Jorn in Scandinavia 1930-1953


Jorn in Scandinavia 1930-1953
Authors	Guy Atkins & Troels Andersen
Publisher	Percy Lund, Humphries & Co. Ltd./Borgens Forlag
Publishing date	1968
Series	Asger Jorn Catalogue raisonné
Followed by	Asger Jorn - The Crucial Years 1954-1964

Jorn in Scandinavia 1930-1953 is the first book in a five-volume catalogue raisonné series on the Danish painter Asger Jorn by Guy Atkins and Troels Andersen. Documenting 855 oil paintings from the first twenty-three years of Jorn’s career, it remains an essential reference work for the study of both Jorn and the modern Danish art movement as a whole.

Origins of the Project

The catalogue raisonné began with a chance conversation over lunch. Guy Atkins described the moment in a 1983 essay for Art Monthly:

By 1961, I had got to know Jorn quite well. One day we were having lunch at the Coupole in Paris: a heavy meal of cassoulet d’oie toulousienne, washed down with two or three bottles of Burgundy. I asked him what had happened to all his early pictures from the 1930s and 1940s. ‘No idea’, he said, ‘I was very poor. Some pictures I exchanged so that I could eat, and one, I remember, I sold for a pound of coffee.’ I asked him, ‘Why don’t you get these pictures catalogued?’ ‘Who’s going to do a thing like that?’, he asked. By this time we were drinking brandy. ‘I’ll do it’, I said on the spur of the moment. Jorn looked at me in amazement. ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Sure’, I said. ‘Give me a piece of paper to make it authentic and I’ll start this summer.’ I tore a piece of paper from my address book, and he wrote a statement and signed it. This document (which I only had occasion to use once) was reproduced in 1980 in the third and final volume of the œuvre catalogue, almost 20 years after that conversation in the Coupole.

- Guy Atkins, Art Monthly, 1983

Atkins had first met Jorn when the artist visited London in 1956. The project took six years to complete, with Atkins working closely with Danish art historian Troels Andersen. As Jorn wrote in his preface to the volume:

I have watched the growth of this catalogue with great interest during the six years of its preparation. The photographs of my paintings and the other photographic material, as well as the texts, have been checked over by me at various times, and particularly just before going to press. I have done my best to help Guy Atkins to find the chronology of these hundreds of early paintings, many of which I neglected to sign or date when I painted them. At the time, of course, it did not seem likely that they would ever come to have any historical interest.

When I first saw the accumulation of photographs of paintings whose existence I had mostly forgotten, I asked myself - after I had got over the shock of seeing these ghosts from the past - what on earth drove me to paint all these pictures? I shall never know the answer to this. But I can take this opportunity to assure those friends of mine who bought my early paintings that all the pictures in this catalogue are - whatever other qualities they may lack - at least genuine.

- Asger Jorn, Preface to Jorn in Scandinavia

Concept

The book traces Jorn’s artistic development from his beginnings around 1930 to the completion of the “Silent Myth” cycle in 1953. This group of paintings forms a climax at the end of what the authors describe as “a very rigorous and prolonged self-imposed apprenticeship” lasting twenty-three years. During this period, Jorn lived primarily in Denmark, though he made numerous trips abroad to Sweden, Western Europe, and once for six months to Tunisia. In the autumn of 1953 he decided to leave Scandinavia, a decision that proved to be an important turning-point for his art.

Part One examines the various stylistic landmarks of Jorn’s development: his personal and lyrical “Didaska” paintings and watercolours from the mid-1940s; the “word pictures” made with Belgian poet Christian Dotremont during the CoBrA movement; and the humorous yet strangely obsessional “Aganak” sketches of imaginary beasts, which date from a year of extreme poverty and suffering shortly before Jorn underwent a long hospital cure for tuberculosis.

Part Two includes the illustrated œuvre catalogue of all paintings by Jorn discovered from 1930 to the winter of 1953/4, amounting to 855 works with additional items listed in an appendix. The photographs were commissioned specially for the catalogue.

Part One

Themes and Styles
- From naturalism to the influence of Paris (1930-1939)
- Small things (1940-1941)
- Didaska (1944-1945)
- Saxnäs (1946)
- Tunisian paintings (1947-1948)
- Word pictures with Christian Dotremont (1948-1953)
- Le droit de l’aigle (1949-1950)
- Historical pictures (1949-1950)
- Aganaks (1950-1951)
- The Seasons (1948-1953)
- From CoBrA to the Silent Myth (1948-1953)
- Murals
Historical Background
Collections
Description and Identification of the Paintings

Part Two

Catalogue of paintings from 1930 to 1953/4
Appendix, Bibliography, Credits, Index