Asger Jorn was a painter, communist and philosopher; the Danish artist moved in the tension field of various influences and styles, oscillated between abstraction and figuration, between Informel and Art Brut, and created his own sport with three-sided football.
(...) Continue readingAsger Jorn – Teacher, painter, communist and resistance fighter
Asger Jorn was born Asger Oluf Jørgensen on 3rd March 1914 in Vejrum in Westjütland. Both parents were teachers and following the premature death of his father, Asger moved with his mother and five siblings to Silkeborg. Here he received his first drawing lessons, and created landscape paintings and portrait under the direction of the art painter Martin Kaalund-Jørgensen. Jorn initially pursued a conventional career, joined the scouts, and studied to be a teacher. Contact with the radical syndicalist Christian Christiansen led to a lifelong engagement in politics, but art soon took on ever greater significance in his life and in 1933, he was able to participate with three pictures in a group exhibition of the Frie Jyske Malere (Free Jutlandic Painters). In 1936, he travelled to Paris by motorbike where he entered the Académie Contemporaine of the versatile French artist Fernand Léger and made the acquaintance of Pierre Wemaere. However, the outbreak of the Second World War and the German occupation of Denmark moved him to return to his homeland and to join the active resistance struggle as a communist.
Co-founder of CoBra; artistic proximity to Art Informel
Like many of his fellow artists, Asger Jorn struggled with the numerous prohibitions on thought and the strict control exercised by the Communist Party after the end of the war and the occupation. Jorn left the party, joined the artists' group Høst and decided on the name he still goes by today. He increasingly focussed on the relationship between art, architecture and everyday life. In order to visit a major Munch retrospective, he travelled illegally to neighbouring Norway in a cloak-and-dagger operation – an exhibition which made a deep impression on Jorn. In the autumn of 1948, he was one of the founding members of the famous artists' group CoBra, whose declared aim was to restore the immediacy and expressiveness that had been missing in art. Artistically, Jorn was close to Art Informel, drawing his themes primarily from the rich world of myths and legends of his Scandinavian homeland, and oscillated between figurative and abstract painting. Over time, he shook off the initial influence of the Swiss-French master Le Corbusier in favour of a more dynamic style of painting.
In the field of tension between different influences and convictions
Throughout his life, Asger Jorn struggled with the inner conflict between his communist convictions, his sympathy for syndicalism and the influence of his Protestant parents. His unswerving adherence to communism made it difficult for the artist to access the important American art market: he never set foot in the USA himself and had only a few dealers there, which is why the majority of his work is in European collections. In 1959 and 1964, he took part in Documenta in Kassel. As a pioneer of the Situationist International group, he took a stand against capitalist functionalism in numerous manifestos and even after he had left the organisation, he continued to finance its activities. In the meantime, Asger Jorn worked extensively with Scandinavian photography, but returned to painting. With the invention of a three-sided football variant, he wished to visualise his trivalent logic and communicate it to a wide audience.
Asger Jorn died on 1st May 1973 in Aarhus. A museum in Silkeborg carries his name today and houses a substantial number of his works.
Asger Jorn - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
