Asger Oluf Jorn (3 March 1914–1 May 1973) was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the Situationist International and COBRA (avant-garde movement). He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen.
The largest collection of Asger Jorn's works—including his major work Stalingrad—can be seen in the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark.
Early life
He was the second oldest of six children, an elder brother to
Jørgen Nash. Both his parents were teachers. His father, Lars Peter Jørgensen, was a
fundamentalist Christian who died when Asger was 12 years old in a car crash. His mother, Maren,
née Nielsen, was more liberal but nevertheless a deeply committed Christian. This early heavy organised Christian influence had a negative effect on Asger who began progressively to inwardly rebel against it, and more generally against other forms of authority.
In 1929, aged 15, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis although he made a recovery from it after spending 3 months on the west coast of Jutland. By the age of 16 he was influenced by Nicolai Grundtvig, and although he had already started to paint, Asger enrolled in the Vinthers Seminarium, a teacher training college in Silkeborg where he paid particular attention to a course in Nineteenth century Scandinavian thought. Also at about this time Jorn became the subject of a number of oil paintings by the painter Martin Kaalund-Jørgensen, which encouraged Jorn to try his hand in this medium.
Early career
When he graduated from college in 1935, the principal wrote a reference for him which said that he had attained 'an extraordinary rich personal development and maturity' - especially because of his wide reading in areas outside the topics required for his studies. While at College he joined the small Silkeborg branch of the
Danish Communist Party and came under the direct influence of the syndicalist Christian Christensen, with whom he became close friends and who, Jorn was to later write, was to become a second father to him.
In 1936 he traveled (on a BSA motorbike he had scraped together enough money to buy) to Paris to become a student of Kandinsky. However when he discovered that Kandinsky was in straitened circumstances, barely able to sell his own paintings, Jorn decided to join Fernand Léger's Académie Contemporaine; it was during this period that he turned away from figurative painting and turned to abstract art. In 1937 he joined Le Corbusier in working on the Palais des Temps Noveaux at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. He returned again to Denmark in the summer of 1937. He again traveled to Paris in the summer of 1938, before returning to Denmark, traveling to Løkken, Silkeborg and Copenhagen.
From 1937 to 1942, he studied at the Art Academy in Copenhagen.
World War II
The occupation of Denmark by Nazi Germany was a time of deep crisis for Jorn, who had been deeply inculcated with pacifism, initially sinking him into deep depression. He subsequently became an active
communist resistant. During the war he also co-founded with the architect Robert Dahlmann Olsen the underground art group,
Helhesten or "hell-horse," and was a contributor to its journal. In 1941, he wrote the key theoretical essay, "Intimate Banalities," published in
Helhesten, which claimed that the future of art was kitsch and praised amateur landscape paintings as "the best art today." He was also the first person to translate
Franz Kafka into Danish.
Post-war
After the war, he complained that opportunities for critical thinking within the context of the communist arena had been curtailed by what he characterised as a centralised bourgeois political control. Finding this unacceptable, he broke with the Danish Communist Party, although he did not hand in his membership until the mid 1960s and remained a lifelong philosophical communist.
He traveled again to France where he was a founding member of COBRA (a European avant-garde art movement), and edited monographs of the Bibliothèque Cobra.
He returned, impoverished and seriously ill of tuberculosis, to Silkeborg in 1951 and resumed work in the ceramics field in 1953. The following year he traveled to Albisola in Italy where he became involved with an offshoot of COBRA, the International Movement For An Imaginist Bauhaus.
Situationist International
In 1954 he met
Guy Debord, who was to became a close friend. The two men collaborated on two
artist's books,
Fin de Copenhagen (1957) and
Mémoires (1959), along with prints, and forewords to each other's work.
He participated in the conference that led to the merger of COBRA, the Lettriste Internationale, and London Psychogeographical Association to form the Situationist International in 1957. Here he applied his scientific and mathematical knowledge drawn from Henri Poincaré and Niels Bohr to develop his situlogical technique. Jorn never believed in a conception of the Situationist ideas as exclusively artistic and separated from political involvement. He was at the root and at the core of the Situationist International project, fully sharing the revolutionary intentions with Debord. The Situationist general principles were an attack on the capitalist exploitation and degradation of the life of people, and solution of alternative life experiences, construction of situations, unitary urbanism, psychogeography, with the union of play, freedom and critical thinking. Such general principles were applied by Jorn to painting.
In 1961 he friendly quit his activity in the SI, still fully supporting its contents and goals, and keeping to financially support it, but believing that the new strategy of the SI was little effective.
He went on to found the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism in Silkeborg and contributed material to the Situationist Times. Later, he donated a museum for modern art to the Danish town of Silkeborg, near where he grew up. He was to remain close to Debord, however, and continued to fund Situationist publications.
His philosophical system Triolectics was given a practical manifestation through the development of three sided football.
Later years
His first American solo exhibition was at the Lefebre Gallery in 1962. After 1966, Jorn continued to produce oil paintings while traveling throughout Europe collecting images with photographer Gerard Francesci for his vast archive of "10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art". He traveled extensively, to Cuba, England, and the far east. Jorn traveled to the United States for the first and only time in 1970, for a gallery opening at Lefebre Gallery. He had earlier asserted that he refused to travel to a country that made visitors sign a statement maintaining that they were not communists.
In 1964, he was awarded a Guggenheim International Award including a generous cash prize, by an international jury assembled by Lawrence Alloway. The following day Jorn sent this telegram to the president of the Guggenheim, Harry F. Guggenheim:
GO TO HELL BASTARD--STOP--REFUSE PRIZE--STOP--NEVER ASKED FOR IT--STOP--AGAINST ALL DECENCY MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY--STOP--I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME.
During the course of his artistic career he produced over 2500 paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, artist's books, collages, décollages, and collaborative tapestries.
He died in Aarhus, Denmark on 1 May 1973. He is buried in Grötlingbo, on the island of Gotland in Sweden.
Writing
Luck and Chance: Dagger and Guitar (1952)
The first edition of
Luck and Chance was Jorn's first published book, issued privately to subscribers in 1952. It was written at the Silkeborg Sanatorium during his convalescence from a serious attack of tuberculosis aggravated by malnutrition and scurvy. Later in the process, it also became intended as a doctoral dissertation which was refused by a professor of philosophy at Copenhagen University. It is, amongst other things, a critique of Kierkegaard's triad of aesthetic, ethical and religious stages, and of his definition of truth. Another powerful influence appears to be present in ghostly form : Friedrich Nietzsche. It is one of the most fundamental texts to understand Jorn's undertaking of "a reconstruction of philosophy from the point of view of an artist".
Internationale Situationniste (1957-1961)
Originality and Magnitude (on Isou's System) (1960), article in Internationale Situationiste No. 4.
Open Creation and its Enemies (1960), article in Internationale Situationiste No. 5.
Value and Economy
Critique of Political Economy and the Exploitation of the Unique (1961)
This book consists of two parts. The first is a concise critique of the apparent contradictions in Marx's
Das Kapital which Jorn uses to prepare the ground for a discussion of how the work of "the creative elite" can have "value" in any future society aligned on communist principles. This was originally published in French in 1959 by the
Internationale Situationniste and is the most straightforward and least discursive of all of Jorn's texts, probably because Guy Debord had a hand in the editing. The second part is a long polemic against contemporaneous Russian revisionism and the failed attempt by Denmark and Britain to join the Common Market, before coming to Jorn's main proposal, an economically independent international "creative elite" adopting typical Scandinavian institutions to realize "artistic value" for the greater universal good. He also attempts to reconcile the unique and individual position of the "creative elite" with his socialist principles. The second part alternates between objective and subjective modes.
The Natural Order (1962)
:
If this is a critique of Niels Bohr's theory of complementarity, then it is also to just the same high degree a critique of that dialectical materialism, that I in my earliest youth took to my heart and perceived to be the only acceptable principle for thought. (Asger Jorn)
Signes gravés sur les églises de l'Eure et du Calvados (1964)
Jorn had noticed some graffiti scratched into the porch at the church in
Damville during a visit in 1946. Having noticed similar scratchings in
Scandinavia at the cathedrals in
Ribe,
Lund, and
Trondheim, Jorn decided to study the phenomenon. He was able to make a trip to Normandy in 1961 with Franceschi. They were able to record a number of such markings in
Eure and
Calvados, but not elsewhere.
See also
List of Danish painters
Art of Denmark
Members of the Situationist International
Tachisme
Museum Jorn, Silkeborg
References
Jens Staubrand: Asger Jorn - On the author Ager Jorn and his five books from the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism and Index to Asger Jorn’s five books from the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism, Copenhagen 2009. ISBN 978 87 92259 89 9. The book is in English and Danish.
Jens Staubrand: ''Asger Jorn-aforismer, og andre korte tekststykker”, Valby 1995 . ISBN 8721001758 / 9788721001759
Niels Viggo Bentzon (chamber music work): ‘Det Banale’[The Banal], for mezzosopran og cello, Frederiksberg 1995. At The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Asger Jorn: Naturens Orden [The Natural Order] , København 1962
Asger Jorn: Værdi og Økonomi [Value and Economy] , København 1962
Asger Jorn: Held og Hasard [Luck and Chance] , København1963
Asger Jorn: Ting og Polis [Thing and Polis] , København 1964
Asger Jorn: Alfa og Omega [Alpha and Omega] , København 1963-64
Graham Birtwistle: ’’Asger Jorn’s comprehensive theory of art between Helhesten and Cobra 1946-1949’’, Utrecht 1986.
Troels Andersen, Brian Rasmussen and Roald Pay: ‘’Jorn in Havanna’’, Copenhagen 2005. The book is in English and Danish.
Comparative Vandalism: Asger Jorn and the artistic attitude to life by Peter Shield, Borgen/Ashgate (1998)
The Natural Order and Other Texts by Asger Jorn (Translated by Peter Shield), Ashgate (2002)
Asger Jorn : en biografi Troels Andersen, Copenhagen (1994) 2 volumes.
Tom McDonough (2002) Art in America July 2002
Notes
External links
Biography, pictures and huge list of exhibited paintings at Galerie Birch, famous for Asger Jorn and the COBRA-movement
Asger Jorn in Høst, Cobra, Group Spur and Situationists in German
Danish Expressionist Artist Life and Paintings by Karan Reshad | kolahstudio
Actual exhibitions with Asger Jorn
Museum Jorn, Silkeborg (formerly Silkeborg Kunstmuseum)
Category:Art Informel and Tachisme painters
Category:1914 births
Category:1973 deaths
Category:Danish painters
Category:Modern painters
Category:Situationists
Category:Gotland
Category:20th-century painters
Category:Abstract painters
![The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located directly on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, 35 kilometers north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark[2] with an extensive permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, dating from World War II and up until now, as well as a comprehensive programme of special exhibitions. The museum is also acknowledged as a milestone in modern Danish architecture, noted for the synthesis it creates of a](http://web.archive.org./web/20110409091618im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/05/cc/6d5ad93be646d14348f26430e2cb_grande.jpg "The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located directly on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, 35 kilometers north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark[2] with an extensive permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, dating from World War II and up until now, as well as a comprehensive programme of special exhibitions. The museum is also acknowledged as a milestone in modern Danish architecture, noted for the synthesis it creates of a")
![The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located directly on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, 35 kilometers north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark[2] with an extensive permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, dating from World War II and up until now, as well as a comprehensive programme of special exhibitions. The museum is also acknowledged as a milestone in modern Danish architecture, noted for the synthesis it creates of a](http://web.archive.org./web/20110409091618im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/05/cc/6d5ad93be646d14348f26430e2cb_thumb.jpg "The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located directly on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, 35 kilometers north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark[2] with an extensive permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, dating from World War II and up until now, as well as a comprehensive programme of special exhibitions. The museum is also acknowledged as a milestone in modern Danish architecture, noted for the synthesis it creates of a")
