Career
His outstanding and varied oeuvre included numerous book covers and illustrations. He also wrote studies of both Arthur Rimbaud and Marquis de Sade. He and Toyen also exhibited in Paris in the late 1920s, where they founded their own movement, Artificialism.
Between 1928 and 1929 he was designer for the group"s drama wing, the Osvobozené divadlo, where he collaborated with Vítězslav Nezval and others
Štyrský was also an active editors In addition to his Edition 69 series, he edited the Erotická revue, which he launched in 1930, and Odeon, where many of his shorter texts appeared.
Born in Lower Čermná, where he spent his childhood. He studied first in Hradec Kralove, then the Prague Academy of Fine Arts.
His early artistic work was partly under the influence of Cubism, the main style for him but later became influenced by surrealism.
During the summer in 1922, he met with Mary Cermínová (1902–1980), who later began using the pseudonym Toyen. They worked as an artistic pair closely. There they also established their own direction, the Czechoslovakian surrealism - Artificialism (transition between Surrealism and poetics / bridge between reality and abstraction).
After returning to Prague he became head of the Liberated Theatre.
In 1934, with Toyen, Bohuslav Brouk, Vitezslav Nezval, and Karel Teige he co-founded the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in Prague. At the invitation of the Parisian Surrealists in 1935 he returned again to Paris.
He recovered during his stay, though only temporarily. He died in 1942 in Prague.