Lot 160

Jiří Kolář (1914 - 2002) MUSES ARE NOT SILENT AS ARMS MAKE NOISE

Jiří Kolář was sceptical about artistic exhibitionism. His art tried to encompass the facts. Although he chose artistic means to convey his message and destroyed the image, which he reassembled into a new whole, he tried to keep the message well preserved. The present work unfolds in the line of so-called "disappearances", when the main figures disappear from famous works of art and are replaced by a semantically related analogy. Here, the rather serious juxtaposition of creation and destruction is sophisticatedly built into Piero della Francesca's composition, when he portrayed the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Interestingly, the Duchess was the real muse for the Duke of their happy marriage, and the Duke had himself portrayed from the left profile because he had lost his right eye due to the influence of "gunplay" during the tournament. This is a Latin paraphrase: Inter arma silent musae.