Jiří Kolář

When in 1952 police found his manuscript, Prométheova játra, in the property of Václav Černý he was arrested and spent several months in prison.

[3] Kolář was one of a group of several artists, among whom Václav Havel, Václav Černý, Jan Vladislav and Josef Hiršal, 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.

Kolář's wild behavior lost him former friends (e.g. he threw coffee on Josef Hiršal's shirt and had his soda water poured on him in return).

Kolář signed Charta 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.

Křestný list and Kolář's three other collections of poems from the 1940s (Sedm kantát, Limb a jiné básně, Ódy a variace) belong stylistically to the existentialist artistic movement of Skupina 42 of which Kolář was a member; other members included Jindřich Chalupecký, Ivan Blatný, Josef Kainar, Jiřina Hauková and Kamil Lhoták.

During the years of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia (1948–1953) Kolář wrote poetic diaries – Očitý svědek (Eyewitness, 1949), Prométheova játra (Prometheus' Liver, 1950).

Some of the more prominent exhibitions of his work were in the New York Guggenheim museum in 1975, in Prague in 1994 in Dům U Černé Matky Boží,[7] in Madrid in 1996 in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.