Jià ÂàKolÃ¡à  (; 24 September 1914 â 11 August 2002) was a Czech poet, writer, painter and translator. His work included both literary and visual art.
KolÃ¡à  was born on 24 September 1914 in ProtivÃÂn, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, in a working-class environment. His father was a baker and his mother a seamstress, and he himself trained early in life as a cabinet maker (which cost him a finger). He later changed trades several times, working as a construction worker, security guard, and bartender, among other jobs. In 1943 he became a full-time writer while living and working in Kladno. He moved to Prague in 1945 to work as an editor of the publishing house Druà ¾stvo DÃÂlo. KolÃ¡à  joined the Communist Party in 1945 but left the Party the same year. Because of his critical stance towards the regime he was not allowed to publish after communists took control in Czechoslovakia in 1948. He married BÃÂla Helclová in 1949. When in 1952 police found his manuscript, Prométheova játra, in the property of Václav ÃÂerný he was arrested and spent several months in prison.
KolÃ¡à  was one of a group of several artists, among whom Václav Havel, Václav ÃÂerný, Jan Vladislav and Josef Hirà ¡al, who met and discussed in Café Slavia, both during the period leading up to the Prague Spring when the communist regime grew more permissive, and in the period of normalization after the Prague Spring. Koláà Â's wild behavior lost him former friends (e.g. he threw coffee on Josef Hirà ¡al's shirt and had his soda water poured on him in return). The failure of the Prague Spring in 1968 brought KolÃ¡à  and his work into disrepute again. In 1970 cerebral apoplexy stiffened his right arm. KolÃ¡à  signed Charter 77 and while on a scholarship to West Berlin, the government decided to force him to emigrate; he was therefore not allowed to return home. From 1980 on he lived in Paris. After 1989 he visited his homeland more and more often. In 1999 KolÃ¡à  injured his spine and he spent his last years in a Prague hospital.
Koláà Â's poetry was first published in 1938 in a private edition; these early poems are not included in his complete work, probably because they are openly erotic, describing oral sex (ÃÂstnice), sex positions (SvÃÂcen a trakaà Â) and sex with a prostitute (Rà ¯à ¾e VeÃÂernice). Thus Kà Âestný list (Baptism Certificate, 1941) is considered his debut. Kà Âestný list and Koláà Â's three other collections of poems from the 1940s (Sedm kantát, Limb a jiné básnÃÂ, ÃÂdy a variace) belong stylistically to the existentialist artistic movement of Skupina 42 of which KolÃ¡à  was a member; other members included Jindà Âich Chalupecký, Ivan Blatný, Josef Kainar, Jià Âina Hauková and Kamil Lhoták.
During the years of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia (1948âÂÂ1953) KolÃ¡à  wrote poetic diaries â OÃÂitý svÃÂdek (Eyewitness, 1949), Prométheova játra (Prometheus' Liver, 1950). In 1957 he wrote a creative re-interpretation of Sun Zi's The Art of War, an ancient Chinese classic on the art of warfare, under the name Mistr Sun o básnickém umÃÂnà(Master Sun on the Poetic Arts). In 1964 Náhodný svÃÂdek (Accidental Witness), a selection of his work from the 1940s was published, and in 1966 a censored selection from his 1950s work came out under the name Vrà ¡ovický Ezop (Aesop from Vrà ¡ovice). In the 1960s he started writing experimental poetry, creating new forms of poetry which he gave names such as analfabetogram and cvokogram. In these new forms of poetry the line between the literary and the visual increasingly started to blur, which ultimately led to his experiments in visual art.
KolÃ¡à  died in Prague on 11 August 2002, at the age of 87.
His first exhibitions in 1937 focused on his collages. In the 1960s KolÃ¡à  first combined painting and poetry but he gradually turned completely to experiments 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 fragments of paper from various different sources.
His collages were intended to influence the viewer's outlook on life; the technique of using fragments of text and images from various different sources was well suited to achieve the effect KolÃ¡à  wanted, by showing the destruction and fragmentation of the world KolÃ¡à  inhabited. Simultaneously, by juxtaposition and contrasting of these different fragments the technique of the collage served to create surprising and visually striking new combinations; for instance, the combination of astronomical maps with Braille writing. KolÃ¡à  invented or helped to develop new techniques of collage â confrontage, froissage, rollage, chiasmage and others.
From the 1960s Koláà Â's visual artwork was featured regularly in exhibitions by galleries and museums. Some of the more prominent exhibitions of his work were in the New York Guggenheim museum in 1975, in Prague in 1994 in Dà ¯m U ÃÂerné Matky Boà ¾ÃÂ, in Madrid in 1996 in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.