Jindřich Štyrský was a founding and leading figure of the Surrealist movement in former Czechoslovakia. His prolific body of work has been foundational to the global understanding of Surrealism. Although part of the Czech avant-garde since the 1920s, Štyrský in tandem with his fellow compatriots Toyen and Jindřich Heisler officially established the Czech Surrealist group in 1934. Before this, he lived in Paris between 1925 and 1928 in the company of his artistic partner and fellow Surrealist, Toyen. After meeting Philippe Soupault, one of the founding members of the Parisian Surrealist circle, Štyrský and Toyen were invited to exhibit at Galerie Vavin in December 1927. A pivotal moment came in the spring of 1929 when the Surrealists rediscovered Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, leading to a new edition of the work, edited by Soupault and Karel Teige (another Czech Surrealist) with twelve illustrations by Štyrský. Following this project, collage became central to Štyrský’s artistic output. Often serving as a commentary on politics, mass culture or sexual desire, his collages frequently incorporated daringly erotic imagery.

Executed in 1934, the present work hails from the artist’s Portable Cabinet series of 66 photomontages. Instead of being set in a narrative sequence, each collage was conceived as an autonomous picture. Louis Philibert Debucourt’s 1787 print Fortune and Misfortune is Štyrský’s most critical influence on this composition. Below the image, the caption “One’s good fortune, the other’s misfortune” is printed in five languages. Set in a bourgeois interior with Louis XVI–style furniture, a fern in a Chinese vase and a decadent candelabra, the central protagonists are constructed from anatomic parts culled from a medical textbook. A putto with a skin disease hangs on to the ballerina in a tendu arabesque while a man wearing a monocle and dinner jacket observes the awkwardly romantic scene through a cracked door.

A consideration of infidelity and bourgeois society, this iconic collage was the maquette for the cover of the Surrealismus review in 1936. As noted by scholars Lenka Bydžovská and Karel Srp, “In Portable Cabinet Štyrský attempted to create a body that differed from reality but was at the same time far removed from the widespread grotesque form used by Arcimboldo.... He gave life to beings that had previously not existed.”