COURAGE

connecting collections

Edgaras Klivis (b. 1974) is a Lithaunian theatrologist. He obtained an MA in art history and criticism from Vytautas Magnus University in 2000, and in 2004 he defended his PhD thesis. He has been working as an associate professor since 2006, and as head of the Department of Theatre Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Vytautas Magnus University since 2015. He is a member of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Klivis is a co-author of three books on the development of theatre in Lithuania, and author of a number of research articles. In his research, he pays much attention to the history of Modris Tenisons’ troupe, about which he has given a number of public lectures. Klivis argues that Tenisons’ troupe was the only one that was really avant-garde. In 2012, he organised and curated the exhibition ‘Nebyli komuna: Kauno pantomima 1966-1972’ (Blind Commune: Kaunas Pantomime in 1966-1972). He still has items from this exhibition in his private papers.

Painter and writer Jozo Kljaković was born in Solin near Split on March 10, 1889. He finished secondary school in Split in 1908, after which he studied mathematics and physics in Zagreb. He then went to Prague and Vienna, where he studied architecture at a polytechnic college. He soon devoted himself to painting under the influence of Vlaho Bukovac, and acquired his artistic skill first in Geneva under Ferdinand Hodler, and then in Vienna at various art museums. In 1911, he went to Rome to attend the Institute of Fine Arts, and later began to study Florentine art in early 1912. In the Académie Ranson in Paris in the 1920s, he finally concluded his education with Maurice Denis and Marcel Lenoira, refining his skill in fresco-painting.

Politically, in the First World War, he advocated the creation of the Yugoslav state and fled to Serbia in 1912, avoiding mandatory military service in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. After briefly living in Serbia until 1915 as an art instructor, he went to Paris and Geneva, where he remained until the end of the First World War, and then moved to Zagreb for an extended period. In Zagreb, he was granted a post as a professor of wall and decorative painting at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked from 1921 until his emigration in 1943. Together with Ivan Meštrović, Kljaković was the central figure of the Zagreb Circle’s art school in the interwar period. As a distinguished public intellectual, in 1934 he signed the Zagreb Memorandum in which he sought the federalization of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after assassination of King Alexander I Karađorđević.

After the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia, Kljaković was arrested and interned between October 1941 and February 1942 due to his political past and Yugoslav orientation. He went to Rome in 1943, where he lived until 1947, when he went to Buenos Aires. He returned to Rome in 1956. At that time, he was vice-president of the St. Jerome Fraternity for Assistance to Croatian Refugees in the post-war era. His second stay in Rome lasted from 1956 to 1968, when he finally returned to Zagreb. Kljaković did not dare to return to the country immediately after the war because of his criticisms of Tito's regime and socialist Yugoslavia, but also due to his pro-democratic positions and highly developed religious art.

However, just before his death, when he was old and blind, he decided to return to his own country and die there. There was a process of so-called “liberalization” in the 1960s, and Kljaković no longer had to fear for his life as much as in the initial post-war years. Croatian sculptor Antun Augustinčić, who studied under Kljaković at the Academy of Arts, deserved the most credit for his return. In his letter to Augustinčić dated May 13, 1967, Kljaković explicitly stated that his decision to return to Croatia was crucially influenced by two external events: the Brijuni Plenum and the resignation of Aleksandar Ranković in 1966, one of Tito's main associates, and the Protocol in that same year which established formal relations between the Vatican and Tito's Yugoslavia ad led to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two states.

Because of these political reversals, Kljaković hoped that the "evolution of our communists" had progressed, and he wanted to finally return to his homeland (Kljaković 2018: 111). His return to the country was strictly censored by the regime and Kljaković's funeral was organized under its strict control without a church ceremony. He died in Zagreb on October 1, 1969, at age of 80.

Eva Kmentová was a Czech sculptor. She graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in 1951 and the following year married her fellow student, the sculptor Olbram Zoubek. She had her first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Aleš Hall – Gallery of Young Artists. However, after 1968 she was a banned artist and could only exhibit her work occasionally, usually in small galleries outside of Prague. In addition to sculpture, Kmentová also created drawings, objects and installations. Her work tended to reflect the theme of carnality, which she interpreted in an original way – she emphasized touching the body, haptic perception, the injuring and fragmentation of the body. Amongst her favourite techniques were printing and casting.

Milan Knížák is a Czech artist, musician and performer. His works cover a broad range of activities – art, architecture, fashion, design, music, poetry, photography or action art. His first exhibition took place in 1958 in Mariánské Lázně. Since the beginning of the 1960s, he started with performance art – happenings – and realised several installations in Prague. Knížák and his friends founded a group called “Aktuální umění” (Actual Art), later known as “Aktual”, in 1963. It was a group of young artists focusing on new forms and action art, and one of its goals was to connect art and common life. The group published samizdat magazine of the same name, in addition to newspapers and flyers and as well as organising street events, exhibitions and happenings. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) between 1963 and 1964, though did not finished his studies. He then became a member of the Union of Visual Artists in 1965. He was registered as an “unwanted” person by the State Security a year later. In 1967, he founded a music group also called “Aktual” in Mariánské Lázně. Jindřich Chalupecký, an art and literary critic, mediated contact between Knížák and the movement Fluxus; this lead to Georg Macinaus inviting Knížák to travel to the United States, where he attended events organised by the movement in 1968. In 1970, Knížák returned to Czechoslovakia and renewed the music group Aktual, which significantly influenced the Czechoslovak underground and music groups such as The Plastic People of the Universe, DG 307 and Umělá hmota.

During the 1970s, he was followed by the State Security and arrested several times. By the end of the 1970s, he was allowed to travel to Western Germany and Austria, where he gave lectures and created art. He became the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) after 1989 and director of the National Gallery in Prague between 1999 and 2011. He gives lectures at both Czech and foreign universities, has organised dozens of group and individual exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad and has written several books. Knížák’s opinions, his activities as the director of the National Gallery and some of his contemporary works have also caused controversies, some of which have led to lawsuits.

Edvard Kocbek was born in Sveti Juraj ob Ščavnici, near Maribor, in the province of Styria (Slovenia) on 27 September 1904. He was a Slovenian poet, essayist, writer and translator who, as a Christian Socialist, joined the Revolutionary Front and the Slovene Partisans under the leadership of the communists in the Second World War. He completed his secondary education in Maribor, after which he spent two years studying theology in the seminary. After leaving the seminary, he enrolled with a major in French language and literature at the University of Ljubljana. During his studies, he went to the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he attended lectures by German theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini. After completing the studies during the 1930s, he spent some time in France, where he met Emanuel Mounier and the circle around the French magazine L' Esprit. In 1936, he returned to Slovenia and began teaching French. Throughout his studies, he was a member of the Christian left, and in 1937, backing the Republican side in Spain, he expressed his opposition to the support of Slovene Catholics for General Franco in his writing. This move created a division in the Slovene Catholic movement, and his stance on the Spanish Civil War were condemned by Bishop Gregorij Rožman. Before the Second World War, as a Christian socialist, Kocbek principally condemned the communists, but in spite of that fact, he and his Christian Socialist group later joined the communists, particularly during the war, when they were unified within the framework of the Slovenian National Front.

After the war, he held several posts in the new communist regime in Slovenia and Yugoslavia, but he did not have any real power; thus, in the first Tito-Šubašić government, he was the minister for Slovenia. He came into conflict with the regime in 1951 when he published a collection of short stories entitled Strah in pogum (Fear and Courage), in which he critically dealt with the moral conduct of the Slovene and Yugoslav Partisans during the war. This is why he was placed in isolation and under the strict control of secret service (UDBA), and was forbidden from any public activity or writing. To survive, he translated French and German literature. He paid special attention to writing poetry at those times when he was banned from public life, which was highly regarded as the greatest achievement of Slovenian modernist poetry.

Though he was not imprisoned at that time, he was repeatedly interrogated by the secret police, while his home was wired with microphones. Several years before his death in 1975, Slovenian writers Boris Pahor and Alojz Rebula published Kocbek's interview in the Trieste review Zaliv (The Gulf) under the title “Edvard Kocbek – pričevalec našega časa” (Edvard Kocbek - a witness to our time). What the communist authorities found controversial in this interview was Kocbek's statement about the liquidation of 12,000 Slovene Home Guardsmen (domobranci) after the end of the war by the Partisans, which was the first public mention of these events after the end of the war. Kocbek also pointed out that from the very beginning of the war, communist terror against non-communist groups within the Slovenian National Front continued. There was a fierce campaign waged by the regime media against Kocbek, but ultimately he was not prosecuted thanks of international pressure, since Kocbek enjoyed a reputation as a great poet and writer.

Pavel Kocman was born on October 25^th, 1968 in Hustopeče. He spent his childhood in southern Moravia in Valtice and Břeclav, where he attended grammar school. In 1987 he was accepted to study of history and archival studies at the Faculty of Arts at UJEP in Brno. At the time of the outbreak of the strike in November 1989, he joined the Strike Committee at the Faculty of Arts, UJEP. Initially, he put posters on the walls, but soon prof. Zdeněka Rusínová contacted him. She knew he was studying archival studies, and suggested that he start organising the documents, posters and all of the other artefacts that were on a pile in the Strike Committee.  Doing that he set the foundations for the current collection. This collection he later arranged with other students: Darja Golková (later married Kocábová), Renáta Brožová (later married Růžičková) and Ivo Durec. After completing his studies in 1993, he was employed as an archivist in the district archive, worked at the Czech Television and at the Jewish Museum. The history of the Jews in Moravia eventually became his main theme of interest, which he has dedicated himself to since. He also teaches this subject at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, and the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague.

Darja Golková was born on 8^th November 1967 in Ostrava. From early childhood she lived in Brno, where she attended elementary school and grammar school. After graduation she was accepted to study history and archival studies at the Faculty of Arts, UJEP, Brno in 1986. She was one of the students at the Faculty who joined the FF UJEP Strike Committee during the November 1989 Revolution. Together with Renata Brozova, they joined Pavel Kocman and Ivo Durec and helped them to organise documents and create a set - today's FF UJEP Strike Committee materials. In 1990, together with Renáta Brožová, she was the author of the final version and the organisation of the entire collection, which she handed over to the Archive of Masaryk University in the following year. After graduation, she became an archivist at the Břeclav State Archives, based in Mikulov, where she has worked since.

Pavel Kohout was born in Prague on the 20^th July, 1928. After graduating in 1947, he studied comparative literature, aesthetics and theatre science at Charles University, but did not successfully finish his studies. From the end of the 1940s and most of the 1950s, he worked as a reporter, a commentator and a publicist in several editorial offices (Československý rozhlas, Československá televize, Československý voják). In 1949–1950, he worked in the Czechoslovak embassy in Moscow, and after his return he led the humorous magazine Dikobraz till 1952. From 1956 he became a professional writer, but in 1963-1966 he also worked as a playwright at Divadlo na Vinohradech. He has also been involved in official organisations - especially in the Czechoslovak Youth Union, later in the Union of Czechoslovak Writers - and until 1969 he was a member of the Communist Party. In 1977, he signed the Charter 77. Next year he travelled with his wife Jelena to Austria, but they were deprived of Czechoslovak citizenship and had to stay abroad. In forced exile he continued his creative activities and cooperated with exile publishing houses. After 1989 he was living alternately in Austria and Czechoslovakia /Czech Republic.

Pavel Kohout has been a writer since his youth, besides novels he also wrote poems and in the period of normalisation prose too. By the mid-1950s, he wrote highly engaging poems which were in line with current official poetics celebrating the Party's leaders, new Communist order, and the utopian prospects for the future (Verše a písně, Čas lásky a boje). Approximately since the mid-1950s, criticism of Czechoslovak society and politics become a permanent part of his texts and became a dominating theme in the years to follow (August, August, august, Bílá kniha, Nápady svaté Kláry, Hodina tance a lásky, etc.) A reflection on the period of Communism, the Prague Spring and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia brings the book Z deníku kontrarevolucionáře; the reflection of the origins of the Czech dissent and the establishment of the Charter 77 brings the book Kde je zakopán pes.  

The literary work was in line with the public involvement of Pavel Kohout, who gradually transformed from a prominent cultural figure of the communist regime into a vocal critic. In 1967, he criticised the 4th Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers, which is considered to be one of the most important beginnings of the Prague Spring. Due to his activities in 1968, he was expelled from the Communist Party in the following year and persecuted in various ways. He participated in the establishment of the Charter 77 Declaration, being one of the first signatories.  In forced exile he contributed to the exile periodicals Svědectví a Listy. 

Taiga Kokneviča is the deputy director of the Museum of the Occupation in Latvia, and the main curator of the museum. She has taken part personally in building up the collection, in preparing exhibitions of paintings by Kurts Fridrihsons, and to popularise the collection on other occasions. As the main curator, she has also described the content and the use of the collection in connection with the 'Action of Light’ (donations by Paulis Kļaviņš and Ģederts Melngailis), and the review ‘Auseklis’ (donation by Vaira Strautniece).

Vesna Kolarić Kišur was born in Zagreb in 1925. She is the second wife of Rudi Supek and was the owner of his archive after his death in 1993. She continued to collect materials related to her late husband. After her death in Zagreb in 2004, the Rudi Supek archive was inherited by Supek’s descendants from his first marriage (his daughter Olga Supek). In the Rudi Supek Personal Papers at the Croatian State Archives, there are documents related to Vesna Kolarić Kišur, which includes her correspondence with Rudi Supek and others.

The work of Jiří Kolář covered two areas of interest. He was a poet, and his work was close to Skupina 42. He is the author of Prometheus’s Liver, as a result of which he was sentenced to several months in prison in 1952. Alongside his poetry, he also made collages (or as he calls them, proláže, roláže, muchláže). Thanks to them, he became internationally recognized. His work was presented at Documenta in Kassel (1968), at the biennale of Sao Paolo (1969) and in the 1970s and 1980s his work was frequently shown at the Guggenheim museum in New York.

Kolář lived in Czechoslovakia until 1979. After a year-long fellowship in Western Berlin, he moved to Paris. This change was not approved by the Czechoslovak authorities, and he stayed in Paris illegally. In 1984 Kolář received French citizenship. He returned to Prague in 1999.

Kolář was important not only as an artist, but also as someone who built communities. He was part of Skupina 42, Umělecká beseda and Křižovatka. After his release from prison in 1953, he started a tradition of the so-called Kolář’s table in Café Slavia (Prague) where independent intellectuals and artists gathered.

Běla Kolářová worked with photography (photograms) and collage. Her interest in experimentation and found objects was, for a long time, less appreciated than the work of her husband Jiří Kolář. This has changed in recent years. Her works were exhibited for the first time in 1962 in Mánes, and then she joined the group Křižovatka and exhibited with them. Běla Kolářová, together with her husband, left Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s for Berlin, and then for Paris. In 1981, she came to Prague for a short visit, but the police did not allow her to return to her husband until 1985. Since 1999 she lived in Prague. She was autodidact.

Božena Komárková is an important representative of the Brno Protestant dissent. She was born on the 28^th of January, 1903, in Tišnov, but her studies brought her to Brno, where she stayed until the end of her life. After graduation, she studied Philosophy, History and Geography at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. Professionally she worked most of her life as a secondary school teacher in several places in Moravia. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, she joined an anti-Nazi resistance group: Obrana Národa, but in 1940 she was arrested and imprisoned until the end of the war. In 1945 she returned to Brno, where she continued her pedagogical activities. In autumn 1948, she was forced to change school because of ideologic reasons, then had to leave the profession as a teacher and became a librarian at the State Pedagogical Library, where she was released at the end of 1951. Since 1952, due to serious health problems caused by war prisoners, she had been paid as an invalidity pensioner.  

In addition to her pedagogical activities, Komárková obtained a doctorate degree at the beginning of 1948. The Habilitation theses was written during the next year, and defended in 1992, in Brno. Among Komárková´s works, the most important, belonging to the ‘Sekularizovaný svět a evangelium, Původ a významný lidských práv, Lidská práva’ (‘Origin and Significance of Human Rights’), where she reflected on the development of modern society and the inalienability of human rights from a Christian point of view. This trend was also evident in its efforts to revive the theological and ecclesiological foundations of the Českobratrské církve evangelické (Evangelical Church of the Brethren), within the New Reconstruction stream. The result of these activities is a book called Zásady Českobratrské církve evangelické (Principles of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren).

Božena Komárková represents the Protestant stream of cultural opposition. Already in the early 1950s, she organised secretive seminars for members of the abolished YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association). She joined these activities after the signing of Charter 77; her apartment became one of the most important centres of the Brno dissent, which was especially Christian-oriented.   She also published her texts in samizdat or in exile publishing houses.

Božena Komárková was awarded several times in her life for her dissent and intellectual work. In 1982 she received an honorary Doctorate of Theology at the University of Basel, in 1991 the Order of T. G. Masaryk, a year later the gold medal of Masaryk University, in 1993 the medal of Charles University too. She died on the 27^th of January, 1997, in Brno.