COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

The work of Jiří Kolář covered two areas of interest. He was a poet, and his work was close to Skupina 42. He is the author of Prometheus’s Liver, as a result of which he was sentenced to several months in prison in 1952. Alongside his poetry, he also made collages (or as he calls them, proláže, roláže, muchláže). Thanks to them, he became internationally recognized. His work was presented at Documenta in Kassel (1968), at the biennale of Sao Paolo (1969) and in the 1970s and 1980s his work was frequently shown at the Guggenheim museum in New York.

Kolář lived in Czechoslovakia until 1979. After a year-long fellowship in Western Berlin, he moved to Paris. This change was not approved by the Czechoslovak authorities, and he stayed in Paris illegally. In 1984 Kolář received French citizenship. He returned to Prague in 1999.

Kolář was important not only as an artist, but also as someone who built communities. He was part of Skupina 42, Umělecká beseda and Křižovatka. After his release from prison in 1953, he started a tradition of the so-called Kolář’s table in Café Slavia (Prague) where independent intellectuals and artists gathered.

Běla Kolářová worked with photography (photograms) and collage. Her interest in experimentation and found objects was, for a long time, less appreciated than the work of her husband Jiří Kolář. This has changed in recent years. Her works were exhibited for the first time in 1962 in Mánes, and then she joined the group Křižovatka and exhibited with them. Běla Kolářová, together with her husband, left Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s for Berlin, and then for Paris. In 1981, she came to Prague for a short visit, but the police did not allow her to return to her husband until 1985. Since 1999 she lived in Prague. She was autodidact.

Božena Komárková is an important representative of the Brno Protestant dissent. She was born on the 28^th of January, 1903, in Tišnov, but her studies brought her to Brno, where she stayed until the end of her life. After graduation, she studied Philosophy, History and Geography at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. Professionally she worked most of her life as a secondary school teacher in several places in Moravia. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, she joined an anti-Nazi resistance group: Obrana Národa, but in 1940 she was arrested and imprisoned until the end of the war. In 1945 she returned to Brno, where she continued her pedagogical activities. In autumn 1948, she was forced to change school because of ideologic reasons, then had to leave the profession as a teacher and became a librarian at the State Pedagogical Library, where she was released at the end of 1951. Since 1952, due to serious health problems caused by war prisoners, she had been paid as an invalidity pensioner.  

In addition to her pedagogical activities, Komárková obtained a doctorate degree at the beginning of 1948. The Habilitation theses was written during the next year, and defended in 1992, in Brno. Among Komárková´s works, the most important, belonging to the ‘Sekularizovaný svět a evangelium, Původ a významný lidských práv, Lidská práva’ (‘Origin and Significance of Human Rights’), where she reflected on the development of modern society and the inalienability of human rights from a Christian point of view. This trend was also evident in its efforts to revive the theological and ecclesiological foundations of the Českobratrské církve evangelické (Evangelical Church of the Brethren), within the New Reconstruction stream. The result of these activities is a book called Zásady Českobratrské církve evangelické (Principles of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren).

Božena Komárková represents the Protestant stream of cultural opposition. Already in the early 1950s, she organised secretive seminars for members of the abolished YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association). She joined these activities after the signing of Charter 77; her apartment became one of the most important centres of the Brno dissent, which was especially Christian-oriented.   She also published her texts in samizdat or in exile publishing houses.

Božena Komárková was awarded several times in her life for her dissent and intellectual work. In 1982 she received an honorary Doctorate of Theology at the University of Basel, in 1991 the Order of T. G. Masaryk, a year later the gold medal of Masaryk University, in 1993 the medal of Charles University too. She died on the 27^th of January, 1997, in Brno.

Paul Kondas (1900-1985) was an Estonian naive artist. He was a teacher by profession. In 1919, he took part in the Estonian War of Independence against Soviet Russia (1918-1920). From 1925 to 1941 he was a teacher and director at the Suure-Jaani elementary school. In 1941, he was forced to leave Suure-Jaani, because he refused to cooperate with the German occupying authorities. In 1945, by the time of the Soviet annexation, he was appointed director of the Viljandi high school for adults. In 1951, he was dismissed for political reasons. After that, he worked as a teacher at the Heimtali school. He retired in 1961 and devoted himself to painting, fishing, and his correspondence. He was too old and eccentric for the state to be interested in him.