Abstract
Recent acquisition in Museum of Art Olomouc, the album Babyluna (1952), is of a big importance not only in the context of work of Jiří Kolář (1914-2002), but it is an example of the innovative approach in front of creation on the borders of literature and visual art.Kolář himself defines these works as "textograms", despite the fact that he designated additional collages of a similar type from 1951 and 1952 as confrontations, stories, news reports, destinies. They hew to the artistic concept and are even among the most common and sparest, with their creator respecting the strict basic compositional regime of the vertical superposition of the two clippings.
However, the essential value of the set is the fact that each sheet combines a textual and artistic part.The textograms are relentless, cautionary, but at the same time open messages in a sense. Civility, artistic simplicity or perhaps even the seemingly dull compositions of the sheets acquire meaning in connection with a radical, though by no means didactic, line of verbal commentary.
Plain yet intellectually inventive visual confrontations and the concise tone of the texts deviate in an irritating way from everyday reality; it is a language of aporias that speak far more expansively than traditional pictorial narration about the complex world of the early 1950s.
