Kristians TONNY (1907- 1977) Surrealist composition

Kristians Tonny

A surrealist work by Dutch painter Kristians Tonny, created in 1927. A highly charged, dreamlike composition featuring human figures, birds and oversized insects.

Oil on cardboard
Signed and dated 1927 lower right
Dimensions: 90 x 71 cm
With frame: 112.5 x 93.5 cm

Price: 5500 euro

Surrealism in painting, a “pure psychic automatism”.

Surrealist painters express the unconscious and dreams through their art, often using strange, fantastical images.
Surrealism is associated with the technique of automatism. This consists of painting or drawing without conscious thought, to allow the unconscious to take over and reveal hidden images.
André Breton laid the foundations in 1924 with the publication of his Manifesto of Surrealism, inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theses on the unconscious. He defined it as “pure psychic automatism”, with automatic writing as its creative principle.
The main artists associated with this movement include Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Max Ernst.

Kristians Tonny, talented young surrealist painter

Kristians Tonny, a 20-year-old painter prodigy, painted this canvas two years after his participation in the first exhibition of Surrealist paintings at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925
He was soon recognized as an established artist, acclaimed by critics and whose works were acquired by discerning collectors. He had befriended Gertrude Stein, American poet, writer and collector of modern art, whose portrait he painted in 1930, becoming the second artist after Pablo Picasso to do so.

Biography

Tonny Kristians was a Surrealist painter and draughtsman whose career spanned the 1920s to the 1970s. Born in Amsterdam, he moved to Paris with his parents in 1913. Encouraged by his father, he began painting and drawing at an early age, which enabled him to exhibit in a Paris gallery from the age of twelve, and to establish himself as an avant-garde artist by 1929.

Youth

His talent was recognized and encouraged at an early age by his father, A. Kristians.
helped him in the studio and also accompanied his parents on their travels. His immersion in Parisian life, cabarets and cinema inspired much of his early work.

Considered a child prodigy, he quickly made a name for himself.
He exhibited for the first time in 1920 at the Parisian gallery Mouninou, then, in 1924, in the Netherlands, at the Amsterdam artists’ society De Kring.

By the age of fifteen, he was a regular visitor to the studio of the painter Jules Pascin. He learned a great deal from him. In particular, he contributed to the development of the transfer technique, a blind drawing technique conceived by Pascin as an experiment in free expression. Kristians Tonny perfected this technique and made it his own.

Life and career to 1939

In 1925, he took part in the first major Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Pierre in Paris. He was soon recognized as an established artist, acclaimed by critics and whose works were acquired by discerning collectors. He had befriended Gertrude Stein, who encouraged him to rent a studio. A private quarrel led to a definitive break between them. He decided to move to Tangier, Morocco. After about a year, he returned to Europe, spending time in France and the Netherlands before settling permanently in Paris.

In early 1937, he set off with his first wife, Marie Claire Ivanoff, whom he had just married, as well as Paul Bowles and his future wife, the writer Jane Auer, on a trip that took them first to the United States, then to Mexico and Guatemala. In the United States, his work was shown in various exhibitions. He sold canvases to collectors and museums, and was commissioned to paint a series of frescoes in a theater in Hartford, Connecticut.

His trip to Mexico fulfilled a long-held dream, and from then on the Mexican landscape became a recurring theme in his work. It was a turning point in his artistic development.

At the end of the 1930s, Surrealist exhibitions were held in several major European cities, and Kristians Tonny helped organize the first international Surrealist exhibition in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam, alongside André Breton, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard, E.L.T. Mesens and others.

Life and career after 1939

During the Second World War, K.Tonny spent most of his time in the south of France. He and his wife attempted to emigrate to the United States, but despite completing all the formalities, the trip was not possible for both financial and political reasons. During the war, he nevertheless managed to take part in exhibitions in Monte Carlo, where he even organized his own show in 1942.

In 1944, he returned to Paris, where he resumed his pre-war life. He sold his works, produced book illustrations and painted frescoes in the newly-built casino in Saint-Malo.
He encountered difficulties, not least because the pre-war Parisian art scene had disappeared. In addition, personal problems plunged him into a deep depression.

In 1949, after more than thirty years abroad, he settled in Amsterdam and remarried. He led a reclusive life in the Netherlands, and was unable to integrate fully into the Dutch art scene of the time, partly because of the lack of interest in Surrealism at the time. Despite this, he remained highly productive until several years before his death.
In 1977, he died in Paris of pneumonia.

Since his death, Tonny has remained an artist known only to a limited public; his original works are rarely exhibited, either at auction or at shows.

Bibliography