Literature: Guy Atkins: “Asger Jorn. The Crucial Years: 1954–1964”, London, 1977, no. 1339, ill. fig. 171.

“Choleric painting, besmeared painting thrown at the spectator's face, kneaded painting, messed-up painting, raging and free, oh how free, so free that it sometimes seems to be thrown on canvas in a go-to-hell fashion, which it no doubt is, but Jorn does not care, for he urinates his painting, he ... it (but let us be decent, we are writing in a nice art review. Well all right, let us go on.) Jorn is full of ideas. They split his head. He is full of visions. His eyes are drunken. He throws all this on the canvas, roughly and hastily, hurriedly finishing them, getting rid of them and of his whims, his phantoms (...) He takes delight in metamorphosis. His figures are often landscapes. One is fooled, and one feels Asger good-humoredly laughing up his sleeve. For he is a humorist. A tragic humorist like all good humorists. In this kind of humor, man is always tied to the mother earth, muddy all over and haggard and ridiculous, stifling the cry of Munch under the pork-like grumbling of Father Ubu. Jorn is one of the masters of 'this other figuration' that includes some of the most captivating painters od our time such as Dubuffet, Fautrier, etc. In his particular case, this 'other figuration' directly joins the diabolical images of old Danish churches and the baroque interweavings of the Vikings. This is an art flowing from the source. (...) Painter of gesture from the beginning, spontaneous painter before there was ever a question of action painting, painter of equivocations (his figures are men, animals and plants, all at the same time, bringing into daylight indefinite figures as if they were discovered furtively (...)”.

The poet Michel Ragon on Asger Jorn. Originally published in the art review “Cimaise”, Paris, January-February 1961, quoted here from the catalogue published by Galerie Rive Gauche, Paris 1961, p. 9.

The titles of Asger Jorn's paintings are an entire story in themselves, and in several works – including this painting – he uses paradoxical compilations of words. In 1961, the term 'Underdeveloped' was in popular use, and it provided the artist with creative fuel for a series of titles: “Underdeveloped fertility”, “Underdeveloped enthusiasm” and so on. Guy Atkins describes Jorn's titles as “(...) poetic and strangely evocative inventions that act like a magic formula. The picture is not ‘explained’, but the title casts a spell which gives a lead or direction to the imagination (...)”. Guy Atkins in “Asger Jorn. The Crucial Years: 1954–1964”, p. 45.