Ella Slater (London, UK) ₊˚⊹♡
SELECTED WRITING
CURATION
TALKS/PRESENTING/OTHER
BEAUTIFUL GOWNS
Everything is Sexual: Toyen and Annie Le Brun's Anti-Fascist Erotica
(Published in E/X Journal, Issue 01, Winter 2025)
1. LOST BETWEEN FLESH AND LANGUAGE
“Oh! My rumpled paper dresses. Incestuous swaying of hammocks. The universe was swelling under my floral-print blinders. Childish crawling in a wicker casket that was carried away with the current, while with cannibal self-assurance I crouched down on the violet banks of the horizon.”
—Annie Le Brun, Annulaire de Lune [Moon Ring] (1977), trans. from the French by Alicen Weida.
“…broken cups, hairpins, Barbara's slippers. burnt-out bulbs, shadows, cigarette butts, sardine tins, all my letters and used condoms.”
—Jindřich Štyrský, “Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream,” Edition 69, 1931.
Last weekend I went to a literary salon with a lineup of burlesque opera singers, spirit-medium drag queens and an in-house dominatrix. It was all very sexy. I read a weird short story about an insufferable male artist and a homemade sex doll, borne through a strange crossover of influences from Daphne du Maurier and JG Ballard that I had binge read in the same week. To me, the sex doll felt like an apt symbol of the convergence of narcissism, capitalism and disconnection which seems to characterise much of—and implicate all of—contemporary sexuality. While I left the party thinking that more reading nights should incorporate cabaret, my days remain more screentime than playtime.
The erotic has always been tied up with cultural and societal change. I could eulogise real human connection as if I’m not Generation Z but the truth is, the current moment is all I’ve ever known. I have grown up in privileged and entirely unsexy circumstances. Perhaps this is why, when my academic supervisor introduced me to the work of Toyen last year, I became fascinated with the explicitly revolutionary nature of sexuality in her illustrative art and much of the interwar avant garde. Or perhaps this feels particularly pertinent amidst an uptake in right-wing populism and fascism across the Western world. If we cannot believe in politics anymore, can we instead believe in the erotic?
—
A recent critical reappraisal of Toyen’s work has revealed the renewed significance of this question. A few days after I submitted my thesis on the late artist this summer, her first UK exhibition opened at Richard Saltoun’s gallery in London, titled Dreaming in the Margins. Focusing primarily on Toyen’s graphic art—which encompasses an expanse of erotic illustrations, surreal drawings and collaborative books—the show also enlightens a relationship with the writer Annie Le Brun, a Surrealist contemporary and friend of the artist who died last year. The result is evidence of a politically engaged, female and queer-led surrealism which approaches the human body as the battleground upon which freedom is upheld.
Toyen, who was born Marie Čermínová in Prague in 1902, is perhaps best known for sheltering the artist Jindřich Heisler from the Nazis during the Second World War, as well as her affiliation with André Breton and surrealism in later years. Toyen occupied a unique position in surrealist circles inasmuch as she was respected as an equal by her male contemporaries, rather than a muse. She famously dressed androgynously, calling herself a “malíř smutnej” [sad (male) painter], yet the convention among records of her life and work, somewhat imperfectly, relies on female pronouns. Toyen was famously reticent. She left little writing about her work and even less about her life.
Amidst the poetry and revolution of Prague, Toyen had been involved with the avant-garde artist collective Devětsil, which organised itself around the anti-bourgeois dissolution of art-as-academia in favour of an ‘art of living’ aligned with the communist task. Devětsil espoused a kind of anti-reproductive erotica, opposed to the capitalist mobilization of fin-de-siècle psychiatry, psychoanalysis and sexology. Later, as Toyen and her artistic partner Jindřich Štyrský moved toward surrealism, this would be articulated by Bohuslav Brouk, the enfant terrible of interwar Czechoslovakia. In the afterword to Štyrský’s Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (1933), published under the artist’s erotic imprint Edice 69, Brouk explains his theory of ‘pornophilia’: “[The artist] has expanded throughout the world. He pisses a sea, shits a Himalayas, gives birth to cities, masturbates factory chimneys, etc. Nothing is sacred to him, and the associations he makes are, above all, sexual.”
Though worded explicitly (and, in my opinion, fabulously), the crux of this quote reveals an encompassing prioritization of the pornophilic, the ‘pansexual’ or the ‘pornographic,’ as Brouk repeatedly refers to nonreproductive sexuality in his theoretical texts. He would argue extensively for pornophilia’s revolutionary potential in disrupting capitalist productivity, or the institutionalization of the erotic in the body. The alternative, he would argue, is submissiveness: lives devoted to perpetuating power imbalance and embracing inequality. Transposed onto the modern day, I wonder if it is not only Gen Z’s infamous lack of sex which disarms us against the impending rise of fascism, but our lack of sexuality. Oof.
Dreaming in the Margins is the second of three major exhibitions of surrealism at Richard Saltoun in 2025, staged as part of the gallery’s emphasis on reviving the female and queer currents of an artistic movement often tied to Bretonian heterosexism. While Toyen was close friends with Breton, her artistic explorations of eroticism are more expansive than his famously restrictive views on love and sex. Works on display—many of which do not exist online or publicly—reveal a combination of collage and illustration that merge yonic and phallic imagery across the real and imagined borders of gender and species. For example, the artist’s illustrations for Le Brun’s Annulaire de lune [Moon Ring] (1977) show a series of exquisite corpse-like figures, which combine corseted abdomens with moon heads and flower dresses. Other works fragment bodies further, in combinations of dismembered women and often huge, sometimes monstrous penises. While her work is complex and haunting, it does not lack a sense of humour.
The exhibition also reveals Toyen’s political engagement beyond erotica. Perhaps the best example of this on display is the series Cache-toi guerre! [Hide, War!] (1947), which was created just prior to the end of World War II in 1944. In these drawings, skeletal forms occupy desolate landscapes, whose skies are populated by thick smoke. They are unsettling and sad: in one, the remains of a seahorse are tangled with a table leg while a school of fish proceeds in regimented formation below. In another, dandelion seeds descend on rows of poppies like parachutes. In his introduction to the series, Toyen’s Czech contemporary Karel Teige argued that Hide, War! disproves the theory that surrealism is confined to an “illusory refuge in an ivory tower,” unconcerned with reality or real conflict.
Le Brun similarly talked of surrealism’s revolutionary potential. Despite being born exactly four decades after Toyen, their friendship and collaboration was forged by their overlapping attitudes to the movement and its aims. In an interview given to Marianne shortly before her death in 2024, Le Brun writes that “surrealism was born of the desire to ‘change life’, as Rimbaud dreamed”. Toyen illustrated Le Brun’s first book of poetry, Sur le Champ, in 1967, and Annulaire de Lune a decade later, with a cover depicting a pear (fruit) fastened up as a pair (tits) in a lacy brassiere. During this period, Le Brun also wrote a controversial book titled Lâchez Tout [Abandon Everything] (1978), a criticism of the twentieth century French neofeminist movement, which derided it for what she saw as its hypocritical nature: its disguised moralizing and militancy. “This book is a call for desertion,” Le Brun writes. Like Toyen’s, hers was a life devoted to the breakdown of power and fascistic ambition, through the liberating nihilism of pleasure.
2. THANATOS/EROS
“But philosophy, Justine, is not the art of consoling the weak; it has no other aim but to bring soundness to the mind and to uproot its prejudices. I do not bring consolation, Justine; I bring truth.”
—Marquis de Sade, Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue, 1791
“This world has never quite lost a certain odour of blood and torture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887
There is fascism, Michel Foucault says, “in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” This makes sense of a lot of my girlfriends’ love lives, but it also speaks to a larger human seduction by violence, characterized by the Freudian death drive. Yet if the death drive—in its proclamation of the inevitable nature of human destruction—associates evil with reason, it also severs it entirely from the libidinal (or animal, or unreasonable). As unlikely as it might ostensibly seem, could it be in marrying Thanatos and Eros we escape the inevitability of darkness?
This, in the end, is where the belief in a liberating eroticism originates from. One of the most prolific examples of this can be found in the controversial literature of the Marquis de Sade, who was introduced to surrealism by Guillaume Apollinaire in the early 1900s, and was subsequently resurrected as a misunderstood martyr rather than a debased pervert. On one hand there are those who argue that Sade’s tales of rape, torture, incest and paedophilia are fascistic stories themselves, excusing of brutality. On the other hand are those like Toyen and Le Brun, who argue for Sade’s revolutionary struggle against tyranny through transgression.
In 1932, Edice 69 published a version of Sade’s Justine (1791), which was illustrated by Toyen. In this tale, the young heroine, having been expelled from her orphanage, is rewarded for her virtuosity with rape, and repeated, torturous punishment. The drawings which accompany this reprint appear as Toyen’s characteristic overlapping outlines, sporadically blooming in colour. In one image, a red-haired woman shields her eyes from a gigantic, red-tipped penis. In another, a bloody backside tied with ropes is visible, while nearby, an enviably moustached man sucks another huge cock. The drawings are disturbing in both their deliciousness and their violence, just as Sade’s writing shocks with its baseness.
Almost a century later, in 2014, Le Brun marked the bicentennial of Sade’s death by curating an expansive exhibition titled Attacking the Sun at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Having spent a large part of her career as a well-known scholar on the writer, Le Brun was suited to defend the philosophical potential of his ferocious sexual depravity. The exhibition was, at its heart, a reframing of modernity through a Sadein lens. Alongside works by Toyen, it included everything from Rodin’s reliquary box of Saint John the Baptist plaster fragments, to Cezanne’s The Kidnapping (1867) and Delacroix’s Medea (1838). Though critics derided it for its overwhelming masculinity, it was also lauded as evidence of desire’s unmatched influence on representation.
For someone whose depravity precedes him—he was eventually captured after imprisoning five men and one woman in his Lacoste château—Sade might seem an unnatural referent for two women so committed to individual liberation. Yet Le Brun, ever the contrarian, saw Sade’s goal as liberation borne from the aforementioned anti-ideological nihilism which she held so closely. Or, put more simply, she admired his commitment to freedom. As she argued in a past interview: “Sade’s atheism attacks not only religion but everything that nourishes in mankind all forms of servitude and acceptance.”
Part of this subjugation of freedom is forged through Western political philosophy, which, as the psychoanalyst and writer Avgi Saketopoulou argued in Texte Zur Kunst earlier this year, requires “the pacification of the body’s hedonism.” The result is a desexualized society that relies on the stalwarts of ‘reason’ and ‘progress’ to the detriment of ‘pleasure’ and ‘freedom’. It is Sade, Saketopoulou argues, who first demonstrated the ways in which erasing the libido reduces our capacity to resist fascism. As a model for psychoanalytic political theory, she sees Sade as an advocate for justice rather than submissive reparation, a state which can only be achieved through inclusion of the libido:
“To bring about a real state of emergency we need to be able to tap into the revolutionary impulse: We need to be able to think not through the death drive but through the inseparable circuitry of destructiveness and libidinality. Only in this way can we begin to have conversations that go beyond critique, that go beyond merely dissecting the conditions that have led to the rise of fascism and to the genocide of the Palestinians and to come to oppose them by practicing resistance.”
In erotica, then, lies revolutionary potential. This might seem far-fetched when applied to sexuality on an individual scale—taking place in the private confines of the bedroom, for example, or through the transient whims of briefly entangled, discrete lives. However, as Toyen and Annie Le Brun demonstrate, harnessing the anti-fascist potential of the erotic requires reframing it as something transcendent of a used condom or a complicated tryst. Instead, the libido becomes a charge of insurgency, a seditious energy which simmers below the surface of us all as the longing for transgression, only awaiting permission to be released. To me, the work of Toyen and the words of Le Brun are a call to action: a revitalization of the libido in service of human connection, through activism and risk and insurgency. It is this which makes the work of these dissident Surrealists, as well as many of their collaborators and colleagues, so vital to revisit as the world goes up in smoke.
FOOTNOTES
1. Annie Le Brun, Annulaire de Lune (1977), trans. by Alicen Weida. Black Sun Lit, 2019.
2. ibid.
3. Jindřich Štyrský, “Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream”, trans by Jed Slast (Edition 69, 1931).
4. Lucy Ives, “Mythic Being”, Artforum 60, no. 6 (2022): accessed October 26, 2025, https://www.artforum.com/features/lucy-ives-on-the-art-of-toyen-251416/.
5. Bohuslav Brouk in Štyrský, “Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream.”
6. Isabella Vogtensberger, ‘Annie Le Brun (1942-2024) : "Le surréalisme est né du désir de 'changer la vie', comme Rimbaud le rêvait"’, Marianne (2024): accessed October 26, 2025, https://www.marianne.net/agora/entretiens-et-debats/annie-le-brun-le-surrealisme-est-ne-du-desir-de-changer-la-vie-comme-rimbaud-le-revait.
7. Annie Le Brun, Lâchez Tout (le Sagittaire, 1978).
8. Marquis de Sade, Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791).
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Reclam of Leipzig, 1887).
10. Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xl–xlv.
11. Annie Le Brun quoted in John Galbraith Simmons, “Sade Attacking the Sun,” Brooklyn Rail (Dec/Jan 2014–15): accessed October 26, 2025, https://brooklynrail.org/2014/12/artseen/sade-attacking-the-sun/.
12. Avgi Saketopoulou, “On the So-Called Death Drive and the Revolutionary Impulse,” Texte zur Kunst (2025): accessed October 26, 2025, https://www.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/avgi-saketopoulou-on-the-so-called-death-drive-and-the-revolutionary-impulse/.