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New World of Love

Nondream art 1968 by Toyen

This piece is Toyen's tribute to a strange utopian book written in the 1840s but suppressed until 1967--Charles Fourier's Nouvelle monde amoureux (New World of Love). It advocates communes accepting all sexual identities and orientations. It really was a century ahead of its time! Or, given the 2020s' regression to barbarism, maybe two or three.

'New World of Love', painted 1968 by Toyen. Click to enlarge.
To me, the two lines of dogs on the grid stand for the binary gender system. The fully rendered left line are men. The deep blue shadows on the right are women--mere silhouettes not seen in the round, having at least a place. But the translucent cat in the middle is literally "out of line", refusing to fit into the system--the androgynous, rebellious Toyen, of course. And around her, ghostlike, other queer and trans people lurk in the cracks in the grid...

SOURCE: Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic by Karla Huebner, 2020, pp. 258-60


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