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In the beginning was the word

Topič Salon reopens after six decades with a Kolář retrospective
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
March 19th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Kolář cut up both images and text to create striking new perspectives.
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Jiří Kolář: The Space Between Word and Image


at Topič Salon Ends Friday, March 21. Národní 9 (first floor), Prague 1-Old Town. Open Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Jiří Kolář is one of the most distinctive Czech visual artists of the 20th century, but he was foremost an artist of the word. A writer, poet and bookmaker, he was also trained as a cabinetmaker. So it’s appropriate that his retrospective exhibition at the newly reopened Topič Salon is mostly a litany of words on wooden frames.
Exhibitions of Kolář’s work in Prague are usually organized by the National Gallery, and held in prestigious spaces appropriate for an artist of his stature. However, this show of more than 100 works (mostly collages, but also books and objects) is a fitting way to re-inaugurate the Topič Salon, a prestigious Prague gallery from the First Republic era that has been closed for 60 years.
Kolář was born in 1914 in the village of Protivin, where he trained as a joiner. He participated in his first exhibition of collages in 1937. Together with some friends in 1942, he founded the art group Skupina 42 (Group 42), which was based on experimental poetics. In 1945 he moved from Kladno to Prague, and visited Paris for the first time the following year.
After the communists took power in 1948, Kolář lost his job as an editor at a publishing house, and in 1953 spent a year in prison awaiting trial in connection with a politically objectionable book manuscript. In 1959, he abandoned textual poetry in favor of his visual poems, and these artworks had their first solo exhibition in London in 1963. In 1968, Kolář exhibited at Documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany, and the next year he was an award-winner at the 10th Sao Paolo Biennale.
In 1975, Kolář had an exhibition at the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York City. But his life was once again made difficult by the communists after he signed Charter 77, so in 1980 he moved to Paris. He was subsequently stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship, and sentenced to one year in prison (in absentia) in 1982. After the Velvet Revolution, Kolář returned to his homeland to receive honorary citizenship, and in 1991 received the Order of T.G. Masaryk from then President Václav Havel. He returned to Prague for good in 1999, by which time he was very ill. He died in Prague in 2002.
The current exhibition at Topič Salon opens with some of Kolář’s earliest works, from the late 1950s, including one black-and-white photo collage of an explosion in the middle of a lake. Taken from his series “Poems of Silence,” the explosion seems to be of a structure filled with words, showing letters soaring into the sky along with wood debris. In the midst of the explosion’s black cloud, there is a small cut-out from a work by Lucas Cranach (of a woman embracing her lover’s head).
This early exploration of words led Kolář to decades of experimentation with texts, letters and fonts in many languages, even imaginary alphabets. He also used manipulated images ranging from classical paintings to contemporary magazine photography, especially fashion.  
Kolář’s earliest works in this exhibition also incorporate theater, tram and train tickets, as well as Czech bureaucratic index cards obscured by tape and other scraps of paper. The effect is similar to the Dadaist constructions from paper scraps made by Kurt Schwitters in Berlin after World War I.
Then there are Kolář’s visual poems from the early 1960s, larger text-based collages from the mid-1960s, and fringe collages from 1977–78 (made from reproductions of works by Hieronymus Bosch sliced into strips). These three methods of creation are among his most important original contributions to modern art.
At the front of the gallery’s central space, there is a self-portrait of Kolář from 1979. This crumplage shows a photo of his face and hand, distorted or crumpled into sections and framed by chaotic, pasted texts. While the majority of his work uses Czech text, he also made some collages and chiasmages using French texts, as well as Latin, Greek, Chinese, Arabic and other languages. This adds to one powerful effect of Kolář’s art, the sense that it should all make sense, if one could only figure out the meaning.
The main room of the exhibition offers many examples of Kolář’s work from throughout his career, integrating texts, signatures, images of great men’s heads, body parts and astronomical maps, among other imagery. Adjoining rooms include works inspired by other writers, such as a wall of collages from his Božena Němcová series, and two works dedicated to Baudelaire — one stretching the poet’s face out wide like a monster, and the other with the poet’s face visible if the work is viewed from straight-on, but with two other images visible if it is viewed from other angles.
Visual disorientation is a cornerstone of Kolář’s work. His word-play is also important, whether calculated or created randomly. Essentially, he is a destroyer of texts, a subversive poet betraying the preciousness of the word. At the same time, his collages and objects wrapped in texts, and visually disorienting images, elevate the word to a higher plane. Thus, the more unintelligible, the better.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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