Jiří Kolář Collage Techniques: Froissage, Rollage and More

The Jiří Kolář collage techniques form one of the richest toolkits in twentieth-century art. Kolář (1914-2002) did not simply glue pictures together: he gave names to dozens of procedures for cutting, tearing, crumpling and reassembling printed images, and froissage, the method of drawing from crumpled paper, is one of the techniques most often linked with his name. This page explains the main methods and the life that produced them.

From poet to collagist

Kolář was born on 24 September 1914 in Protivín, in southern Bohemia. He trained as a carpenter, worked in a range of jobs and became a full-time writer in 1943. During the war he belonged to Group 42 (Skupina 42), a circle of poets and painters interested in modern city life, together with the critic Jindřich Chalupecký and the poets Ivan Blatný and Josef Kainar, among others. His early collections, starting with Křestný list (1941), made him a respected poet.

After the communist takeover of 1948 he was barred from publishing. In the early 1950s (sources give 1952 or 1953) he was arrested after police found one of his manuscripts and spent several months in prison. The Encyclopaedia Universalis describes how, after his release, he tried to escape what he called the “prison of words” through photomontage and assemblage. By the end of the 1950s he had replaced written poetry with what he called “evident poetry”: objects and images made from printed material. He showed his first non-verbal works in Prague in 1962 and abroad, in London, in 1963.

With Ladislav Novák and Josef Hiršal he also formed the first Czech Group of Experimental Poetry. See our profile of Ladislav Novák.

The main techniques

Kolář’s methods are documented in exhibition glossaries and his own writings. The descriptions below are simplified; the names often have French endings in -age, following the model of collage and frottage.

Rollage

An image is cut into regular parallel strips, which are then reassembled, often interleaved with strips from a second image. The pictures seem to vibrate or blur between two states. Universalis describes rollages as images cut up and redistributed in parallel strips. Kolář also made circular and kinetic variants.

Chiasmage

Small pieces of printed text, from dictionaries, sheet music, maps or timetables, are cut up and laid in all directions to build a new image or cover an object. Universalis describes chiasmages as collages of varied texts cut into pieces and juxtaposed in all directions. Kolář applied it to flat sheets and to three-dimensional objects.

Confrontage

Two or more images, often reproductions of different artworks, are combined so that they comment on each other. Wikipedia names confrontage alongside froissage as techniques he helped develop.

Crumplage and froissage

In crumplage (in Czech muchláž), a printed reproduction is crumpled at random, flattened again and pasted onto a backing, so that the creases break up and distort the picture. Froissage uses the crease pattern of a crumpled sheet as the basis for a new drawing or image. Universalis lists froissages among Kolář’s works of the 1960s, and Wikipedia calls him one of the major exponents of froissage. The crumpling methods connect him directly with Novák, who developed froissage around 1964; the gallery archive Multiples says Kolář took up the method after his friend.

The difference from Novák is one of emphasis. Novák drew figures out of the creases with pen and watercolour. Kolář usually worked with existing printed images, often reproductions of old master paintings, letting the crumpling deform them rather than drawing into them. To try the drawing approach, see our step-by-step froissage guide; to combine crumpled sheets with cut images, see froissage collage.

Other methods

Exhibition literature also mentions prollage, intercollage, ventilage, décollage and collages with holes. Kolář systematically described his methods in a Dictionary of Methods (Slovník metod); published editions vary, so check a library catalogue for the version you need.

Exile and recognition

Kolář’s international reputation grew through the 1960s and 1970s. He received the Herder Prize in 1971, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York exhibited his work in 1975. He signed Charter 77, the human rights declaration, and while he was on a scholarship in West Berlin the government prevented him from returning. From 1980 he lived in Paris, returning to Prague more often after 1989. He died in Prague on 11 August 2002. Later retrospectives included shows in Prague (1994) and at the Reina Sofía in Madrid (1996).

Trying Kolář-inspired exercises

Kolář’s methods are easy to explore with ordinary printed material, as long as you work from images you are allowed to use: old magazines, your own photographs or public-domain reproductions. These exercises are inspired by his techniques rather than copies of his works.

Crumpled reproduction. Take a printed picture, crumple it firmly, flatten it and look at how the creases break the image into facets. Some areas become unreadable, others gain a new expression. Mount it flat or leave it slightly in relief.

Strip interleaving. Cut two different printed images into vertical strips of the same width and alternate them on a backing sheet. The two pictures stay recognisable but interfere with each other, in the spirit of rollage.

Text collage. Tear printed text into fragments and arrange them by tone or texture rather than meaning, so that words become grey shapes, as in the chiasmage idea.

Each exercise turns an existing image into raw material and lets a procedure, not drawing skill, decide part of the result. That makes them good companions to froissage and to other chance methods such as decalcomania. Our article on pareidolia in art explains why viewers so readily find new faces and figures in deformed images.

Why Kolář matters for froissage

Kolář’s work shows that crumpling is not just a children’s art exercise but a serious way of thinking about images: what happens to a famous painting when its reproduction is crushed? How much of a picture survives distortion? His methods are easy to adapt for a classroom (see froissage for kids), and they place froissage within the wider family of chance-based methods covered in surrealist art techniques and the history of froissage.

We do not reproduce Kolář’s collages here because they remain in copyright. The National Gallery Prague’s online collection and the Slovak National Gallery’s Web umenia site show many of them.