Jiří Kolář

Biography

In 1952 the secret police searched the home of the literary historian Václav Černý and found there a manuscript of “Prometheus’ Liver”, a poetic cycle by Kolář. The author was interrogated and spent several months in custody. By one account this was nine months of pre-trial detention, ending with release under a presidential amnesty; by another, the term ran into 1953. The book for which he was arrested was not published in Czechoslovakia until 1990.

He was born on 24 September 1914 in Protivín, in southern Bohemia, to a baker and a seamstress, and grew up in Kladno. From the age of seven he helped in the bakery. He wanted to become a typesetter, but during the Depression printing houses took no apprentices, so he trained as a cabinet-maker with a neighbour; the trade cost him a finger. As an apprentice he read poetry, at sixteen discovered the modern poets and began to write himself. In the 1930s he changed occupations many times: building labourer, security guard, waiter, butcher’s assistant, hospital orderly, newspaper seller, and he often lived on unemployment benefit. In 1937 he showed his first collages at the theatre of Emil František Burian, the year of his first exhibition. Of those early works only one survives, given to the critic Jindřich Chalupecký.

He sent his poems to František Halas, and the collection “Baptism Certificate” (Křestný list) appeared in 1941. Earlier, openly erotic poems of 1938 were left out of his collected works. Through Halas, Kolář met Chalupecký, and in 1942 the two of them founded Group 42, which the poets Ivan Blatný, Jiřina Hauková and Josef Kainar and the sculptor Ladislav Zívr joined. His texts became the group’s manifesto. The three collections of the 1940s, “Seven Cantatas”, “Limb and Other Poems” and “Odes and Variations”, are written in free verse and built on the principles of musical composition. During the war he worked as a cabinet-maker, then on forced labour as a railway track worker. In spring 1945 he joined the Communist Party and left it in August of the same year. In 1949 he married Běla Helclová.

After February 1948 he was branded a reactionary, and in 1950 colleagues in the Writers’ Union hurled epithets at him such as “cosmopolitan hyena”. His diary entries “Years in Days” were confiscated, and he was no longer published.

In the late 1950s he gradually turned away from literature. He kept a photographic diary and tried “concrete” and “evident” poetry, in which words are replaced by objects and pictures, and arrived at collage. He cut images from magazines with a scalpel and made colour from glued-on scraps of printed paper. To my mind, the most telling thing about this transition is that the methods were named like poetic forms: “analfabetograms” and “cvokograms” (texts that a child who cannot yet write might produce, or a madman who has forgotten how). Later he described his methods in the “Dictionary of Methods”; there are more than a hundred and twenty of them. In confrontage, contrasting subjects are placed side by side; in rollage, two pictures are cut into strips and interleaved; froissage means paper crumpled and then glued flat. In 1964 he began making compositions of objects, and after a visit to the museum at Auschwitz, as he himself told it, he became convinced that art which plays on shock cannot surpass reality. In 1964 he also made playful textile collages from embroidered kitchen curtains, an ironic answer to the demand for “committed” art.

From 1963 he exhibited abroad: in London in 1965, at documenta in Kassel in 1968, at the São Paulo Biennial in 1969, at Expo 70 in Osaka, and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1975. From the second half of the 1960s foreign galleries and collectors bought his work, and he became financially independent. The money went to other people’s causes: he bought works by Vladimír Boudník, from whom he acquired about ninety prints and for whom he arranged the first exhibitions abroad, and supported Mikuláš Medek, Jan Koblasa and others. In 1956 he issued, in typescript, the almanac “Life Is Everywhere”, in which Josef Škvorecký, Jan Zábrana, Václav Havel and Bohumil Hrabal made their debuts. In the years of “normalisation” after 1968, the period of hard-line restoration following the Soviet-led invasion, he paid for the samizdat series Edice Petlice and its prizes. In 1968 he founded the Jiří Kolář Prize, which he awarded himself. He was among the first signatories of Charter 77, the human-rights petition.

In 1979 he received a one-year scholarship in West Berlin, and in 1980, at the invitation of the Centre Pompidou, he moved to Paris. An extension of his stay was refused, and he remained in France. In March 1981 he founded there the quarterly “Revue K”, devoted to Czech and Slovak art in exile. In 1982 he was sentenced in absentia in Czechoslovakia to a year in prison and confiscation of his property. In 1984 he received French citizenship, while his wife was able to join him only in 1985. After 1989 Kolář formalised the confiscation as a donation.

After the Velvet Revolution he often visited the Czech lands, and in 1990, together with Václav Havel and Theodor Pištěk, he established the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for artists under thirty-five. In 1999 he received the Hans Theo Richter Prize of the Saxon Academy of Arts. He settled back in Prague for good in the late 1990s. He died there on 11 August 2002; the collection of his friends’ work, assembled with his wife, and part of his own work were bequeathed by the couple to the Museum Kampa in Prague.