Born in 1902 in Prague, Marie Čermínová, known as Toyen, was a Surrealist poet and painter who was active for nearly six decades. In 1922 she met Jindřich Štyrský and became a member of the Devětsil group. The following year, she travelled to Italy and France and went by the pseudonym Toyen from the French "citoyen". In 1925, she moved to Paris with Štyrský. They founded the "artificialism" style, anticipating certain elements of the future lyrical abstraction. That same year, they met André Breton and the Surrealists, with whom they began a long collaboration. Toyen explored the condition of women in her artworks, as in "The Great Masturbator" (1926), where a nude, dominant woman symbolises female emancipation. She returned to Prague in 1929, where she continued to develop the Artificialism movement. In 1934, she was a founding member of the Czech group "Artvivanten Europe" (Surrealism) with the poet Vítězslav Nezval, the artist-critic Karel Teige, and Štyrský. Toyen took part in the Surrealist movement and developed her international reputation. Her interest in poetry led her to illustrate several collections of poems, in particular those by Heisler, with whom she was very close.

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During the censorship of the Second World War, she hid Heisler who was Jewish from 1941 onwards, and clandestinely produced a cycle of drawings entitled Tir (Střelnice, 1940). From 1939 to 1942, the year of Štyrský's death, she practically gave up painting to devote herself to drawing. Toyen returned to Paris in 1947 and became a member of the Paris group of the Surrealist movement, which led her to exhibit several times at the Galerie A l'étoile scellée. Despite Heisler's death in 1953, Toyen's close link with poetry never faded. In the years that followed, she took part in numerous solo and group exhibitions until 1969, when the Paris group of the Surrealist movement disbanded. This event marked the gradual isolation of Toyen, who withdrew from the artistic scene. She died in 1980, leaving behind a precious legacy. Her influence on future generations of artists was considerable, including the likes of of Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning.