chechonze had gone to Paris and they wanted to meet André Breton, the leader of the French surrealists. And they went to André Breton's apartment and were very, very disappointed that he was not home. Very sad. So they were feeling tired and disappointed and they said to themselves, well, let's go to a cafe and rest our feet and so forth. So they walked to a nearby cafe, walked in and who did they see at a nearby table? But André Breton, who they then proceeded to speak with. And they said, we have people in Prague that are interested in becoming surrealists and forming a surrealist group in Prague and doing collaboration. And so that was kind of the beginning of the Prague Surrealist Group. And rather like Devy et Sil, but as a much smaller group, it had a variety of different kinds of people in it. So not just artists, but also writers and surrealism originally began as a movement of writers. And then you have also some theater and musical composition and various other things represented in Prague Surrealism in the 1930s. So very quickly they're off and running and here we have some photos of four of the major people. So Stirsky, Toyin, Nezval and Carl Taiga. Taiga was not a founding member because he and Stirsky had had some disagreements in the recent past, but he very soon joined the Prague Surrealist Group because it just seemed like what he should do. So, and here we have Stirsky, Nezval and Toyin hanging out at the Outdoor Cafe at the Montess Association during the 1930s. Cafes in Prague, very much like in Paris, were a very important part of the cultural scene and I think continue to be today. And so as we get into Toyin's early Surrealist period, we start to see some changes in her artistic style. Also in some of her themes, she's moving away from these kind of moody, abstracted landscapes and seascapes and getting very interested in ghostly figures and in imagery of kind of cracking and fishering. And so these are a couple of paintings from really right around the time that she's becoming a Surrealist, these two ghosts or specters. Where we don't really see any heads. We aren't sure what kind of bodies are underneath what appear to be clothing. And here we've got an exhibition view that shows both of these. And you'll notice that the rose ghost over on the far left actually has a much more blue background than we were seeing in the previous slide. That was something that was interesting to me to see when I finally saw it in person. The two works that we're seeing over to the right hand side are Toyin's Magnetic Woman or Magnet Woman. And then over to the far right, Stirsky's Squid Person or Squid Man. So the two are doing work that has a lot of similarities, but nonetheless, once you get familiar with it, you can generally tell which artist made which work. So they're no longer artificialists, they're now Surrealists. And so very quickly, the French Surrealists want to know, okay, what's going on there in Prague? We have to go see. So André Breton, his wife, the painter Jean-Claude Lambert, and the poet Paul Elouard, accompanied by a Czech artist living in France, a former deviant soul member named Josef Schema, arrived in Prague, and the Prague Surrealists gave them a very good time, put them up in the fancy Art Nouveau Hotel Potashish or Hotel Paris, and took them around to see all the sites, made sure that they had the chance to give various lectures, both in Prague and in the Moravian city of Brno. And the French Surrealists were very, very impressed and excited with the turnout at the lectures and how people were interested in what they had to say. And they also spoke on the radio as well. And Elouard wrote back home, the activity of the Surrealists here has been enormous. We're much more famous here than in France. Whether this was really true is questionable, but that was certainly the impression that he got. So next, some of the Prague Surrealists made a return visit to Paris. Toyan and Stirsky and Nezval went. Nezval was going to be speaking at a writer's conference. They're kind of a leftist, very large writer's conference. And so again, they're meeting up with all of the Surrealists in the Paris group. They're hanging out at cafes, they're going to different people's studios, they're having a wonderful time. And then things kind of go terribly awry in a couple of ways. For one thing, Stirsky suffered an attack of heart trouble and was in the hospital and almost died. And also there was an incident with the Soviet writer, Ilya Ehrenberg, where, and this is kind of a long story to go into. I talk about it in my book, so I will direct you there. Toyan had an unfortunate role in it. I don't really blame her, but she did play a role in this incident with Ehrenberg. And the result was that Ehrenberg, coming from the Soviet delegation, made sure that the Surrealists were kind of denied a voice at the conference. So it was politically kind of a difficult time for the Surrealists, but nonetheless, so overall, Stirsky recovered at least temporarily from his heart problems. He continued to have heart trouble the rest of his short life, but he was able to go home. The French and the Czech Surrealists remained close friends. And so back in Prague, of course they're continuing to do various Surrealist projects of different kinds. One of the things that they were doing was in 1936, there was a big centennial of a Czech romantic poet named Maha. And people were going all out on this celebration of this centennial. He was an amazing poet, died very young. And on the one hand, the Surrealists liked Maha, but they were also really kind of irritated and annoyed by all the hoopla that was everywhere about Maha. So they put together a kind of not so celebratory little booklet called Anilabut Aniluna, which means neither swan nor moon that had various essays and some collages by Toyin and Stirsky. These are a couple of examples of Toyin's collages. This was before she got very heavily into collage, but she was doing interesting collages even in this early period of her collage work. And these kind of relate to the idea of the, some of the ideas from Maha's major poem, My or May, where there's this so-called forest lord who is awaiting death in prison and looking out into the dark night. Now we can take a look at some of the collage work that Toyin would have been seeing and getting ideas from around the same time, namely that by Max Ernst, the German Surrealist and her own artistic partner, Yandere Stirsky. And you can see that at this time, her collage work is a little bit more like what Max Ernst is working with, that she's taking print imagery from 19th century books and magazines and catalogs, whatnot, and collaging with it. Whereas Stirsky is working much more in color with color imagery, especially religious imagery and imagery from medical texts. So, each of them is developing their own style of working with collage. And Toyin's continuing to develop her imagery of these sort of ghostly figures, which tend not to have any kind of recognizable body underneath their clothing. So these are a couple of works from the late 1930s, quite major works that are still on display in Prague. And as you may know, Czechoslovakia was one of the, really kind of the first country that came under Nazi domination. This happened before World War II broke out. It happened as a result of the meeting in Munich in 1938 between Hitler and representatives of Czechoslovakia's allies, the allies, the French and the British, basically threw Czechoslovakia under the bus and thought that if they gave Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, maybe Nazi Germany would just quietly stop wanting more territory. And we know how mistaken they were about that. So what happens is that the Germans initially take parts of Czechoslovakia, then eventually they get all of Czechoslovakia. You have lots of people first coming as refugees from the areas known as the Sudetenland that were more ethnically German. You have people flooding out of Czechoslovakia as Nazi control broadens. And in terms of Toyan's work, she and the other surrealists are having to go somewhat underground. Now, that's not to say that, you know, they were completely underground, but they were not exhibiting. They had to behave very carefully. And particularly those who were like Toyan did hiding one of their members, the relatively new surrealist, the poet Jundtsech Heisler, who was of partly Jewish descent. Heisler spent part of the Nazi occupation living in Toyan's bathroom. Both of them, if they had been caught, would have been executed. So they're leading a very underground life even though Toyan was, I am sure, able to do things like go to the grocery store and things like that. So rather than spending as much time working on paintings during the occupation, not that she stopped doing paintings, but she did relatively few of them. She did a lot of drawings and worked on a lot of prints. And these are two prints from a series called Shooting Range. They are printed in black and white and then are individually hand colored. So she did several print series and lots of drawings at this time. She also worked on collaborative projects with both Stirski and Heisler. The three of them were all close friends. Toyan and Stirski were not quite as close as they had been, but they were still pretty close. And Heisler would become her second artistic partner. And Stirski died relatively early in the war of sources, some sources say from heart disease and some say from pneumonia. At any rate, he did not survive to see the liberation. So Heisler and Toyan were thinking in terms of collaborative work where he was writing poetry and she was making imagery that either inspired the poetry or, I mean, they're going back and forth in terms of who's inspiring whom. And one of the projects that they did that's quite unusual and not anything like really any of Toyan's other work, but led, I think in part to Heisler beginning to do visual art as well as poetry is this collaborative work, Kasmat Spanku for the case mates or strongholds of sleep. And they did this with photography and kind of making little dioramas. And it's kind of a Sami's dot sort of publication. My understanding is that there are 17 copies of it. It was not something that was commercially published for obvious reasons. And they did other kinds of collaborations too at this time. Again, with printmaking and poetry. And over on the left, we're seeing one of Toyan's relatively few oil paintings from during the war years, this painting after the performance, also known as Relage. And over on the right, and it kind of a work from right after the end of the war, the myth of light, where we're seeing Heisler's silhouette holding this apparently real plant with its roots. And then there is a gloved set of hands making this little shadow image of a wolf or fox, some kind of canid. Two really major works from this period. And you can see how, she's very versatile, she's going through different periods artistically in her life, different kinds of imagery, different stylistic choices. And so after the war, Czechoslovakia soon goes toward communism. They felt that many people felt that the democratic powers of the West had betrayed them, which was not false. And so communism seemed like maybe that was the direction they should go, having been a democratic nation prior to the Nazi occupation. And initially, here we have some works by Toyin at the exhibition that are kind of immediately post-war, kind of dealing with this expulsion of the ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, feelings of anxiety and so forth. And then as Czechoslovakia is going communist, they Toyin and Heisler decide, okay, there's an exhibition in Paris, we're going to secretly move there. And they basically shipped all their stuff to Paris. So here they are in their packing stage in their overalls or their coveralls. And so they went to Paris and joined the Paris Surrealist group. Heisler unfortunately did not live very long once they were in Paris. He died of heart trouble in 1953, but Toyin had close friendships with several of the Surrealists in France. And so she developed some very close connections. And here we have a photo prior to Heisler's death where we've got Heisler on the left, then under Breton, Toyin, and the poet Benjamin Pehe on vacation at the shore. So they're starting to be in the Paris Surrealist group very interested in ideas about, well, they've been interested in ideas about alchemy for a long time. They're interested in ideas about things like the classical four elements. So the image we're seeing in the very center there is the four elements by Toyin, these classical elements of earth, water, fire and air. And they're thinking about a lot of you know, kind of classical philosophical ideas and also interested in Celtic mythology and things from the ancient areas of Gaul, namely what became France. And exploring some of the Celtic areas of France like Brittany. And in the 50s, Toyin's style is becoming again more abstract. At the same time, we're seeing kind of sort of recognizable looking elements like things that look like tongues, things that look like owl faces, things that look like maybe wrapped up folded kinds of fabric. So she's doing some, again, very different and interesting work during the 1950s. Also sometimes doing work that bears a relationship to ideas about women's sexuality and gender. Around the time that she did this painting, one of the other women in the Paris Surrealist group was writing about kind of attitudes of that day about the importance of kind of being like Marilyn Monroe and not Marilyn Monroe the person, but Marilyn Monroe the film star, being the sex object, having the bright red lipstick, et cetera. And I think that some of this comes out a little bit in some of Toyin's work of this period. Not real, obviously necessarily, but I think that there is something, some connection to what these two Surrealists are thinking about here. Because they're much more interested in the idea of women as different from but co-equal with men. And this is something where Surrealism, while it's often been referred to as misogynistic, Surrealism went through a lot of different periods and changes over time. And Andre Breton definitely by this time was interested in bringing what he saw as the feminine to balance the masculine, he felt like the masculine had taken over the world and that we needed a balancing. I think of it in terms of like Yin and Yang. So this is something that was important in Surrealism at that time. And so Toyin is still interested in kind of ghostly figures, apparitions, whether humanoid or animal-like appearing in dark spaces. And in, of course, ghostly kind of feminine figures, these three are from a series of seven called the Seven Unsheathed Swords. We're looking at the vertigo visitor, the beautiful usherette and the Awakener of Tenderness. The Awakener of Tenderness is the only horizontal format painting in the set. And as we look at it close up, you can see that there's this kind of bluish, stripy, wild beast over the very attenuated, ghostly, misty, possibly female figure at the bottom. And again, you know, more imagery that takes these sort of feminine looking figures but is doing quite interesting, unexpected things with them. Bringing in sort of animal heads, sometimes suggesting the kinds of furs that people would wear in fur stoles at that time, but also imagery that kind of suggests female genitalia, as we're seeing over on the left, kind of tongues and genitalia, but you know, this real sense of mystery. And then as we get into the 1960s, the sense of mystery continues, but things are not necessarily quite as misty and we have things that are much more clearly delineated. Antoine is starting to use more little bits of collage on her oil paintings. So for instance, that fleeing figure that we see through the window on the left, this is a collaged photograph of Bernini's famous sculpture of Daphne Flea and Apollo. And then Toyan also took to collaging on lots of imagery of particularly mouths and bits of animal imagery. So we're seeing these kind of interestingly, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes in between, sometimes not entirely human kinds of figures. We can see these mating moths up at the top on the folding screen, this collaged human mouth with lipstick with the animal figure further down on that same painting. These fish over in eclipse. And so quite a range of different kinds of things throughout a really long career. And of course, Toyan is also once settled in Paris, continuing to do a lot of printmaking and drawing as well and finding new people to collaborate with. This is a set of prints called Debris de Rèves or Debris of Dreams that she did in collaboration with the writer, the Yugoslav surrealist living in Paris, Radovan Ivshic. So the two of them collaborated, a man or similar to how she had formerly collaborated with Heisler. And she also collaborated with Annie Lebrun who is still alive and was one of the curators for the exhibition that is currently up in Prague. And this is my last slide. I just wanna remind you of the cover of my book which you can get at the library or if you get really excited by it it is available for sale as well. But I also wanna bring to your attention the catalog for this exhibition. Yeah, I don't think it is on sale in the United States but it is something that if you are so inclined you should be able to order from the National Gallery in Prague that there is an English edition. And I think that the two books go quite nicely together. My book really focuses on setting Toyan within her check context which is something that is not that well-known in the United States looking at her in relationship to the late 19th, early 20th century women's liberation movement in what became Czechoslovakia which at that time was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Also her context in terms of the people that she knew the poets that she associated with the members of the Prague Linguistics Circle which is one of the early groups involved in formulating semiotics. So there are a lot of things going on in terms of the check context that I haven't talked about in this talk but that are in the book. And then in the catalog there is a lot of really interesting information much of it newly uncovered or newly lent particularly relating to Toyan's later years in Paris. So there are things written by some of her friends there members of the Paris Surrealist group. There are letters translated from Paul Elouard from Yves Tanguy. There are reminiscences about going to jazz concerts and blues concerts with her in her later years. So there's a lot of interesting stuff in there plus reproductions of some of the works that I don't think had been previously reproduced. So I feel that both are worth recommending. So I think now is a good time to see what kinds of questions we have from the audience. So I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and hope that works properly. All right, so let's see what's in the chat. Oh heavens, it looks like there's a lot in the chat. I may need some help wading through all of this chat. Let's see, I'm gonna scroll down it. John, maybe you wanna start off with a question or two while I'm sort of looking through this. Well, first, I'd just like to thank you for your fascinating presentation and on your remarkable book which covers today's topics and many others in greater detail. And I was especially impressed by how skillfully in your book as well, you sketched the cultural and historical context that Toyin participated in and that most Americans would be unaware of. I wonder if you wouldn't mind saying a few words about how you discovered Toyin and Czech culture more generally. When did you know you wanted to write a book about Toyin? That's a great question. I've had a lifelong tie to Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, which dates back to before I was born when my father was a soldier in World War II. And at the end of the war, he was stationed in Western Bohemia and became friends with a family that kindly allowed him and a couple of friends to sleep in their house rather than on the floor at the schoolhouse. And so he stayed in touch with that family for the rest of his life. And the couple that took him in were kind of like a third set of grandparents to me. So I was always interested in Czechoslovakia as was my brother who is a historian of Central Europe. And at the same time, I wasn't really pursuing it particularly. I mean, I'm actually a fiction writer in my other part of my life. And nonetheless, I started becoming quite interested in exploring art history. Basically, oh, well, quite some time ago now. And one of the books that I bought was Whitney Chadwick's Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Very wonderful, important kind of groundbreaking book. And reading that, I discovered, oh, well, there's this Czech Surrealist and there's a Czech Surrealist group. And this is someone who's doing erotica and what? So I was really intrigued. And then some years later, I decided to go to graduate school. And when I began the PhD, and I was kind of thinking that probably I would do something German related because my advisor, Barbara McCloskey, is a Weimar German specialist and had written about George Gross. But we weren't coming up with anything really amazingly new and exciting to research in terms of German art. And so Barbara said to me, well, what about that Czech Surrealist that you're interested in? Could you do a dissertation on that? And I said, well, yes. If you don't mind that I need to get my Czech more up to speed. So that over a period of years led to finishing a dissertation that then turned into this book. And that's kind of the story of that. So. Very interesting. Thank you for that. I remember Whitney Chadwick was at San Francisco State and one of the audience members agrees that that book was a classic. Yep. Yep. And in fact, I did spend a semester at San Francisco State before starting grad school and was able to take a class with Whitney Chadwick. So I am very grateful to Whitney Chadwick on a lot of fronts. One of my colleagues who actually is quite knowledgeable about Czech culture, Lynn Davidson has a couple of comments and questions for you. So I'll read them to you. Okay. She says, thank you so much for this wonderful presentation. I wonder if you can tell us any of the spots in Prague where Toyan lived or worked or hung out. She says she knows the city well and will know exactly what you mean. I'd love to visit these places when I'm there in the fall. Thank you. Oh, that's a great question. All right. Well, I don't have the addresses right in front of me but Toyan was born in Smichov and she seems to have basically grown up in Smichov. Then I know that probably during World War I she was working in apparently a soap factory and the poet Yoroslav Seifert would see her coming home from there. And that seems to have been in the working class district of Carleen if I'm remembering correctly. I think it was Carleen. I know it's in my book which of the working class districts in the north part of Prague that it was. Then for a large part of her life in Prague Toyan was actually living with her sister who was married to a guy employed by the Czechoslovak Railways and they seem to have lived at the Smichov train station. So Toyan lived there at least officially during the 20s and most of the 30s. I'm not sure offhand exactly which year she actually moved out but she finally bought her own flat in... Oh, I am picturing the building. I hope I have this in the book because I'm blanking out. I was just there very recently. You are welcome to get in touch with me and ask for more of these addresses. In terms of places to hang out, definitely cafes. So the cafe at Mones and Mones is in the same location as it was in the 30s. It's on the riverbank. And also, let's see, the Prague Surrealists did a certain amount of like surrealist games and things at... Oh, and again, I am picturing the place. It's a hotel where I have stayed. It's close to Namjosti Republiki. Oh my. This happens to be in the classroom too where it's like, oh, I'm picturing it. I know who it is. I know where it is. The name is escaping me. It makes me feel senile. It was not Café Arco. Café Arco was frequented by Kafka. And while it's possible that Twain went there, I'm not aware of her going there. But the cafe in this one hotel, well, they also went to the... Okay, the cafe in the hotel in... Cafe Jules, or Jules, that's on Wenceslas Square. I don't know if there's still a cafe there, but the building is still there and has neon up at the top. So I know that they spent time there. I think also the Narodny Cafe, which for a long time did not exist anymore, but I think has recently been kind of revitalized. And that would be close to the National Theater. So I think there are a variety of cafes. So that's what I can tell you off the top of my head, despite having those early senility moments of blanking out on names. I'm seeing a question in the painting I referred to sea anemones or seaweed. And there are also images that look like crystals. Yes, there definitely are. And I think one of the interesting things about that painting, sea anemones, is that I don't really see anything in the painting that looks that much like a sea anemone. Whereas, yes, there are definitely those crystal informs. So sometimes the poetic titles that she and her poet friends would come up with are kind of like a leap of the imagination, I think. But I know that sometimes she would bring in, especially later on imagery from things she and her friends were doing. Like for instance, there was one painting that I saw at the exhibition that I had never seen before, but that had images of agates. And apparently she and the other Paris surrealists were looking at a lot of agates. And I'm seeing a question or a comment about poetry. And yes, I think autocorrect is torturing you there. Indeed, poetism, not pietism. Poetism, yeah. Very important within the Devyotsil group and theorized by Carl Tiger, the idea of that in combination with kind of workaday constructivism, you needed this so-called poetism where you're enjoying things like going to the circus and to the fair and going for a walk with your sweetie and having a beer and all of those kinds of things. And this was really, really important in terms of Devyotsil and also I think for Twain. Okay, question about, could it be the Imperial Hotel? I don't think that, it's not the one I'm thinking of. The place that I'm thinking of is, oh geez. And I think I know where the Imperial Hotel is. If it is, it's like down the street from that. It's a very art deco building. There's a couple of questions from the question and answer feed I controlled, read them to you. One is from William Brandt. And he says, I'm wondering how much of the work is digitized, particularly the publications like document journal. Ah, good question. If you look around on the internet, you will see a lot of digital images of Twain's paintings, prints and drawings, certainly not everything, but there is quite a bit that I and other people have scanned or photographed. In terms of documents, that's a little trickier. Some of it has been digitized and documents I'm thinking like, and journals, okay, the DeViet Sil group had several different journals. The best known of them is the Revue DeViet Sil, better known as Red. They like that title because in English, of course it means Red, and they were very friendly to Communism at the time. There are, the New York Public Library has some of that digitized. I would say that some of the major collections that have some of these would be New York Public Library, also the Art Institute of Chicago, which has been collecting a lot of Czech modernist books, journals, they're a great resource. And then there are miscellaneous places around the internet that are kind of harder to find. And some of them are kind of more, I'm not gonna say behind a paywall, but for instance, the National Library in the Czech Republic, it has digitized a lot of stuff, but most of it you cannot access unless you are on the library premises, which is just infuriating, really frustrating. Because, yeah. There's a couple of other questions from a different audience member, Jennifer Lehmann. I'm gonna read you the shorter one first. Okay. And then there's a longer one. The short one is, can you explain where the name of Toyan comes from? Is Toyan itself an article in Czech? If so, how would it be used in a Czech sense? Good question and something I should have mentioned in the talk itself. There are a couple of different stories about where this pseudonym Toyan came from. The French surrealists say that it came, that it is a shortened form of the French word C-Toyan, meaning citizen, and that Toyan shows it because of her interest in the French Revolution. On the other hand, her friend Yaroslav Seyfert, Nobel Prize winner from the Deviatsil group, said that she and other friends wanted him to help come up with pseudonyms and that he was coming up with various pseudonyms. And they weren't being appreciated. And then he wrote down Toyan and for some reason, the artist like that and settled on it. So there are these two kind of conflicting, now, Seyfert may not have told the entire story, it might have, I mean, they might both be true. I mean, they might have come up with, Seyfert might, along with Toyan, might have come up with Toyan from C-Toyan and that C-Toyan just didn't make it into his memoir. But there's also, as one of the people in the chat is noting, you can kind of out of Toyan come up with Toyan which means it is he. So, you know, there's a lot of interesting linguistic playfulness going on there. And of course, C-Toyan, or C-Toyan in French is the masculine form rather than the feminine form of C-Toyan versus C-Toyan. Which would have been feminine. You know, the whole issue of gender is very confusing and interesting with Toyan because, you know, there are a lot of both masculine and feminine things going on there. And I suspect, but I don't know because Toyan was very reticent about some things that probably Toyan may have just preferred to be kind of ambiguous. I think there are probably other questions that I haven't seen. There's a second question. It's slightly longer. That's a Dr. Humner also from Jennifer Layman. I'm re-asking a question from the New York presentation that you couldn't get to. How did the period of artificialism serve Toyan Stirski and the broader surrealism movement later? Could that be viewed skeptically as a way for them to build names for themselves by starting a movement? Are there true differences between artificialism and surrealism? Or is that, you know, tortured or non-existent difference? Oh, that's a great question. And yes, I remember reading it from the New York presentation. Thank you for coming to both, Jennifer. I think that artificialism is different from surrealism. It's certainly closely related. One of the things that you have in the 20s is that you have a lot of people that are kind of akin to surrealism, but not surrealism. And so Toyan and Stirski as artificialists are, they kind of fit in like that. There's another group called Le Grand Je, or the Great Game, to which Yosef Schema belonged. It's several French people and a couple of French people. I think that's a great question. And again, they're similar to surrealism, but not the same as surrealism. And they had fights with the surrealists. The surrealists wanted them to join surrealism, but they wouldn't. So the surrealists would kind of trash them and they would kind of go back and forth, you know, in their, in their, you know, avant-garde disputing sort of way. And so I think in some ways it was important to, you know, to, you know, for Toyan and Stirski on the one hand, to create an artistic identity in Paris that was different from what other people were doing. So, you know, Toyan really quickly dropped the primitivist work that had been very typical of her recent work in Prague. And that was similar to what other, some other Czech artists were doing. And so I think in some ways it was important to, you know, for Toyan and Stirski on the one hand and on the one hand, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of similar roots for artificialism as for surrealism, but they, I mean, I'm not going to say that they weren't trying to position themselves and make a name for themselves because I am sure that they were. But I think they also very definitely at that point felt like what we're doing is different from surrealism. And of course, surrealism developed and changed over time. And the Czechs in general became more open to surrealism after the second manifesto of surrealism came out in 1928, that where the Czechs really saw, oh, the surrealists are much more political than we thought. They're not just, you know, like following Freudian things around. They're not just this storm of the unconscious and nothing else. And as is being commented also, you know, yes, Dali is also important around the time of the second manifesto. So the surrealists are changing and Toyan and Stirski are changing too. I mean, that's a partial answer. I think there is more in my book as well that, you know, will help inform you about some of the nuances. But I think also you will be, you know, coming to your own conclusions as you look more at both the artificialist work and the surrealist work. And once you have a chance to read the artificialist manifesto if you haven't had a chance to yet and all of that. I think more work needs to be done on artificialism. It's work that I really enjoy looking at. I, you know, it's not something that I've delved into as much as some of the other aspects of Toyan's work, but it's a really cool, interesting period in Toyan and Stirski's career. And I think it does build toward what they do later as surrealists in the 30s. Carla, we have a question from YouTube and that namely is, is there anything in your book that you didn't have time or room for? Yes. And there were things that I had to cut. One of the things that I really wanted to do initially in my research was spend time in France researching in the French archives. But what I discovered was that, okay, I have enough to make a dissertation and then later, okay, I have enough to make a book. It has its particular focus. There is all kinds of, you know, additional exciting stuff for other people to research or me for that matter in other, you know, like journal articles and so forth. So, yeah, there is definitely stuff that did not make it in there. So one thing that I was kind of interested in but never really planned to have in this particular book was I was looking at the fact that Nezval is very interested in astrology. He was really quite a passionate astrologer. And in fact, a couple of years ago, I had the chance to look at the archive of his astrological charts, which are in the hundreds and mostly are not labeled as to who they are, although those of his friends are and his family. And so I thought, well, you know, to what extent, you know, do astrological things perhaps relate to some of Toyin's choices of imagery? How do things like the four classical elements come in besides in the painting, the four elements? You know, some of those kinds of things. And I did not say very much about some of those things in this book. I am kind of exploring some of that more esoteric aspect in some current work that I've been doing. I don't think it's going to be, I'm sure it's not going to be a book, but I think it will probably at least be some conference papers. So yeah, I mean, there are definitely lots of really interesting things that either I figured I did not have time or the resources to explore or that in some cases I wrote about in the dissertation and then I published separately as journal articles. So for instance, I did quite a lot of research on what's known as sex reform and the interest in what at that time were known as sexual minorities and also sex education. And that was something I ended up publishing in a journal article in the journal Espezia about, oh, let's see, I think it was 2010. So while that definitely nourished my research on Toyin, it was something that got published separately. So I took it out of the book. Although there's a couple of comments from the audience. Michael Hicks, a friend, says in an imaginative and provocative talk. Also, then Davidson adds a comment that Toyin's later work reminds her a bit of the artist Remedios Varro. I was wondering if you had any just general comments about how you would relate Toyin to other perhaps better known women surrealists. Ah, well, that, okay, that's something I could say that, yes, got left out of the book a little bit too. And in fact, that was the one critique that the important surrealist scholar Alice Mann, her main criticism of my book, which otherwise she liked a lot. And I did have a little bit of comparison in originally and that got taken out because peer reviewers were saying, take out some of this stuff. You've got too much in here. You don't need to go into all this detail. I love Remedios Varro. I love Remedios Varro so much. And I think some of the differences are that, between Toyin and some of the other women associated with surrealism. One of the major differences is that a lot of the other women associated with surrealism never really quite felt like they were fully members of the group. They often felt, or at least said later, that they felt like they were kind of on the sidelines, that they were there because they were involved with men who were in the surrealist group. That, you know, that they learned a lot and they gained a lot from surrealism, but that they felt kind of at the periphery. Whereas Toyin was always really central. Toyin was a founding member of the Prague Surrealist Group. She was really, really in the center of that group. Then when she moved to Paris and was friends with Breton, if you look at photographs, and I didn't show any in the talk, but there are photographs of some of the Paris Surrealist meetings where you have Breton, Toyin, and Benjamin Perret all together in the front. And then you may have, you know, various other people. And of course, lots of people in the back, but that the three of them tend to be in this little group of three together in the front of the photograph. And if L.O.R.D. had not, you know, distanced himself from surrealism during World War II, I'm sure he would have been in that little group as well. But Toyin was very close to Breton and so while she wasn't so close to necessarily all of the Paris Surrealists, she had this kind of privileged position and then she was also close to some of the younger Surrealists in that group. So that's something that I think is different from a lot of the other women, which is not to say that, you know, that the other women artists among the Surrealists were not, you know, some of the amazing, you know, I mean, I love Carrington's work. I love Feeney's work. I love Varro's work. There are many other interesting and wonderful women among the Surrealist artists. I'm a little less familiar with the Surrealist writers among the women. But Toyin has this different position and she's also addressing sexuality in a way that is different from a lot of the other women. Not that none of the other women were addressing sexuality because some of them were, but Toyin, it's something through her entire, you know, life, you know, that's something she's absolutely fascinated with is sexuality and all of its forms. We are running out of time. But I wonder if I could get a couple of questions in. If there is, is there one thing you would like audiences, if there's one thing you'd like audiences to know about Toyin, what would that be? Okay. I think the most important thing to take away from, you know, beginning to learn about Toyin, besides the fact that Toyin was an amazing artist, is to think about Toyin in this, in this context as really quite a remarkable figure that at a period, you know, the early 20th century when, when it was not that easy for women to become well known as artists, yeah, I mean, women could study art, you know, things had changed a lot by then. But when not very many women were becoming major figures in the art scene in their home country, when, when, when women were still fighting for equality and education. And when people, certainly gender ambiguous people and people in sexual minorities were trying to figure out how they could, you know, get rid of some of the repressive laws, that here we have somebody that somehow manages to not, not just become an artist as a young woman, but, you know, becomes one of the major cultural figures in her own time, not just in retrospect, and that was beloved by all kinds of male colleagues, including the ones that she rejected that were attracted to her. And, you know, nobody seems to have been like, oh, she rejected me, so I'm going to trash her. I've never seen any evidence of that. People are just sort of like, oh, I was in love with her for a while, you know, she never was interested in that, but we stayed friends. And someone that friendship was very important for. I think those are, and that's kind of a cluster of things, but Toyin is an amazing, amazing person who was not like, I mean, that she grew out of a particular context that clearly nurtured her, but, you know, that, that she's also very, very much unique and fascinating. That's a great answer, you know, and I thank you for that. I've seen a lot of her pictures in Prague's National Museum, although not so much of the erotic pictures. So, you know, that's a whole another dimension I was unaware of. And before I read your book, I was also, you know, unaware of much of her background. I think that your book is very, it succeeds very well, you know, in putting Toyin in context. You know, I was going to ask you, I really enjoyed this book. Are you working on another book these days? And if so, do you feel like saying a few words about it? Well, I'm always working on other books. I'll mention two, one of which relates to the Toyin book. And that is that I have been compiling an anthology of translated Czech modernist texts on art, visual culture, architecture, aesthetics, because there are a lot of these texts that have been translated, but they are very hard to find unless you are a specialist. And so I'm putting them together and annotating them and looking for a publisher. So that's one project that fits with what you've just been hearing about. And the other book that is in the pipeline that is not so closely related to the Toyin book, but that I have to mention because it has a publisher and it will be out before too long, is that next spring, I will have a novel coming out called In Search of the Magic Theater. So keep an eye out for that as well. And as you might guess, it has a strong relationship to Hermann Hesse and his famous novel, Steppenwolf. But it has different gender things going on than Steppenwolf does. Well, thanks. Thanks for letting us know. I should mention the library has 10 copies of Karla Hubner's book on Toyin. So feel free to use your friendly public library and learn more about Toyin. This really been a marvelous talk and I really also want to thank you for the fascinating question and answer session that you led. And thank you also to our friends in YouTube Land for submitting questions. It's been a great introduction to the artist. You from the author has written the only English language book on Toyin. So what a honor and privilege it is to have you with us. Thank you for sharing this with the San Francisco Public Library audience and with the world. Thank you, everyone.