Visual Propaganda #4: Jindřich Štyrský

Jindřich Štyrský was a Czech Surrealist painter, poet, editor, photographer, and graphic artist that liked getting tripped out on his dreams

Jindřich Štyrský was a Czech surrealist known for his paintings, photographs, collages, and, to a lesser extent – his poems (surrealists and dadaists dabbled in all manner of media because they weren’t yet bound to a ferociously fascistic art market that demanded artists pick a style and sell it for decades). These images all derive from the artist’s 1941 book Dreams. In it, Štyrský displays paintings, photographs, and collages that were made to visually reconstruct the dreams of his that he’d documented throughout the 1930s after getting well and truly Freud-pilled. Looking back on these images, it’s hard not to feel a sense of longing for a time when the artist was utterly self-obsessed and nearly divorced from the ideological totalities that surrounded him.