Jiří Kolář (24 September 1914, Protivín - 11 August 2002, Prague) was a Czech poet, writer, painter and translator. His work was divided between literary and visual art.
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Kolář came from a poor family of a baker and a seamstress. He got a training in cabinet making (he lost a finger while joining) and then changed trades (sanitation worker, bartender etc.) until 1943 when he became a full-time writer while he was living and working in Kladno. Kolář joined the Communist Party in 1945 but left the Party the same year. He was not allowed to publish after Communists took control in Czechoslovakia in 1948. He married Běla Helclová in 1949. When police found his manuscript, Prométheova játra, in the property of Václav Černý he was arrested in 1953 and spent several months in prison.
In the next long years of milder Stalinism he became a leader of a group of poets (among them Václav Havel or Jan Zábrana) in Kavárna Slavia (Café Slavia). Kolář's wild behavior lost him former friends (e.g. he threw coffee on Josef Hiršal's shirt and was poured by his soda water). In 1960s he started writing experimental poetry (analfabetogram, cvokogram) from which he shifted to experiment in visual art. The failure of Prague Spring 1968 brought his work in the index again. In 1970 cerebral apoplexy stiffened his right arm. He signed Charta 77 and used his scholarship to West Berlin to emigrate. Since 1980 he lived in Paris. After 1989 he visited his homeland more and more often. He got ill and spent his last years in a Prague hospital.
In 1938 his first poems were published in a private edition but they are not included in his complete work probably because they are openly erotic, describing oral sex (Ústnice), sex positions (Svícen a trakař) and sex with a prostitute (Růže Večernice). Thus Křestní list (Baptism Certificate, 1941) is considered to be his first fruit. This and the other three collections of poems from 1940s are part of a new existentialist poetic style of Skupina 42 with such members as Jindřich Chalupecký, Ivan Blatný, Josef Kainar, Jiřina Hauková, Kamil Lhoták etc.
In the Stalinist years of Czechoslovakia (1948-1953, the presidency of Klement Gottwald) he wrote poetic diaries - Očitý svědek (Eyewitness, 1949), Prométheova játra (Prometheus' Liver, 1950). In 1957 he wrote a paraphrase of a classical Chinese warfare tract under the name Mistr Sun o básnickém umění (Master Sun on Poetic Arts). In 1964 Náhodný svědek (Accidental Witness), a selection of his 1940s work, is published, and a 1966 censored selection from his 1950s work bears the name Vršovický Ezop (Aesop from Vršovice).
His first exhibitions were in 1937, and in these exhibitions he displayed his collages. In 1960s he put painting and poetry together but he gradually fully turned to experimenting in visual art. In his work he used a scalpel to cut pictures out of magazines. He produced colors in his collages by gluing on printed papers. His collages were intended to influence the viewer's outlook on life; to raise the viewer's level of consciousness. He invented or helped to develop new techniques of collage - confrontage, froissage, rollage etc.
"Like most great artists of the past century, Kolář was both an anarchist and a reactionary. In order to “make it new,” the artist must systematically reject every aesthetic tendency that’s come before; the artist can either accomplish this task via exclusion or destruction. Witnessing first-hand the steady self-destruction of European civilization throughout his life, it seems only natural that Kolář would go the latter route – picking through the debris and disfiguring all that he came across, granting his objects a novel significance that certainly would’ve baffled their original creators." Travis Jeppesen