Asger Jorn retrospective

The timeline begins with the work "Untitled". It was made in 1937 – the year Asger Jorn began to make a name for himself as a creative artist internationally. In 1936, hoping to be apprenticed to the Russian avant-garde artist Wassily Kandinsky, Asger Jorn left Denmark and drove to Paris on his BSA motorcycle. As fate would have it, Kandinsky no longer accepted pupils, and instead Jorn was apprenticed to the French artist Fernand Léger. Léger taught the abstract-industrial idiom of art, and in its simple forms and lines the painting mentioned above is clearly inspired by this particular idiom. Indeed, Jorn decided to credit Léger by inscribing the master's name on the reverse side of painting.

Throughout the 1940's, Jorn moved beyond the surrealistic, strongly Miró-inspired tradition in favour of the spontaneous-abstract art in which the motifs of the bird and the mask and figurative elements play a crucial role. This centralization of the figurative is evident e.g. in the work "Untitled" (1946). 

The years of 1951 and 1952 were fateful for Asger Jorn. Suffering from potentially lethal tuberculosis, he was hospitalized at Silkeborg Sanatorium. This hospitalization and the severity of the disease are reflected in the paintings from this period in Jorn's life. In the painting "Untitled" (1950), we find a deliberate use of dark, gloomy colours, a palette and a painterly rendition that emphasize the artist's despair at this turn of fate.

From Silkeborg Sanatorium, we turn to Switzerland and Italy: The 1950’s was also the decade in which Jorn, fully recovered, once again left Denmark in order to explore the European currents – including Italian Arte Nucleare and French Tachism. In the period from 1959 to 1962, Jorn's constant development of style and expression led to a number of so-called 'modifications'. A dazzling example of these modifications is "Nocturne III" (1959) where Jorn has created a new world inhabited by bird-like creatures on top of an old landscape. In the preface to an exhibition in Paris in 1959, he describes this “renewed painting” as follows: 

Be modern, collectors, museums. If you have old paintings, do not despair. Keep your memories but divert them so that they correspond to your times. Why reject the old if you can modernize it with a few brush strokes? That'll throw a bit of the new onto your old culture. Be up to date and distinguished at the same time. Painting is over. You might as well finish it off. Divert. Long live painting.

In the late 1960's, strongly inspired by Jackson Pollock's action paintings, Jorn led the viewer into a world of luxurious painterly forms with the so-called luxury paintings. Whereas Jorn had previously worked in oil, he now turned to enamel paint which in its substance can be considered a comment on the sixties' luxury objects and decorative art sprayed with enamel paint. In an interview, Jorn refers to Georges Bataille: “Art is the invitation to an expenditure of energy, without a specific purpose aside from that brought to it by the spectator himself. It is prodigality”.

The latest colouristic works by Jorn offered for sale at this auction were made in 1972 – the year before the artist's death. The paintings "Blue shadow" (1971) and "Capelli Verde" (1972) are examples of the last part of Jorn's artistic production. Here, it is made clear that Jorn resumed his earlier work with figures and motifs in the last years of his life. These motifs, however, were not imitated, bur rather recreated in more intense colour and with new associative connotations. 

Enjoy the experience of Asger Jorn's unique visual universe!