Life of Courtesans

Author: Katinka Duffhuis

Kristians Tonny was the only Dutch Surrealist who actually participated in the activities of André Breton’s Surrealist movement in the 1930s.^[1] The artist was born Tonny Kristians but from 1924 onwards worked under a reversal of this name to avoid confusion with his father Antonius Johannes Kristians, who was also an artist. In 1913 the family moved to Paris where the young Tonny found himself in the midst of the Parisian avant-garde. He was only twelve when his first exhibition opened in Galerie Mouninou, which promoted him as ‘the little Rembrandt’.^[2] Around the age of fourteen, Tonny was apprenticed to the Bulgarian painter and draughtsman Jules Pascin, and was inspired by his approach. Pascin regularly drew using the ‘transfer technique’ as ‘a kind of filter for nuances’. Tonny adopted this technique. He used sheets of paper prepared with oil paint or graphite for his drawings. He laid the prepared sheet on a blank sheet of drawing paper and then drew with a non-writing silverpoint on the blank side of the prepared sheet so that a drawing was forced through by the oil paint or graphite layer on to the drawing sheet.^[3] By drawing ‘blind’ in this way, he concentrated on the movement of his hand without being guided by the image that arose. He only occasionally lifted the top sheet to see whether he had made a mistake in his orientation.^[4] The technique was, linked to automatism by Tonny himself. He said: ‘I have developed my own system, with paint. They can wax lyrical about “automatic writing”, but the automatic – not constrained by logic, routine or the hierarchy of the mind – preceded the product. Look at Ernst or Tanguy, what verism and skill. Their art product actually was thought out. I also knew what I did in my drawings on the blind sheet. An automatic stream preceded it.’^[5] These transfer drawings were characteristic of Tonny’s work from the early 1920s until the 1960s.

From 1925 onwards Tonny was in the circle of the American author and patron Gertrude Stein, whose famous salons brought her considerable influence in the Parisian art world.^[6] It was there that he became friendly with other young artists like Pavel Tchelitchev, Eugene Berman and Georges Hugnet. In these years Tonny made the series of transfer drawings of acrobats, courtesans and Jheronimus Bosch-like figures that are part of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection. The choice of subjects shows both his limitless imagination and his powers of observation. One of the drawings features the Surrealist writer Pierre de Massot with a bulldog. Tonny was referring to Massot’s book Prolégomènes à une éthique sans métaphysique ou Billy, Bull-Dog et philosophe (1930), for which he made six drawings. Sometimes he added an unfathomable text to his drawings, as in Mort d’un acteur. The drawings came from Hugnet’s collection; Tonny asked him to keep all the material from his studio for him after his sudden departure to Tangiers in 1931 with his then lover Anita Matelle. He never asked for the return of the drawings: they remained in Hugnet’s collection until Hugnet’s death.