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The more I examined these collages, the more they provoked the kinds of reflection indicated in the introduction to this text. A range of other artists, both Czech and international, worked in a surprisingly similar spirit at roughly the same time, though for the most part independently of one another.Ĭlearly, Jiří Kolář’s artistic methods from the turn of the 1940s and 1950s can be related not only to as-yet-unformed artistic directions of the future like minimalism or conceptual art.

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This particular series of works by Jiří Kolář can be considered as just one among the possible examples of that period’s search for new approaches to the language of visual art. It consists first of ‘the pleasure of reading the individual compositional elements, and then of the search for the cryptic meaning of the whole’. At the same time Klimešová emphasises the formal principles behind the organisation of the cut-outs, which, according to her, anticipate minimalist or conceptual art. The viewer’s perception of Kolář’s collages from the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, according to Klimešová, occurs in two phases.

DEFINE MONTAGE SERIAL

Marie Klimešová, in her book The Years in the Days ( Roky v dnech), offered an initial interpretative framework for this series of Kolář’s works. Klimešová relates the concept of ‘confrontage’ (‘ konfrontáž’)-Kolář’s own term, one we can apply to the majority of his work-to the principles of narrative figuration and serial painting, as in the work of West-European and American exponents of Pop Art. They do not create a single pictorial space, but rather a sequence of scenes. They come from different places and different times. The cut-outs do not overlap but are placed side by side. Most of these works present two, three or more pictures of the most diverse content, generally arranged along a horizontal or vertical axis. What is the relationship between non-cinematic artworks whose structure evokes the principles of film montage, and actual works of cinema? If we take as our example certain types of collage from the mid-twentieth century, can we possibly relate these to the film theory and practice of that era? To what extent is it possible to show or consider such inspiration as conscious and what does this reveal to us about the connections between various artistic media in that era? What led me to these questions was my exploration of the collage work of Jiří Kolář from between 19. This extensive body of works on paper is based around the compositionally-simple arrangement of picture cut-outs from popular magazines on a sheet of paper. (JO)įilm Montage and the Principle of Montage in Non-Cinematic Media: The Early Collages of Jiří Kolář

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This essay was first published in the Czech journal Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny in 2017. Tracing various manifestations of montage techniques as these were adopted by print media, including in pictorial magazines and film books, Pospiszyl suggests that Kolář was more influenced by this wider appropriation of montage than by film montage specifically, and that these collages were guided less by the montagist’s concern to create new meanings than by a deconstructive principle of media critique.

Pospiszyl examines the extent to which Kolář was influenced by film language and the principles of montage as defined by classic Soviet film theory. His chapter examines a series of collages by Czech artist Jiří Kolář produced between 1947 and early 1953, in which pictures are taken from various sources and laid beside one another, on paper, in a sequence.

Tomáš Pospiszyl is a Czech critic and art historian who is head of the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Define montage