Asger Jorn - The Crucial Years 1954-1964

Guy Atkins
with the help of Troels Andersen

Asger Jorn
The crucial years 1954-1964

A study of Asger Jorn’s artistic development from 1954 to 1964 and a catalogue of his oil paintings from that period

Yves Rivière
Arts et Métiers
Graphiques

[Note: Footnotes have been omitted in this online version. The version on archive.org should be consulted instead.]

Introduction

This volume is a continuation of Jorn in Scandinavia, published in 1968, which described Jorn’s artistic development from 1930 to 1953 and contained an œuvre catalogue of his oil paintings from that period. The present book follows a similar pattern.

The year 1954, as readers of Jorn in Scandinavia will remember, marked the beginning of Jorn’s career outside Denmark. His name until then was hardly known abroad, except through his participation in the COBRA movement. The period of the present book ends with the year of Jorn’s first big international retrospective exhibition (shown in Switzerland, Holland, and Denmark) in 1964. This exhibition completed a decade during which he reached the full maturity of his artistic powers and gained recognition as a major European artist.

Most of the catalogue illustrations for this volume had already been collected and shown to Jorn for authentication before his fatal illness in 1973. At that time I had hardly begun to think about the text. This text, as it now stands, is therefore obviously much the poorer for the lack of guidance and criticism which Jorn would certainly have provided (as he did for the first volume), if he had lived long enough to see the book into print. His untimely death came as a severe shock to me. We had known each other since 1956 and our friendship had grown with the years. After his death I had no incentive to continue with the book. That it nevertheless came to be written is due largely to the persuasion of my Danish colleague Troels Andersen who felt, as did others, that the book would provide a tribute to Jorn’s memory.

When Jorn left Denmark in 1953 he did so in the hope of establishing himself as a painter either in Italy or France. Since he had no private means he risked the humiliating possibility of having to return home if the experiment failed. His decision to emigrate was caused mainly by his disillusionment with the art establishment in Denmark. Never having been offered a public commission the most he got from institutions like the Art Society of Copenhagen was their inclusion of him in an exhibition of Three young painters in 1953. He felt that if his official rating in Denmark was no higher than this he would do better to try his luck abroad.

If the plain and obvious reason for his departure was the frustration of trying to build a career in post-war Denmark, there were also other factors that drove him into taking a deliberate gamble on the future. Among these factors was his association with the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, who showed him a lifestyle of nomadic Bohemianism that had a certain tragi-comic originality. Dotremont, in his solitary wanderings through the more desolate parts of Sweden, used to carry his latest poems and jottings around with him in a battered suitcase. When the suitcase became too heavy he would simply abandon it!

During a stay of seventeen months in hospital with tuberculosis from 10 May 1951 - Dotremont being in the same ward with him for part of the time - Jorn decided that the elements of ‘risk and chance’ would govern his life in future. The image of the Wanderer appears in certain paintings: Buttadeo (1951) and Melmoth (1955). Buttadeo and Melmoth are variant names in the ancient legend of the Wandering Jew. He is sometimes a doubter, who wanders over the earth spreading heresy and disbelief and unable to die, and sometimes a man in search of his soul and ultimate redemption.

Jorn regarded himself as a wanderer and ‘survivor’, by temperament as well as by deliberate strategy, in contrast with those artists of his generation whom he saw as self-destroyers (e.g. Wols, Pollock, de Staël). During the last years of his life the restlessness became more marked than ever. Jorn had homes and studios in three different countries, but he also moved freely to other places, especially when dodging ‘the great artistic success machine’ (Cyril Connolly).

Coming back to the decade that is the subject of this book, Jorn spent the winter of 1953/4 in Switzerland convalescing from tuberculosis. There he made a series of etchings later published as Swiss suite. The following spring he moved to the Italian seaside town of Albisola, where a number of artists from various countries worked together on experimental ceramics. The year he spent in Albisola was artistically rewarding, though he had a hard struggle to keep himself and his family alive on his meagre earnings.

The first favourable break came in 1955 when Carlo Cardazzo, a dealer of international standing, gave him an exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte del Naviglio in Milan. The same year the sale of a series of Dream pictures at Galerie Birch in Copenhagen raised enough capital to enable him to buy a flat in Paris, at 28 Rue du Tage - off the Avenue d’Italie. The rooms were small but Jorn was used to working in cramped conditions. He had never so far (at the age of 41) owned a studio.

At about this time Monsieur Henri Lazard, a member of the family of merchant bankers, bought The witches of Pozzo Garitta (Cat.937) and some drawings. The money from this sale was just enough to ensure Jorn a foothold in Paris for a few more months. The following year an exhibition at Galerie Rive Gauche in Paris, with a catalogue preface by Jacques Prévert, consolidated his position.

At the end of 1958 the struggle for survival was suddenly and dramatically reversed into the opposite problem : how to cope with the arrival, out of the blue, of success and - since 1960 - affluence. During the year 1958 Jorn had one-man exhibitions in Italy, France, Germany, and Britain, but the most important proof of his ‘arrival’ on the international scene was the showing of Letter to my son (Fig.28 and Frontispiece), alongside paintings by Willem de Kooning, in 50 ans d’art moderne at the Expo in Brussels. From now on he found it necessary to take protective measures against the powerful commercial pressures that began to build up against him.

Jorn spent the spring and autumn of 1959 on the gigantic ceramic mural for Aarhus (Chapter 7). He immersed himself in the affairs of the Situationist International movement, sponsoring and financing their numerous publications in France, Germany, Holland, and Sweden. He attended their conferences and spearheaded the many controversies. In 1961 he created an institute for research into pre-medieval art of the Viking period in Europe. This involved, among other things, the engagement of a wholetime photographer, extensive travel in half a dozen countries, and the preparation of lavishly illustrated books. He also donated a large number of contemporary works of art (including many of his own) to the museum of his home town, Silkeborg, in Jutland (Fig.4). He organized exhibitions there of Dubuffet, Michaux, Wemaëre, and Matta, documented in every case by illustrated catalogues of international quality. These multiple activities not only absorbed his by now substantial earnings, but they also provided an impenetrable network of excuses for avoiding undesirable commitments.

From 1959-1962 Jorn’s paintings took on a defensive character. First came the Modifications (sentimental old canvases bought in junkshops and overpainted or ‘modernized’); and then Luxury paintings. produced by various methods of dribbling and splashing paint. The un-Jornlike appearance of these latter canvases, combined with the use of the already outmoded ‘action’ technique, should have ensured their rejection by the public. But in fact the London exhibition of Luxury paintings in 1961 was a sell-out. Jorn was quick to remedy this situation. He raised the prices of his next pictures to a level that effectively curbed demand. This enabled him to produce less work for much the same annual income.

In 1964 a large painting, Dead drunk Danes, was awarded a prize in the Guggenheim International Award competition in New York. Jorn made a practice of placing his pictures hors concours, but on this occasion his New York dealer, Mr Jon Streep, who owned the painting, omitted to sign the necessary proviso. When news of the award reached Jorn in Paris he immediately sent a rude telegram, rejecting the award, to Mr Harry Guggenheim personally. At the same time he wrote a letter to Jon Streep, stating his reasons for disapproving of art competitions in general. Most people in Jorn’s position would have sent the rude telegram to the dealer and the explanatory letter to the Head of the Foundation. But by reversing the process Jorn reckoned, quite correctly, that the reaction in the American press to his unprecedented manner of refusal would be so angry and hostile that he would remain unmolested from that side of the Atlantic for several years.

The period from 1954 to 1964 has been called ‘the crucial years’ in the title of this book, because these years encompass Jorn’s emergence as a major figure in European art. In the middle years of the decade, i.e. from 1956 to 1969, he produced works of the highest quality. Even during the ‘defensive’ phase, from 1959 to 1962, an occasional masterpiece slipped through. Jorn once explained this phenomenon to me by comparing himself to a conjurer. ‘The conjurer’, he said, ‘stands in front of his audience and gives a dazzling display in the air with his right hand, while he is quietly using his left hand under the table to boil himself an egg.’

Some reference to purely commercial factors has been made in this introduction. The reason is that for artists in the mid-twentieth century connivance in success has proved to be a more certain killer than hunger. Jorn was always very conscious of any threat to his freedom of action and he could become highly devious, almost to the point of paranoia, to avoid succumbing to any single influence or pressure. His simultaneous dealing with galleries in six different countries - on the principle that there is safety in numbers - is an example of this. Each dealer was supposed to be kept in his place by the knowledge that he had several rivals.

To sum up. The decade under review in this book covers the time from Jorn’s departure from Denmark to his breakthrough to maturity and recognition (artistically 1956-8; commercially 1960), followed by four years of reculer pour mieux sauter. The ‘defensive’ phase was governed by the reasons already given, but also by the need for a breathing space after the unparalleled exertion of producing the Aarhus ceramic mural, which is one of the largest, if not the largest, mural of its kind in the world. It was made in the shortest possible time and in one single sustained burst of creative energy.

Important landmarks in Jorn’s career from 1954 to 1964 are the Stalingrad picture (Fig.32), the Aarhus mural (Chapter 7) and the great sequence of ‘radiant’ paintings1 which include, among others, Letter to my son (Fig.28), Attention, danger (Fig.98), Half-moon (Fig. 108), Reencounter on the shores of death (Fig. 131).

Biographical notes

1914-1938

1914-29 Born in Vejrum near Struer in Jutland, Denmark, on 3 March 1914. Asger Jorn’s name at birth was Asger Oluf Jorgensen. His father was headmaster of the village school in Sønder Vejrum. His mother also taught there.

There were four sons and two daughters in the family, but one of the sons died in boyhood. In 1929, three years after the father’s death, the family settled in Silkeborg, Jutland. J. has always regarded Silkeborg as his home town.

1930-5 Began to paint small naturalistic landscapes, seascapes and portraits in 1930. Took a teacher training course and taught briefly in local schools. He was drafted into the Artillery, where he served for some weeks before being invalided out.

J.’s first artistic influences came from the painter Martin Kaalund-Jorgensen, who lived in Silkeborg, and from the exhibitions of contemporary Danish artists which Frederik Dam took on tour round the provinces. Dam became J.’s first dealer. J. learned about modern European art from the books and periodicals he read in the Silkeborg Public Library.

Early literary influences were the novels of Thøger Larsen; Johannes V. Jensen’s collection of myths and his novels on the origins of man; the Edda; and the Finnish epic songs of the Kalevala. J.’s admiration for Thøger Larsen was increased by the fact that he resembled J.’s father, who died when the boy was 12. J. saw the resemblance from a photograph of Larsen printed on the dust jacket of his novel Frejas rok. J. was for many years a Communist sympathizer, although from the outset he was opposed to the prevailing art policy of the party. J.’s political views were influenced by his admiration for the syndicalist leader Christian Christensen who lived near Silkeborg. In 1963 J. sculpted a runic memorial stone for Christensen (Fig.9).

J.’s earliest illustrations were sixteen woodcuts for his Blasphemous Christmas Carols, which appeared in a Danish Marxist magazine in 1933.

1936-7 In 1936 J. went to Paris on a motor cycle (Fig.8). He pulled up on the Place de la Concorde and asked the policeman on duty for the way to Communist Party headquarters. It was there that he made friends who supported him during his stay in Paris.

His plan was to study under Kandinsky. He was surprised to find that Kandinsky had no School and could not even get his own paintings exhibited in Paris. So J. joined the academy of Fernand Léger instead. During the World Exhibition of 1937 he assisted Le Corbusier in the decoration of his ‘Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux’.

1938 First one-man exhibition in Copenhagen jointly with Pierre Wemaëre, whom he had met at Léger’s academy and who became a lifelong friend.

1939-45

J. married Kirsten Lyngborg, a schoolteacher from North Jutland, in 1939. There were three children from this marriage. The family lived in Copenhagen throughout the war. For about eighteen months J. printed the monthly issues of the banned Communist journal Land og Folk on a printing press hidden inside an ottoman in his flat.

J. visited the School of Graphic Art at the Royal Academy. Here he produced an edition in ten copies of The jade flute: some Chinese poems with lithographic illustrations. A new version of this was published many years later in collaboration with Walasse Ting under the title Chinoiseries.

An important literary and artistic venture was the publication of HELHESTEN magazine, largely inspired by J. and edited by the architect R. Dahlmann Olsen. J. contributed, among other things, an article in praise of kitsch art and some translations and comments which introduced Kafka to Danish readers. The ‘Helhesten’ group included nearly all the most important Danish artists of J.’s generation : Bille, Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, and Carl-Henning Pedersen - though neither Richard Mortensen nor Robert Jacobsen.

J. experimented in a number of different painterly styles during the war years. Important works in other media were book illustrations, including those for Salvi Dybo (poems by his brother Jørgen Nash); the Didaska water-colours, inspired by a romantic love affair; and the Occupations etchings.

1945 In 1945 J. changed his name from Jørgensen to Jorn.

An event of importance for all Danish artists, shortly after the end of the war, was the exhibition in Copenhagen of some two hundred works by Edvard Munch.

1946-1953

J. always had a taste for travel. After being confined to Denmark for the five years of the war, he took every opportunity to make journeys abroad. These resulted in personal contacts which laid the foundation for the COBRA movement.

1946 Spent the summer in Swedish Lapland, where he had gone to visit the artist Folke Ricklund. In Lapland J. painted canvases in the colourful, curvilinear, near-abstract style of Saxnäs (cf. Jorn in Scandinavia Bibl.426, Fig.35).

In the autumn he met Constant in Paris and struck up a friendship with him. Later that year he stayed in Amsterdam to discuss with Constant the possibility of bringing out an international review of the arts which was to have the outlandish name SARCOMA : presumably an anagram from ARS COpenhagen AMsterdam. Nothing came of this idea, but the discussions helped later when laying down the policy for COBRA review.

1947 J. met Christian Dotremont, the future Secretary of COBRA, in Brussels.

1947-8 In November 1947 he travelled with his family to Djerba, Tunisia, where they spent about six months. He made a number of paintings there which carry the name ‘Djerba’ on the canvas or are recognizably in the Djerba style. Also from this period are the delightful ‘Hmirah’ drawings and texts owned by Bjørn Rosengreen (Bibl.375, p.38).

1948 First one-man exhibition in France, at Galerie Breteau, Paris.

In early November J. attended a conference in Paris organized by the ‘Surréalisme Révolutionnaire’ group. Six of the participants walked out of the conference in protest at the sterility of the discussions. They met in the café of the Hôtel Notre-Dame on the Quai St Michel to form a dissident group of their own. The six men were Appel, Constant, Corneille, Dotremont, Jorn, and Noiret. At this meeting the COBRA movement was founded, through the signing of a short statement drawn up by Dotremont. The name COBRA (COpenhagen, BRussels, Amsterdam) was invented by Dotremont some weeks later.

1948-51 The COBRA movement lasted three years. It began small but finally numbered about fifty artists from ten different countries. The core of the membership is found among the fifteen artists who featured in the small monographs of the ‘Bibliothèque Cobra’, edited by J.

The main public activity of COBRA consisted of joint exhibitions, the most important of which was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in November 1949. The literary effort centred on COBRA review which came out in eight issues. A double number (8/9) remained in proof owing to lack of funds.

The importance of the movement can be seen as being partly geographical. The manifestoes and joint exhibitions in Belgium and Holland challenged the monopoly of Paris as the centre for artistic theories and activities. The artists from the three smaller countries welcomed the chance to break out of their wartime isolation and to enjoy the stimulus of friendship, rivalry, and debate. The Danes were the most hospitable, but at the same time the most independent members of COBRA . They had already established a separate national identity through groups such as ‘Helhesten’ and ‘Høst’. Although they invited guest artists to exhibit at ‘Høst’, it is significant that no COBRA exhibition took place in Denmark until a decade after the movement had ceased to exist.

1949-50 After less than a year J. began to dissociate himself from the COBRA movement. This was partly because he disapproved of the general direction the movement was taking, but in large measure it was due to private events that caused a rift with Constant as well as with the Danish COBRA artists.

In May and June 1949 J. and Constant, with their wives, took a holiday on the island of Bornholm. During this holiday J. fell in love with Constant’s wife, Matie. After Bornholm the families separated, but J. and Matie spent the autumn and winter together - first in the Frederiksholmshytte in Bregnerød (which the COBRA artists had recently decorated with large murals) ; later they were lent a small summer cottage (without heating) at Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, where they spent the winter.

The liaison with Matie led not only to the breakup of J.’s marriage, but it alienated him from the other Danish artists. They held it against him that he had taken up with the wife of an artist who was a guest in their country. For the first time in his life J. had to face ostracism; which had the side effect of making it harder than ever for him to sell his work. In the spring of 1950 J. moved to a small house in the working-class quarter of Islev in Copenhagen, where his son Ole was born. In the summer Matie’s mother, Mrs A. van Domselaer, came over from Holland to have a look at her grandson. Mrs van Domselaer gave me a brief account of her visit. She found the family (including Matie’s two daughters by her marriage to Constant) living in extreme poverty in their tiny house, but as soon as Mrs van Domselaer arrived J. was all eager to take her and Matie and Ole on a journey abroad ‘to live again’. He decided they should go to Sweden. The two girls were billeted out, and then the four of them set out for the railway station ‘very poor, cheerful and Bohemian’. J. wore sandals and socks (with holes in them, through which his toes protruded) and he wheeled the baby along in an atrocious old pram. They first went to Malmö, where they stayed with a young painter, and then on to Lund. Here J. collected some money from Professor Arbman, to whom he had sold a picture. J. insisted that they should put all the money from this sale into buying a maximum round trip ticket that would take them to Gothenburg, Uppsala, Stockholm, and back to Malmö. The highlight of their journey was the stay in Gothenburg. J. knew Rikki and Ingmar Hamberg, who owned a number of his pictures. He found them at their seaside house, where he was received with rapture. He was then given the loan of their town house in Gothenburg where they could all relax for some time in comfort. The trip to Sweden was a happy interlude in an otherwise bleak existence.

During this period J. painted a group of ‘historical’ pictures with titles like Churchill’s entry into Copenhagen, The fall of Hiroshima; and some war visions entitled The pact of the predators (a reference to the Cold War alignment of the NATO powers), The fire of death, The bereaved, The scavengers. These were dark paintings, both in mood and texture.

1950-1 From the autumn of 1950 to the early spring of 1951 J. and his family lived in La maison des artistes danois in Suresnes, a suburb of Paris. The hostel, which was only big enough to house two families, was administered by a committee in Copenhagen, who also collected the rent. Conditions were primitive to the point of squalor. At the time of J.’s stay the other occupant was the sculptor Robert Jacobsen with his family. Their financial plight was at times almost as great as that of J. and Matie.

In January 1951 J. wrote a letter to Frost Larsen, a lawyer friend in Copenhagen, describing how their Christmas dinner had consisted of onions and a pig’s trotter, the latter reserved for the children.

1951 was a year of angst, constriction, claustrophobia. Wols died that year. There was no air in the world. The winter of 1950/1 was the worst period of J.’s life.

By the spring of 1951 J. had developed severe tuberculosis and external symptoms of undernourishment. He had to return to Denmark where he spent seventeen months undergoing hospital treatment in Silkeborg. He married Matie on 23 May 1951 at the Silkeborg Registry Office. She and the children - a daughter, Bodil, was born in December -lived in a council house in the town.

J. regarded his enforced return to Silkeborg as a personal defeat. He symbolized this defeat in the haggard and snarling faces of Return to the detested town (Bibl.426, Fig.l 14). His attitude to his home town was made up of the same elements of love and hate that characterized his attitude to Denmark as a whole: arising out of a disappointment of his high expectations. Whereas Matie genuinely hated Denmark, J. loved his country and the Danish language, but - with the perceptiveness of the exile - he saw all too clearly the blemishes and shortcomings of the Danish character and Danish social and political life. He once said of Hans Andersen’s writings that they were like Carlsberg Lager: considering the ordinariness of the raw material (Danish society in the mid-nineteenth century) one must admire the palatable taste and splendid packaging of the brew. J. went on to say that Hans Andersen was cold-shouldered in Denmark during his lifetime, but after his death Danes claimed that only they could understand his works. J. foresaw a similar fate for himself.

During part of the winter Christian Dotremont, who had also contracted tuberculosis, was in the same ward as J. in hospital. They made a series of black-humoured ‘word picture’ drawings on the theme of hospital life, published later as La chevelure des choses (Bibl.350). Dotremont also wrote a novel called La pierre et l’oreiller in which some of the hospital experiences are described (Bibl. 322).

1951-2 During his period of recovery in hospital J. was given a studio space (adjoining the mortuary) where he worked on The seasons, intended as a possible basis for a suite of murals in an architectural setting. Ever since working with Léger and Le Corbusier J. had hoped for an opportunity to relate painting to architecture on a grand scale, but no commissions came his way.

The two big panels On the silent myth were made slightly later, when J. was allowed to work in a studio in the town. The theme of this second group of paintings is more heroic and dramatic, based on the notion that ‘the image precedes the word’. A large painting from the 1960s called In the beginning was the image reinforces this idea.

Two books resulted from the long period of compulsory rest. The wheel of fortune (Les cornes d’or ou La roue de la fortune) is closely linked to the subject matter of The seasons. The literary counterpart of On the silent myth is a book of reflections called Risk and chance: dagger and guitar. This was probably begun around 1946 and completed in hospital. It was printed in Silkeborg on a hand press with coloured linocuts which were stamped individually into each copy. Ostensibly concerned with aesthetics, the book’s main attraction lies in the originality of the chapter headings, quotations, and scattered aphorisms, rather than in the logical pursuit of any particular topic.

1953 The important artistic event of the year was J.’s preoccupation with pottery and ceramics. His friend Erik Nyholm had introduced him to the medium some years earlier and J. had also made a few ceramics in a factory while living in Djerba. But now he took up the craft in earnest. In the town of Silkeborg itself he fired some ceramics in an electric kiln under the direction of his former tutor Randlev Petersen, who taught in the local Teacher Training College. Then he worked with a potter called Nielsen in the Frederiksborggade. But by far the largest part of his output came from the workshop of Knud Jensen in Sorring. J.’s work there was subsidized by a grant of 2,000 kroner from the Silkeborg Museum (see Chapter 7).

As a result of the intensive training in Sorring J. was already an experienced ceramist by the time he went to Albisola the following year, whereas many of the other artists there were beginners.

1953-4 J. and his family spent six months in Switzerland, from November 1953 to May 1954, in a rented chalet at Chesières, near Villars-sur-Ollon. There J. made a group of etchings, of which 23 were published as Swiss suite in 1961.

J.’s correspondence with Max Bill and Enrico Baj laid the foundation for the ‘Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste’ (MIBI) the following year.

1954-64

1954-5 J. moved to Albisola in the spring of 1954 and made many ceramic vessels and sculptures in the Mazzotti workshop, in the company of an international group of artists which included Appel, Baj, Corneille, Dangelo, Fontana, Matta, and Scanavino. J. knew Appel and Corneille from the COBRA days. He had met Matta before the war, when they both worked with Le Corbusier in 1937.

J. was lent Fontana’s studio near the square called Pozzo Garitta (Fig.3), where he watched the carnival masquerade which gave him the title for the painting The witches of Pozzo Garitta.

J. painted the series of dream pictures and frivolous pictures.

He had a one-man exhibition of ceramics in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen and of paintings at Cardazzo’s Galleria d’ Arte del Naviglio in Milan.

1956-9 J. bought a flat in Paris in 1955 and about two years later rented a studio in the same district. From now on he tended to divide his working time mainly between Paris and Albisola. These years were notable for a run of magnificent paintings: Letter to my son, 1956-7, The timid proud one, 1957, Attention, danger, 1957, They never come back, 1958, and others. First London one-man exhibitions were held at the ICA: graphics in 1957 and paintings in 1958. Other one-man exhibitions were at Galerie Rive Gauche, Paris, in 1957 and 1958; Galerie van de Loo, Munich, in 1958. International exhibitions included 50 ans d’art moderne at the Expo in Brussels; Pittsburgh International Exhibition, USA; documenta II, Kassel.

Publication of Fin de Copenhague (with G.-E. Debord) in 1957 ; Pour la forme, a collection of essays and statements on art, 1958; illustrations for C. Caspari’s Friedhof der Maulwürfe (Cemetery of the moles), 1959; Mémoires (with G.-E. Debord), 1959.

The Situationist International movement (S.I.) arose out of an alliance between MIBI and the International Lettrist group. J. was a leading participant in S.I. from 1957 to 1961.

With Pierre Wemaëre J. made a first sketch for the big tapestry Le long voyage, 3 x 27 m.

In the early summer of 1959 J. made the gigantic ceramic mural in Albisola and arranged for its transport to Aarhus, Denmark. The mural was mounted there in the autumn, with the help of three specialists brought from Italy.

Modifications were shown at Galerie Rive Gauche in Paris in 1959, with a preface by the artist.

1960-3 J. and Wemaëre had collaborated on tapestries for many years. An exhibition of their tapestries (at ‘Quatre Saisons’ in Paris) in 1960 marked the closing of the Jorn-Wemaëre workshop (Bibl.341).

From 1959 onwards J. built up the collection of modern art in the Silkeborg Museum by frequent and lavish gifts. The artists who are best represented there, apart from J. himself, are Dubuffet, Michaux, Wemaëre, and Matta, all of whom were given one-man exhibitions. The collection is also rich in works by members of the COBRA group, though oddly enough no COBRA exhibition has been held at the museum. The long list of modern masters includes Arp, Beckmann, Ensor, Max Ernst, Kubin, Léger, Picabia, Redon, and Wols. Some of the acquisitions were made by direct purchase, others by exchange, others were given by the artists themselves. The most recent gift (1974) comes from Walasse Ting, who has presented some exquisitely lyrical fluorescent acrylics to the museum ‘in memory of Asger Jorn’. The collection eventually became so important that plans for a new building (designed by Jørn Utzon) have been under discussion for some time. An exhibition of Luxury paintings took place at Arthur Tooth & Sons in London, 1961, followed by Modest luxury pictures at Galerie Birch, Copenhagen, 1962. Other important exhibitions were Nouvelles défigurations, Galerie Rive Gauche, Paris, 1962, and the first one-man exhibition in USA at Lefebre Gallery, New York, 1962. The big Stalingrad picture was shown in Art since 1950 at the World Fair in Seattle, 1962.

In 1961 and 1963 a large number of paintings - many of them from the private collection of Paolo Marinotti - were included in the exhibitions Arte e contemplazione and Visione Colore at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (Fig. 13).

After resigning from the Situationist International movement in 1961, J. began to travel extensively through Europe in search of ‘vandalist’ art. ‘Vandalism’ was a whimsical and ambiguous name by which J. referred to art of the Viking period. The graffiti on Normandy church walls, to which he devoted a book, were genuine acts of vandalism, though the patterns made by these mysterious signs tended to embellish rather than defile the walls. But in classifying all Viking architecture, sculpture, and ornament as ‘vandalist’ J. was making an ironical concession to the popular fallacy that Viking=Vandal. The Institute for Comparative Vandalism, which J. founded, was intended to sponsor the publications of some twenty-four to thirty volumes on Scandinavian art from prehistoric times to the early Middle Ages. The project broke down through lack of official support, but J. continued the research on his own initiative. He collected a vast amount of information and about 15,000 negatives and prints. The Institute also gave its imprimatur to some paperback editions of J.’s writings.

1964 At around the time of New Year, during a railway journey on the Continent, J. got into conversation with a Danish industrialist who was in the same compartment. The man mentioned that he was planning to sell a farm on the island of Læsø, off the north-east coast of Jutland. J. promptly bought the farm and never had cause to regret it. A couple of years later he visited the place for the first time. He gradually made it more habitable and added a studio. It became a third home for him (Fig.17).

In January J. rejected a Guggenheim international award for his painting Dead drunk Danes.

During 1963-4 J. made a large number of highly successful collages which were exhibited at his galleries in Munich and Paris. The Paris exhibition was called Réforme de la publicité, a reference to the paper being torn from advertisement hoardings.

The artist’s 50th birthday was marked by the publication of a first book on him in English (Bibl.373), a bibliography of his writings (Bibl.375), and an illustrated study of the Aarhus ceramic mural (Bibl.374). In the autumn the first major international retrospective was shown in Basel. It later travelled to Amsterdam and Humlebæk, Denmark.

A summer spent on the island of Gotland, Sweden, resulted in paintings which were shown the following year at Galerie Burén in Stockholm.

1965-73

1965 This was a restless year, in which J. found it impossible to settle down for long enough to accomplish any solid work. His studio at 143 Boulevard de la Gare was a large room in a ramshackle building which was scheduled for demolition. The studio was far from ideal.

J. spent New Year in Munich and not long afterwards accompanied Paolo Marinotti to Mexico, going from there to New York. This was his first visit to the USA.

One of his many other journeys was to Denmark in the spring. On 1 April J.’s Institute for Comparative Vandalism acquired its first and only home in a bungalow belonging to the Railway Company in Silkeborg. The municipality had paid the sum of 4,000 kroner to put the place in order. The building contained a darkroom with plenty of storage space, a bed-sitting room, the rudiments of a kitchen/washroom, a lavatory and a cellar.

During the year J. published the second of his ‘vandalist’ volumes. It was a study of early stone sculpture in southern Sweden and contained 305 large and impressive photographs. These were taken by Gérard Franceschi, who - together with Jacqueline de Jong - accompanied J. on his research tours.

In November J. was in Albisola, where he had by now acquired an old property with a large garden, on a hill overlooking the town (Fig. 14). An important one-man exhibition, sponsored by Børge Birch, made a successful tour in Norway.

The community of Gammel Balle near Silkeborg named one of its streets ‘Asger Jornsvej’, thereby scoring a ‘first’.

1966 This was an important year because J. got back into the rhythm of painting after a long period in which painting played a minor role. In the beginning was the image appeared in the Salon de Mai in Paris. The summer was spent in London, preparing for a one-man exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons. J. arrived in June, bringing with him fourteen canvases from Albisola, most of them unfinished. He was accustomed to carrying unfinished paintings from one country to another. He claimed that the pictures improved through travel, like the famous Norwegian ‘linje snaps’. This special aquavit is put on board ship in its barrel and is said to acquire merit from tossing on the seas and crossing the Equator. J. was sensitive to atmosphere and it is possible that he imparted something of his new impressions of a country to the canvases.

He finished the fourteen paintings while staying at 49 Onslow Gardens, N. 10. He then moved to a studio-flat in the Belsize Park area where he started afresh. All these pictures, when shown at Tooth’s in the autumn, were not quite up to J.’s highest standard; but he also made a dazzling series of acrylics which were sent to New York for an exhibition at Lefebre Gallery.

In August J. made a short trip to Scotland to study Saxon antiquities in Edinburgh and around Perth.

1967-70 The Erker-Presse in St Gallen, Switzerland, brought out a folder of lithographs Von Kopf bis Fuss …

In 1967 J. visited Cuba at the suggestion of Wilfredo Lam. In Havana he painted the walls of a disused bank with large murals (reproduced in Jorn/Cuba, Bibl.446). The Government of Cuba, in honour of J.’s visit, brought out a 13 cent stamp with a reproduction of his Stalingrad.

J. was in Paris at the time of the May riots of 1968. He made some small posters for the occasion, but did not take an active part in the events. Later in 1968 J. published his most celebrated book La langue verte et la cuite, jointly with Noël Arnaud.

In 1970 he made nineteen coloured woodcuts of outstanding quality in Munich, followed in 1971-2 by twelve others at the Imprimerie Clot, Bramsen et Georges in Paris. His latest collages Au pied du mur were shown at Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris. In Albisola he carried out a large ceramic mural commission for the Art Centre in Randers, Denmark.

In the spring of 1970 J. travelled to New York, in the aftermath of a successful exhibition at Lefebre Gallery, where sales had been remarkably good. In New York J. met Nanna Enzensberger, whom he was later to marry. Their son, Ib, was born in October 1971.

From New York J. went on to Las Vegas, Honolulu, Kyoto, Tokyo, Hongkong, and Teheran. This journey took him less than a month. He disliked the East.

By 1970 J. had got himself fully installed in a spacious studio built to his own design in a house he had bought in Colombes, some ten to fifteen minutes by train from Gare Saint-Lazare. The atmosphere and working conditions suited him extremely well. There he painted a number of masterpieces in large format, as well as smaller pictures, which were shown at the end of the year at Galerie Jeanne Bucher (La luxure de l’esthésie). From this exhibition dates a renaissance of J’.s creative strength. The years 1956-9 and 1970-2 were the high points in his artistic career.

1971-3 During the last phase of his life J. devoted his energies to sculpture, a medium he had not attempted before (except ceramic sculpture). In 1972 he made twenty-three bronzes and (at Carrara) six marble sculptures. The pieces varied in height from 10 to 75 cm. Most of the bronzes were single figures, representing humanoid personalities, with all the ambiguities of posture and gesture that characterize his paintings. When talking about these sculptures to his Italian dealer J. said T feel I have concluded what I had to conclude’. (Jorn scultore, Bibl.467, p.(5)). The words, unfortunately, were prophetic.

J. made a folder of drypoint etchings Entrée de secours, Visat, 1971, and illustrations for a short story by the Icelandic poet Halldór Laxness (Die Geschichte vom teuren Brot), published by Erker-Presse, St Gallen. In February 1973 a large and carefully chosen retrospective exhibition was put on by the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover. The exhibition, which had taken more than two years to prepare, contained 139 works, apart from graphics. After Hanover the exhibition went to Berlin, Brussels, Aalborg, and Humlebæk in Denmark. It should have gone to Stockholm, but the Modern Museum cancelled this part of the itinerary.

J. died of cancer in the Aarhus Municipal Hospital on 1 May 1973, after an illness lasting four months. The cremation took place in Silkeborg. His grave is in Gotland, the island he had visited several times to collect data for a book on Theodoric the Goth, which was almost complete at the time of his death.

Chapter 1 : Switzerland and Italy (1953-5)

Jorn and his family stayed in Switzerland from the beginning of November 1953 until May the following year, when they moved to Albisola.

While in Switzerland Jorn corresponded with Max Bill, the director of the ‘Hochschule für Gestaltung’ in Ulm, and with the Italian ‘nuclearist’ painter Enrico Baj, who lived in Milan. This exchange of letters resulted shortly afterwards in the foundation of an art movement with the cumbersome title Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (MIBI), with Jorn as its Secretary.

Jorn had heard about Max Bill’s new ‘Bauhaus’ in Ulm, and he wrote to him offering to collaborate. This offer was promptly turned down. ‘He [Max Bill] refused and wrote back that no painter was going to have any say in the new Bauhaus. I answered that this being so I would set up a Pictorial Bauhaus’ (Bibl.263, p.39).

In launching his ‘pictorial’ Bauhaus Jorn had the keen support of Enrico Baj and his friend Sergio Dangelo. Baj, a witty and highly intelligent former barrister, was ten years younger than Jorn. His Movimento Nucleare, founded in 1951, was enjoying some success in Italy, largely owing to the boundless energy and flair for publicity shown by the two-man team of Baj and Dangelo. They carried the message of their new art from the jazz cellars and honky-tonks of Milan, where the nuclearist idea was born, into their exhibitions in numerous small galleries in Milan and other cities, and once even as far afield as Brussels. Articles and statements appeared in the Italian press with titles such as ‘The atom is on the scene’, ‘An atomic bomb exploded at the Naples Academy’. Baj made a short colour film ‘representing the spontaneous movements of blotches and outpourings of colour in emulsion’, to illustrate his spontaneous technique of giving a mottled effect to his pictures. A more obvious ‘nuclear’ reference can be seen in his portrayal of solar heads, atomic mushrooms, fallout victims, and alien visitors from outer space. A characteristic feature of Baj’s aliens (ultracorpi) is their front-face posture, legs planted firmly apart, against a background of the most luxurious quality of furnishing fabrics and mattress ticking.

The correspondence between Jorn and Baj began almost as soon as Jorn reached Switzerland in November 1953. It was clear from the start that the two men had several interests in common. Both were internationalists who wanted to gain support for their ideas in as many countries as possible. Both enjoyed art polemics and the drafting of manifestoes. Their styles of painting, though very different, were basically figurative, compared with the ‘purism’ and ‘sterilism’ of the current types of abstract art. Both men also shared a taste for artistic experiments and group activity. It was this that led them to organize the ceramic experiments in Albisola during the summer of 1954. Some of the artists who foregathered there, such as Appel and Corneille, were former cobra associates of Jorn’s. Others, mainly Italian, were friends of Baj and Dangelo. One of the most talented members of the circle was Matta, whom Jorn had known since 1937.

After an intensive summer’s work in the ceramic workshop of Tullio Mazzotti, the artists held a joint exhibition in August 1954, for which the French critic Edouard Jaguer came down to Albisola from Paris. The season ended with a farewell in Milan, where the ceramics were later to be shown at the Triennale.

Jorn did not join the Movimento Nucleare, nor did he sign any of the nuclearist statements or manifestoes, but he did participate in mixed exhibitions with Baj and others, as well as contributing an occasional preface to an exhibition catalogue or an article or illustration to a nuclearist periodical. Some of the nuclearist ideology rubbed off on Jorn, as can be seen in the ‘interplanetary’ themes and titles of the Dream pictures, among others, and in the haunting Death’s dog *ceramic of c.1954 (Fig.22). Baj’s personal influence comes through once or twice in pictures from the middle ‘fifties, as in the hourglass contour and elegant duotone colouring of *Biabadu (Fig.1 ). Also in I adore grand gestures, 1954 (Cat.865), where the outspread arms can be recognized as the stock gesture of certain Baj figures from that period. Influences like these were superficial and shortlived. As for the Modifications which both artists made during the late ‘fifties, these were much more important for Jorn than for Baj. Jorn explored every aspect of the genre in his series of Modifications and Disfigurations, whereas the overpainting of old canvases held only a passing interest for Baj.

If the relationship between Jorn and Baj was always cordial, this cannot be said of Jorn and Appel. There was an element of antipathy and open rivalry between them. These two ex-heavyweights ofthe cobra movement were temperamentally incompatible and they therefore avoided each other’s company as much as possible. Appel was just as professional and dedicated as Jorn, but his art is much more physical. The average format of his best paintings, especially from later years, is considerably larger than the 81x100 cm canvases favoured by Jorn. This bigger format enables Appel to give free reign to the sweeping strokes of the knife by which he builds up his solid, tangible figures in juxtapositions of mainly single colours. Speaking about his own paintings from the later ‘fifties Appel says, ‘… my painting was a fight. I did not paint - I hit! With big knives - I hit! My red, for instance, was blood. Now my red is space.’ Jorn’s progress during the ‘fifties was towards a more and more subtle and complete integration of colour and configuration, as seen at its best in Letter to my son.

From 1954 to 1955 the two movements (MIBI and the Movimento Nucleare) were personified by Jorn and Baj, who collaborated in every possible way. The chief nuclearist review was il gesto, but there were also other ephemera, while Jorn published ERISTICA. The split between the two movements officially came in September 1956 when Baj resigned from MIBI. But already in December 1955 Baj wrote a six- page letter (in the archives of the Silkeborg Museum) in which he complained to Jorn that the names Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste and ERISTICA simply don’t catch on! That journalists just don’t want to know - whereas nuclearist manifestoes are snapped up! And that the title ERISTICA is ‘mysteriosophic’.

It must be remembered that the Milanese artists had a down-to-earth businesslike attitude to their Movimento Nucleare, which they regarded at least partly as a public relations exercise to promote the sale of pictures. The Italian artists met almost daily at their rendezvous in the Giamaica Bar, whose walls carried their slogans and exhibition notices. It was here that new tactical moves were worked out and news exchanged on matters of mutual interest, such as the arrival of an important collector or dealer in Milan. Such a visitor was first invited to the Giamaica and then given a splendid meal in one of the restaurants that accepted pictures in lieu of payment. During the second half of the 1950s Milan was one of the most stimulating and well organized centres of modern art in Europe. The brothers Gio and Arnaldo Pomodoro were beginning to produce their sculpture and jewellery. The most senior artist at the Giamaica Bar was Lucio Fontana, who led the Movimento Spaziale, but was nevertheless on friendly terms with the nuclearist group.

Baj left MIBI just as it was entering its second productive phase. The centre of activity had shifted from Albisola to the town of Alba, which lies about 100 km inland from Savona. Here an experimental laboratory was set up in 1955 under the direction of Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio and his assistant Giorgio Melanotte. Pinot Gallizio was a scientist trained as an organic chemist. His other interests included archaeology and botany. It was his scientific knowledge that proved most valuable when it came to inventing new techniques for mixing and applying colour. His personal contribution lay in the invention of ‘industrial painting’, a style associated with his name from 1958 onwards. Pinot Gallizio’s long strips of mechanically produced pictorial surfaces were first exhibited in Turin at ‘Notizie’ in March 1958. Michèle Bernstein, in her catalogue preface, points out some of the advantages of the new method. ‘All of a sudden’, she writes, ‘no more problems of size; the canvas is cut before the eyes of the satisfied buyer; no more bad periods; mechanical painting never loses inspiration, thanks to a wise combination of chance and mechanics; no more metaphysical themes, these being alien to mechanical painting; no more dubious reproductions of immortal masterpieces; no more private views.’

The climax of Pinot Gallizio’s career was his inclusion in the international exhibition Dalla natura all’arte at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1960. He was represented there by a *Cavern of anti-matter, *measuring 2.05x30.4 m, and a smaller stretch of canvas measuring 2.05x10 m. Pinot Gallizio was a founder member of the Situationist International movement. This exiplains why the Alba laboratory was renamed *The Experimental Laboratory of the Situationist International *in 1957. Pinot Gallizio was an ebullient character whose impromptu speeches added sparkle to the early Situationist meetings (Fig.35).

Chapter 2: Breakthrough (1956-8)

The years 1954-5 were given over mainly to ceramics made in Albisola, but now Jorn decided that he would have to move to Paris. Only in Paris could he hope to establish himself as an artist. Alechinsky found a vacant flat for him at 28 rue du Tage, 13e. Jorn raised the money to buy this flat by painting twenty-three dream pictures, which Borge Birch exhibited in his gallery in Copenhagen. These were followed at the end of 1955 by a small group of frivolous pictures, shown by Birch in a mixed exhibition at Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.

Among the frivolous pictures (which had greater freshness and individuality than the ‘dream’ series) Burning bird (Cat.947), with its tinsel and sand, shows an obvious influence from Albisola. The same is true of several other paintings from the mid-‘fifties, including the humorous Portrait of Einer Madsen (Fig. 19); The coquette (Fig. 140); and the splendid Dante Alighieri (Fig.42). In these pictures a clarity of contour and a dappled ‘glaze’ surface are reminders of the ceramic experience.

In Paris Jorn had his first important one-man show at Galerie Rive Gauche. The exhibition (Arnal et Jorn) took place in June 1957, with a catalogue preface by Jacques Prévert. This preface in itself gave a certain standing to Jorn’s work, which was otherwise almost unknown. His only previous patron in Paris had been an eccentric millionaire, Henri Lazard, who made a brief and highly personal incursion into modern art buying in 1955. He later left Paris for a hotel suite in Lausanne - his collection went into a bank vault. An important side effect of Jorn’s exhibition at Rive Gauche was that it opened his way to England. Several of the best pictures were sold to British collectors.

I first met Jorn when he came to London for a few days in 1956. It was not until some years later, however, that we knew each other well enough for him to talk to me about his life in Italy and France, and the influence that these countries might have had on his paintings. Jorn always regarded himself as a northern or ‘nordic’ painter, but - as I said in an earlier book - ‘it was in Italy and soon afterwards in France that he absorbed from his environment some of the essentially Latin qualities that gave to his painting a new persuasiveness and brilliance’.To these two qualities one should add ‘lucidity’, particularly when referring to those compositions from 1956 to 1958 which Lawrence Alloway once described to me as ‘resolved’.

When Jorn had been living among Italians and Frenchmen for some time, and had observed their habits, he couldn’t help admiring the way in which artists and intellectuals in those countries seemed to be able to regulate their social life by the clock. For them the hour of the apéritif is set aside for meeting friends and acquaintances at the café. As soon as this daily ritual is over, they manage calmly to go back to their private affairs. Not so Jorn. Once Jorn got among people he found it impossible to extricate himself. This was because his life was normally so secluded that a sudden influx of people would stimulate him far beyond any reasonable time limit. His involvement with friends on such occasions tended to be total. In later years, when he lived in Colombes, he would sometimes have an evening meal with friends in his favourite restaurant and then invite the orchestra home with him - to go on drinking and playing music far into the night. Jorn’s gregariousness was that of a basically lonely man.

Jorn claimed that the time-consciousness and self-discipline of French social life were reflected in French art. As an example he cited Georges Mathieu. He contrasted Mathieu as an actor-painter, painting in front of an audience, with the essentially solitary action painting of Jackson Pollock. In Jorn’s opinion Pollock was a typically northern (albeit North American) artist, ‘living out his personal myth’ in front of ‘an audience of nobody’.

Jorn had read Benedetto Croce and he knew that the idea of personal grief expressed subjectively in art is abhorrent to Latin taste. According to the Latin or classical canon all personal marks have to be obliterated to achieve formal objectivity. ‘Form for form’s sake’ Jorn called it. If this is in fact an important principle of classical art, it is relevant to ask how far Jorn was influenced in that direction by his new environment in Italy and France. Perhaps the best answer is to look at one of his completely lucid or ‘resolved’ pictures from the middle ‘fifties. Unwelcome visit (Fig.27) is a good example. The composition is neatly divided into an upper and a lower half. The top right section provides the main interest; a woman facing a rebellious child. In saying ‘woman’ and ‘child’ one is of course translating these zoomorphs into purely human terms. The interpretation of a picture like this is always personal and arbitrary. Jorn’s best paintings are hermetic: they guard their secret even after one has been familiar with them for years. The overall style of Unwelcome visit - with its dominant sandy brown - is quiet, unified and controlled. Such a picture would have been unthinkable even three years earlier, while Jorn was still in Denmark. His newly won clarity and poise must be attributed at least partly to the classical Mediterranean influences.

In using the term ‘classical’ it should be mentioned that Jorn himself avoided the classical-romantic distinction as far as possible, knowing that in such a two-term system he would have to be classed as a ‘romantic’. He preferred the term ‘Gothic’: a Gothicism born out of chaos and striving towards a new and original form.

An event of lasting personal importance at this period was Jorn’s meeting with Otto van de Loo in Paris. Van de Loo was opening a gallery in Munich and came to Paris in the spring of 1957 in search of talent. He met Jorn by chance in Arnal’s studio and later visited him in the Rue du Tage. Jorn was shortly leaving for Italy and agreed to send some work from there. In due course a group of collages arrived in Munich from Albisola, and towards the end of the year, when he was back in Paris, Jorn wrote that he wanted to spend the Christmas period in Munich. Van de Loo and his wife were naturally rather dismayed at the prospect of a strange artist in the house at such a time. They tried to postpone the visit, but Jorn promised to be no trouble - he merely wanted to paint. The visit turned out to be a great success and became the first of Jorn’s many long and productive stays in Munich. He felt happy there, firstly because of the warmth and friendliness of the Van de Loo household. And then he found a never-ending source of amusement in the Bavarian quirkiness, with its largely bogus folk culture, which provided him with a treasure trove of humorous German picture titles.

1958 was an annus mirabilis in the matter of painting. Jorn was now at the height of his powers, and it is symptomatic that some of the finest canvases from that year are in a bigger than usual format: 60-100 points. The first of these was A toast to the New Year (Fig. 149), which was painted at Otto van de Loo’s house and reflects the tumultuous New Year festivities there.

The holiday in Munich was a bright interlude that contrasted with the anguish and depression that spanned the years 1957-8, when Jorn realized that his marriage to Matie was inevitably doomed to break up. It was Jorn’s second marriage failure and he was deeply hurt by it. Now that his home was barred to him he had nowhere to go after his journeys. The hotel he picked (because it was near his studio) was as bleak and drab as one would expect from that end of the Boulevard de la Gare, notorious as a trouble spot during the Algerian riots.

Jorn’s temperament was geared to what he himself recognized as a sequence of manic-depressive cycles. During the low periods he had early taught himself not to struggle uselessly against depression but to hug the invisible enemy to him, and to fall to the ground after the manner of the winning judo practitioner. Now he was able to salvage something from the wreckage of his marriage by creating paintings of tragic splendour.

They never come back (Fig. 127) expresses some of the bitterness of this period. The chaos and turbulence of the surface texture is all the more expressive for being kept below the threshold of tangible figuration. Technically and emotionally it stands at the opposite extreme from Unwelcome visit and the other anecdotal pictures. It has affinities with Stalingrad, though there the violence has been silenced under a shroud of death. Stalingrad is a remote historical battlefield, but it is also a crisis-by-crisis record of Jorn’s inner life.

Letter to my son (Fig.28) is widely considered to be Jorn’s masterpiece from this period. It was included in both of the major retrospective exhibitions (1964-5 and 1973) and has been reproduced in numerous books and articles. The format is about three times larger than usual, but - unlike several of Jorn’s bigger canvases, such as Dead drunk Danes - there is no evidence of extra effort. The picture is singularly harmonious, serene and resolved. Although it has no central focal point, a diagonal axis runs through the images from top left to bottom right. The individual figures stand out as separate entities, yet at the same time they are linked to each other through subtle transitional nuances of colour and a fine balance of stresses. Adjoining heads, in this ‘ballet of heads’ (the title of a painting from 1960), act in mutual support in spite of the fact that these heads (or heads and bodies) are poised in different directions and at different angles: some are seen frontally, others in profile, others are tilted or floating in various ways. The eyes of these persons are either averted from the spectator or directed slightly above his head. This adds to the air of detachment and other-worldliness of this remarkable work.

The main achievement of Letter to my son is the virtuosity with which the whole corps de ballet of floating, zooming, slanting, or pirouetting figures is held under control. In this respect an interesting comparison can be made with an earlier composition, The fallen idols of 1950 (Jorn in Scandinavia, Bibl.426, Fig. 160). Here the individual figures are deployed in a rigid fan formation, splayed out like a hand of cards. From this comparison it is clear that the art of creating variations of space and perspective for figures in a multiple composition was mastered by Jorn only during the middle ‘fifties.

Beyond any mere technical accomplishment, an extraordinary magic, which is Jorn’s greatest personal hallmark, pervades the best canvases from this time. This quality is uppermost in pictures such as Half-moon *(Fig. 108) and *Loss of centre (Fig. 128), which are peopled by pensive, sentient monsters and superhumans from an untarnished pre-urban world: composed of myth and dream. The colours in these pantheistic visions have the natural glowing sheen of bird plumage or butterfly wings. In such pictures there is a sense of remoteness and melancholy. The spectator is looking in on scenes from a primal, monistic world that lies beyond any time scale of past-present-future. The solemnity is of a kind that neither invites nor rejects the onlooker’s participation.

An important category of paintings from 1955 onwards is the long sequence of portraits. Some of these are specific and named, others are human studies which are not titled as portraits, but are nevertheless reminiscent of portraiture. The characterization of the people who -figure in the portrait studies is often strikingly apt, e.g. Einer Madsen *(Fig. 19), *Genia (Fig. 123), Gaston Bachelard (Fig.222). Jorn also portrayed some of his dealers and some members of his family.

It seems reasonable to assume that a number of these portraits were deliberately planned, while others were titled as portraits only after the event, owing to a chance resemblance that may have struck the artist during the act of painting or even after the picture had been completed. This would fit in with his general approach to the problem of finding titles (Chapter 12).

Occasionally the portraits are named after poets or painters from the past: Apollinaire, Dante, Goya, Redon. Only the first of these (Fig.45) looks as if it might have been planned as a portrait from the beginning.

Apart from the named portraits and one or two anomalies, like the Soutinesque Portrait of a waterfall (Cat.962), there is a group of about a dozen very vivid and explicit human studies, some of which are portraits in all but name, e.g. The timid proud one (Fig.29), True clown *(Fig. 129), *Woman of October 5th (Fig. 30). What strikes one here is Jorn’s extraordinary versatility of technique and invention, the total absence of routine or self-repetition. Nothing could be technically further apart than The timid proud one and Woman of October 5th. In the one case the monolithic, arrogant, Mussolini-like face has a startling simplicity and monumentally : it is carried out in two colours against a plain background. In the other case a nervous tangle of jabbed brush strokes over the whole area of the face and neck is completed by some bold lines of yellow squeezed straight from the tube.

A curious feature in some of these studies is the small companion figure in a corner of the canvas, as in The timid proud one. Naturally the most close-knit of these relationships between big and small occurs in Doggie to Missie (Fig.25), where the psychological entanglement of mistress and pet is symbolized by the colour they share and by the physical link of some strands of paint.

As a sideline to the portraits in oil Jorn made an impressive series of paper collages dated 1956. Two typical examples are Violet and orange bird (Fig.234) and Portrait of Baj (Fig.20). The contours are bold and clear and the coloured patches are reinforced here and there by dabs or strokes of the brush. Collages from now on are an important part of Jorn’s production, along with ceramics and tapestries. Their style keeps pace with the development of his paintings, right up to the big collage exhibition of 1969 (Au pied du mur), where the dramatic audacity of some of the big paintings from the late ‘sixties is reflected in the dazzling colours of the collages.

Chapter 3: Stalingrad: No Man’s Land (1956-72)

Jorn’s largest and most problematical painting, 350x540 cm (c.11 ft 6 in x 17 ft 9 in), occupied him intermittently for sixteen years. Stalingrad *is dated on the canvas 1957-60-67-72. But the first date should read 1956, since the earliest version was exhibited in Turin that year under the title *La ritirata di Russia. Jorn probably chose the date 1957 because he completely overpainted the picture after it had been shown in Turin and he continued to paint upon it until 1960. The year 1967 on the canvas relates to the Salon de Mai of that year, when *Stalingrad *was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Jorn spent several hours, while the museum was closed to visitors, repainting parts of the picture. Finally in December 1972, only a few months before his death, he added the dense clusters of dots placed intermittently over the whole surface, giving an impression of gutted buildings. This single element of realism jars with the otherwise total bleakness of the landscape.

The title of Stalingrad also underwent several changes, from La ritirata di Russia (1956) to Stalingrad the non-existent or The crazy laugh of courage (Seattle, 1962) to Stalingrad, utopie inachevée d’une ville qui n’existe plus ou Le fou rire de courage to the definitive French and English titles *Stalingrad, le non-lieu ou Le fou rire de courage *translated as *Stalingrad, no man’s land or The mad laughter of courage. *This English version of the title was approved by Jorn (he particularly liked the ‘no man’s land’) when I suggested it to him in 1963. This was during a long conversation about the picture at the time when I was preparing the small monograph for Methuen’s ‘Art in Progress’ series, where this title is given in the biographical notes (Bibl.373, p. (4)).

On two occasions (in 1963 and again on 20 Sept 1970) Jorn talked to me at length about the origin and motivation of Stalingrad. I made fairly full notes during and after both conversations. To avoid overlap and repetition I will summarize Jorn’s remarks in the form of a single résumé.

Stalingrad, Jorn said, has its origins in the Spanish Civil War of 1937. I detested the gang of intellectuals who associated themselves with the war: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Malraux, Ilya Ehrenburg. Picasso’s Guernica presented a challenge to me, because Picasso’s manner of portraying this event is completely alien to me. Guernica is painted from the standpoint of the involved and indignant spectator. It is the

direct symbolical portrayal of an incident. I, on the other hand, wanted to depict not the outer but the inner reality of an act of war. In the mid-‘fifties I was haunted by the stories told to me about the Battle of Stalingrad. Umberto Gambetta, my Italian friend who later became my housekeeper in Albisola, had fought at Stalingrad. He gave me first-hand accounts of the catastrophic debacle in which hundreds upon hundreds of men died of cold alone. In such a battle the human tragedy outweighs every other consideration. It is impossible to be partisan, even though the battle decided the future of the Western world. It was a turning point in our destiny. Why and how does such a turning point come about? I always wanted to make a painting that would be an action rather than portraying an action. Here again the contrast with Guernica. The difference between the destruction at Guernica and Stalingrad is one of dimension. Guernica still exists whereas Stalingrad was completely wiped off the map. It became a ‘non-lieu’, a ‘non-place’. The magnitude of such an act of destruction transcends the human scale. Until 1950 I believed in the reality of the Cold War confrontation. I painted The pact of the predators in 1950 to symbolize the pact of the nato powers. After 1950 the consequences of nuclear war surpassed the human imagination and could no longer be expressed in pictorial terms. The same is true of the Battle of Stalingrad. The name ‘Stalingrad’ is, in a way, immaterial. It stands for an anonymous battlefield with snow. Yet the idea of painting a picture like this can also be seen within the nineteenth-century tradition of painting historical scenes: Napoleon’s retreat before Moscow. But my picture is an inner record of a historical event.

The above passage is not only a résumé but a paraphrasing of Jorn’s statement. He spoke English very fluently but very unevenly, with idiosyncrasies of pronunciation that were sometimes quite dramatic. No attempt has been made to reproduce his speech style.

Stalingrad is psychologically, as a personal document, Jorn’s most significant work. It is loaded with tragic images, which were deleted again in later stages, only to re-emerge of their own accord. The layers of paint contain a record of his self-examination. The subtitle The mad laughter of courage stands both for the insane heroism of battle and for the irony of keeping up one’s own courage during bad times. In this respect the layers of paint, with their buried or half-buried images, constitute a private diary - a palette which he abandoned as often as the self-questioning threatened to lead to self-destruction.

Stalingrad was bought by Albert Niels in 1958. It was in his house at Rhode-Saint-Genèse near Brussels for some years, but in the early ‘sixties it seems to have been on offer to various buyers: Galerie Krugier in Geneva, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, and Mr J. N. Streep in New York. It now hangs on a spacious wall in good natural light in the Silkeborg Museum, where the visitor is confronted, in an upper room, by this vast deserted landscape - deserted, that is, until the teeming grimaces of the dead begin to stare up through the surface. Stalingrad is comparable to Goya’s ‘black’ paintings, which go to the last frontier of pain and horror.

Chapter 4: Situationists (1957-61)

‘What was basically wrong with the S. I. was that it focused exclusively on an intellectual critique of society.’
CHRISTOPHER GRAY

The MIBI congress which took place from 2-8 September 1956 in Alba, laid some of the foundations for the Situationist International movement. The chief participants in Alba were Jorn, Pinot Gallizio, Constant, and Gil Wolman. The latter was a delegate from the International Lettrist movement. His main contribution to the conference was a statement on ‘unitary urbanism’, the total play-town theory which later figured large in the Situationist literature.

Baj came to the congress but left almost immediately. His departure marked a final split between MIBI and the Movimento Nucleare. Two visitors from Czechoslovakia, Pravoslav Rada and Jan Kotik, arrived at the end of the congress, just in time to add their signatures to the six-point programme drawn up by the others.

This congress was followed by the ‘unification conference’ which took place in the little Italian town of Cosio d’Arroscia in July 1957 (Fig.37). It was attended among others by Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein. Like Wolman they were members of the dissident International Lettrist group which had split off from orthodox Lettrism.

The Lettrist movement, amongst its other extravagant claims, described itself as ‘le seul mouvement d’avant-garde artistique contemporain’. It dated from 1950, though its leaders, Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, were preparing the ground for Lettrism during the second half of the 1940s. Lettrist aspirations were literary and philosophical, but branching out into educational theory, art, sociology, Marxist economics and politics. The group also claims to have been the first to recognize the importance of the strip cartoon as a serious medium of communication. ‘We lettrists were the first, from 1947 onwards, to love the strip cartoon as presaging a means of communication that is greater than ordinary writing. We defended it against the retrograde art critics and literary critics of the period, who regarded it as a medium fit only for children and infantile adults.’ Strip cartoons held an important place in Situationist literature and polemics, as well as in most of the other protest literature of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties.

The ‘unification’ which took place at Cosio d’Arroscia was a merger of MIBI with the International Lettrists under the title ‘Internationale Situationniste’ (Situationist International). Guy Debord soon afterwards took charge of the secretariat and central apparatus of S. I. in Paris, as well as becoming editor-in-chief of the periodical internationale situationniste (IS). He was and remained the dominant personality of the movement.

Six months after the meeting at Cosio d’Arroscia a two-day conference was convened in Paris. It set the pattern for the hard line adopted by Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein in the matter of discipline. Michèle Bernstein, in an article entitled ‘No useless leniency’, explained the necessity for a disciplined organization (IS, I, pp.25-6). The first victims of this closing of the ranks were three members of the Italian section: Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo, and Elena Verrone. They were expelled for persistently voicing reactionary views. Next in line for expulsion, two months later, was the young English painter Ralph Rumney, who had done some notable ‘psychogeographical’ research in

Venice but had then fallen by the way side, and - ‘the Venetian jungle . . closed in on the young man’ (IS, I, p.28).

The Situationist movement, during the decade of its main influence, went through three phases. The first, formative, tentative, and relatively tolerant phase, lasted from 1957 to 1961. This coincided with Jorn’s membership. He resigned in April 1961 owing to ‘various personal circumstances’, but probably in part because he felt that the formative period, during which he could exert some influence, was coming to an end. His interest in the movement had been literary and intellectual rather than political, as can be seen from his contributions to IS magazine. It is also safe to assume that some aspects of S. I. will have appealed to his sense of humour. Like his friends Prévert, Arnaud, and Dubuffet, Jorn was a title holder in the Collège de Pataphysique.

From 1962 to 1965 S. I. broke up into four main factions. A small nucleus remained grouped round Guy Debord and the magazine IS. The German ‘Gruppe Spur’ members were expelled in February 1962, but continued for a short time to publish spur and other ephemera on their own. In March Jørgen Nash and fellow-‘Nashists’ from the Scandinavian section seceded and were consequently expelled. They set up their headquarters on Nash’s farm in southern Sweden. The fourth element, expelled the same month, consisted simply of Jacqueline de Jong, who edited the situationist times from Hengelo in Holland. These three years had been a period of mounting dissension and acrimony.

Finally, 1966-8 saw the vindication of Debord’s policy, sustained against every kind of opposition, of adhering rigidly to the uncompromising pursuit of a singleminded plan. When the time came - in Strasbourg in November 1966 and in Paris in May 1968 - Debord was ready, with his two or three remaining supporters, to take over the revolutionary role for which he had been preparing during the past ten years.

Phase I (1957-61)

Jorn took an active part in the organization of S. I., as well as helping to edit the magazine IS, to which he contributed five articles. His main effort, however, lay in the recruitment of new members. Through his brother Jørgen Nash a number of other Scandinavians came into the movement. Jorn himself brought in Constant, Pinot Gallizio, Jacqueline de Jong, and ‘Gruppe Spur’.

In the autumn of 1958 Jorn had his first one-man exhibition in Munich. There he met the members of ‘Gruppe Spur’. They were a small group of young and impressionable artists, who must have been surprised and flattered at being noticed by someone of Jorn’s standing from abroad. They were amenable to Situationist ideas, though they never grasped the liner points. This was partly because of the language barrier. S. I. sessions were conducted in French and someone had to make two-way translations for the benefit of the Germans.

Jorn helped the young Munich artists to finance their magazine spur and he introduced them to various influential people, among them Paolo Marinotti, who gave them an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. The artists were Lothar Fischer, Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm, Hans-Peter Zimmer. The German section of S. I. also included Uwe Lausen and Dieter Kunzelmann. Lausen served a short prison sentence as the result of an obscenity and blasphemy trial in Munich, for which ‘Gruppe Spur’ had provided most of the provocation. The ‘Spur’ artists went into exile.

‘Gruppe Spur’ created trouble not only vis-à-vis the Bavarian authorities but also for some of those who helped them in their careers as artists. It did not take them long to quarrel with Paolo Marinotti in Venice and Otto van de Loo in Munich. Even Jorn finally came to realize the truth of Matta’s remark to him à propos of ‘Gruppe Spur’ : ‘If you pick up a strange baby, don’t be surprised if it craps on you!’

One of the most successful conferences of S. I. was that held in London in the autumn of 1960. As the conference date drew near the participants arrived in ones and twos from their various countries. When they reached London they were set the ‘psychogeographical’ task of finding their way to ‘The British Sailors Society’ in the heart of the East End (Fig.40). A room had been booked there for the conference. The gist of the conference is reported in IS, V, pp.19-23, but one of the main events took place outside the conference room. This was the public meeting held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which was then in Dover Street. This meeting was a triumphant success for the Situationists, but the audience was merely bewildered.

The following description is based on some notes I made at the time. The meeting had been advertised to start at 8.15 pm, but shortly before 9 o’clock the group of Situationists who occupied the anteroom and bar of the ICA were still wrangling over the English translation of their ‘declaration’. At this point Mrs Dorothy Morland, the director of the ICA, asked me to tell Guy Debord (who doesn’t speak English), that she would cancel the meeting if he was not ready to begin by 9 o’clock. I thought that such an ultimatum would be counterproductive, so I reversed the message. I told Guy Debord that the directrice was most anxious that the text of the statement should be as authentic as possible and that the audience was quite willing to wait as long as necessary. At this Debord immediately gathered up his papers and the group filed into the auditorium. Jacqueline de Jong went out to fetch Jorn who was having dinner with his American dealer, Jon Streep, in a restaurant across the road.

The meeting, from beginning to end, was a parody of a normal ICA evening. Toni del Renzio was the ICA’s chairman that night. He opened the meeting by giving some of the historical background of the Situationist movement. When he mentioned the conference in Alba there was loud applause from the Situationists. At the mention of the ‘unification conference’ at Cosio d’Arroscia the clapping was terrific, accompanied by loud footstamping. The ICA audience was clearly baffled by this senseless display of euphoria. Del Renzio then introduced the *S. I. *spokesman Maurice Wyckaert.

Instead of beginning with the usual compliments, Wyckaert scolded the ICA for using the word ‘Situationism’ in its Bulletin. ‘Situationism’, Wyckaert explained, ‘doesn’t exist. There is no doctrine of this name.’ He went on to tell the audience ‘If you’ve now understood that there is no such thing as “Situationism” you’ve not wasted your evening.’

After a tribute to Alexander Trocchi, who had recently been arrested for drug trafficking in the United States, Wyckaert launched into a criticism of Unesco. We were told that Unesco had failed in its cultural mission. Therefore the Situationist International would seize the Unesco building by ‘the hammer blow of a putsch‘. This remark was greeted with a few polite murmurs of approval.

Wyckaert ended as he had begun, with a gibe at the ICA. ‘The Situationists, whose judges you perhaps imagine yourselves to be, will one day judge you. We are waiting for you at the turning.’ There was a moment’s silence before people realized that the speaker had finished. The first and only question came from a man who asked ‘Can you explain what exactly Situationism is all about?’ Wyckaert gave the questioner a severe look. Guy Debord stood up and said in French ‘We’re not here to answer cuntish questions’. At this he and the other Situationists walked out.

One of the interesting features of the evening had been the remarkable consistency of the play-acting by the Situationist audience in an unrehearsed situation.

This meeting was the second time that the ICA had let itself in for a Situationist hoax. Some months earlier *Hurlements en faveur de Sade *had been shown there. This film is Debord’s masterpiece, made in 1952 while he was a Lettrist. It was first screened at the Musée de 1’Homme in Paris, where it caused an uproar. After the performance several people showed their disapproval by ‘desolidarifying’ themselves (i.e. resigning) from the Lettrist movement.

Hurlements … is a completely blank film (cf. Fig.41) in which nothing at all is shown on the screen. The sound track comes on occasionally and consists of odds and ends of prose spoken in a deadpan voice. The film is black-and-white in the sense that the screen is black during the silences, white for the sound track. Four of the spoken passages are random extracts from the Civil Code. Other utterances are bits of chit-chat such as ‘Il est amusant, le téléphone’; ‘Veux-tu une orange?’ ; ‘Paris était très agréable à cause de la grève des transports’.

During a final silence of twenty-four minutes, when the only sound in the room was the turning of the reel, a member of the audience got up, thanked Mrs Morland for an interesting evening and apologized for having to leave early. Everyone else stayed to the end, hoping that a sensational titbit might still be coming. When the lights went up there was an immediate babble of protest. People stood around and some made angry speeches. One man threatened to resign from the ICA unless the money for his ticket was refunded. Another complained that he and his wife had come all the way from Wimbledon and had paid for a babysitter, because neither of them wanted to miss the film. These protests were so odd that it was as if Guy Debord himself were present, in his role of Mephistopheles, hypnotizing these ordinary English people into making fools of themselves in public.

The noise from the lecture room was so loud that it reached the next audience, queueing on the stairs for the second house. Those who had just seen the film came out of the auditorium and tried to persuade their friends on the stairs to go home, instead of wasting their time and money. But the atmosphere was so charged with excitement that this well-intentioned advice had the opposite effect. The newcomers became all the more anxious to see the film, since nobody imagined that the show would be a complete blank!

Afterwards one realized that Debord’s use of emptiness and silence had played on the nerves of the spectators, finally causing them to let out ‘howls in favour of de Sade’.

Phase II (1962-5)

The discord that was building up inside the Situationist movement came fully into the open during the 5th Conference, held in Gothenburg in August 1961. It was the first conference at which Jorn was not present, as he had resigned in April. Without his calming influence the Germans and Scandinavians, most of whom he had personally brought into the movement, began to voice their dissent from the orthodox Paris line. Before long the mood of the conference became distinctly unpleasant, as one can see from reading the official report in IS. Yet by the time the conference ended, several of those who were shortly to be expelled had been voted into responsible posts on the central administration.

A few months after the Gothenburg conference the mass expulsion of ‘Gruppe Spur’ and three other Germans took place. The names were Erwin Eisch, Fischer, Kunzelmann, Renée Nele (the sculptress), Prem, Gretel Stadler, Sturm, Zimmer. A month later five Scandinavians were eliminated: Ansgar Elde, Steffan Larsson, Katja Lindell, Jørgen Nash, Hardy Strid. Another casualty was Jacqueline de Jong from Holland.

This purge left several countries unrepresented in the movement. Among those who remained, J. V. Martin (Denmark) showed unusual powers of survival during the next few years, unlike his colleague from Norway. The Norwegian member, Ambrosius Fjord, committed the offence of signing one or two ‘Nashist’ manifestoes. After his expulsion the authorities in Paris realized that Ambrosius Fjord was in fact Nash’s Norwegian horse. Nash had used his Norse horse to make his list of signatories look more impressive.

The root cause of the rupture between the loyalists round Debord and the rebels round Nash was their difference of opinion on the strategy for bringing about the desired cultural revolution. Debord believed in the total rejection of the prevailing consumer society, whereas the Germans and Scandinavians maintained that the existing institutions could be successfully infiltrated and undermined. At Gothenburg Heimrad Prem put forward the view that artists should work within the limits of the possible, but Debord maintained that a ‘conniving avant-garde’ was Public Enemy Number 1. By the end of the third session late at night, tempers were frayed, and epithets like ‘cultural pimp’ were hurled around. The plain dilemma, shared by all the artists from Prem to Jorn, was that painters have to sell pictures in order to live. Even Debord, the revolutionary soul and conscience of the movement, could not avoid selling paintings given to him by Jorn in order to meet the printing costs of IS. The rumour that he lived by cheating at poker was just a happy fantasy.

After the breakup that occurred early in 1962, Jørgen Nash set up a ‘Situationist Bauhaus’ on his farm ‘Drakabygget’ (‘Dragon’s Lair’) in Sweden (Fig.44). He built a studio there for Asger Jorn, who never used it. The German painters, who now called themselves ‘Spur im Exil’, spent some time at Drakabygget, as did the English poet and painter Gordon Fazakerley and the Danish film maker Jens Jørgen Thorsen. The atmosphere on the farm was gregarious and hospitable, with an undercurrent of intrigue, not unlike the Giamaica Bar in Milan, and for the same reasons.

At Drakabygget, during the summer, a dozen or more people would normally sit down to table every day, not counting the children; and Katja had a tough time catering for these hordes. The farm’s telephone bills alone must have been alarming. Nash and his guests were compulsive long-distance callers. Another extravagant habit was that letters carrying the ‘Situationist Bauhaus’ emblem were almost automatically sent by ‘express’ mail.

Drakabygget had an air of bustle and artistic activity, even though the things produced there were mostly rather ordinary. Michèle Bernstein’s claim that the Situationists ‘insist on recruiting only geniuses’ was an exaggeration.

The magazine drakabygget was written mainly in Swedish and had a limited circulation, as did the other booklets and manifestoes produced at the farm. From time to time the dissident situationists organized joint exhibitions and demonstrations. The most publicized stunts were the daubing of ‘Co-ritus’ slogans on walls and hoardings in Copenhagen, and the decapitation of the bronze mermaid in Copenhagen harbour. Jorn’s association with Drakabygget was shortlived. The final rupture was caused by the ‘Co-ritus’ activities, against which Jorn spoke out in the press.

Another dissident centre was Jacqueline de Jong’s retreat at Hengelo near the German border in Holland, the situationist times was originally intended as an orthodox Situationist periodical to run alongside IS, but at Gothenburg it was decided that a second paper would be too expensive, besides presenting the problem of translation into English. Jacqueline de Jong, after her expulsion, launched and edited the magazine singlehanded, though many of the photographs and ideas were supplied by Jorn. Two heavily illustrated issues of the situationist times (on ‘knots’ and ‘labyrinths’) attained a respectable size of around 200 pages and a print run of 1,600 copies.

The situationist times was nominally written in English, but the editor did not feel bound by this or any other petty restriction. Even her ‘British’ edition (No.3) contained extracts in French, German, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish. Her personal contribution in English showed such a disregard for standard English grammar, spelling and vocabulary, that much of what she wrote was unintelligible. The pictures, however, told their own story. The ‘knot’ and ‘labyrinth’ numbers have a visual vitality which is lacking in the rest of Situationist literature, although the editors of IS made some effort in the direction of appearances. They chose dazzling metallic outside covers in different shades for the twelve issues of the magazine. The text itself was enlivened with girlie photos and a variety of cartoons and diagrams. These features were a sign of skilful journalism, but they had little to do with art. Debord did not have much sympathy or understanding for artists, which explains why they all left the movement. Although Jorn had resigned in 1961 he remained on friendly terms with Debord, who turned a blind eye to the contacts which Jorn maintained with dissident members in Sweden and Holland.

When we read of the continual expulsions and resignations from S. I. *it would be easy to get a completely wrong impression of the overall size of the membership of the Situationist movement. Raspaud and Voyer have shown (Bibl.462, p. 14) that only seventy persons belonged to *S. I. during the twelve and a half years from the foundation conference in July 1957 to the end of 1969. Out of these seventy members no fewer than sixty-six either suffered expulsion or resigned (often under the threat of expulsion). The names of those who still belonged to S. I. at the end of 1969 were Gilles Ivain (classified as a ‘membre de loin’; his real name was Ivan Chtcheglov), Guy Debord, J. V. Martin, and G. Sanguinetti.

As an interesting corollary to the many purges, Raspaud and Voyer have compiled an index of those who were insulted in the pages of IS. They number 540, but Raspaud and Voyer add the consoling statistic that a further 400 persons were mentioned in the magazine without *insult. The terminology of *S. I. abuse has a certain curiosity value. At the bottom of the scale are the routine expressions of disapproval which come most easily to hand: ‘braggart’, ‘cheat’, ‘cretin’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘idiot’, ‘impostor’, ‘liar’, ‘mafioso’, ‘nonentity’, ‘pimp’, ‘scoundrel’, ‘traitor’, ‘upstart’. Next comes a more precise group of epithets: ‘anti- Semite’, ‘deist’, ‘lapassadist’, ‘mentally deficient Buddhist’, ‘militarist’, ‘mythomaniac’, ‘necrophage’, ‘plagiarist’, ‘royalist’. Political invective also has its scale, from the simple to the more complex, starting with ‘argumentist’, ‘confusionist’, ‘integrationist’, ‘reformist’, ‘Trotskyist’ and proceeding to more sophisticated aberrations such as ‘anarcho- Maoist’, ‘anti-Boumediennist’, ‘Bourguibist’, ‘sub-Leninist’, ‘stalino- surrealist’. At the very top there are maledictions which reach poetic heights: ‘coagulated undertaker’s mute’, ‘monogamous police hound’. The lavish nature of all this surrealist abuse leads one to think that either the libel laws must be rather lenient in France or else that the magazine did not circulate very widely among the 540 insultees.

Phase III (1966-8)

The events of May 1968 in Paris and the preceding riots in Strasbourg and Nanterre have already been the subject of many books and articles. Debord, in his book La véritable scission dans l’internationale (Bibl.459), has given his own interpretation of the role that the Situationists played. A key sentence is ‘La théorie de l’I. S. est claire au moins sur un point: on doit en faire usage’ (p.l 19). Debord’s revolutionary theory was vindicated only by being put into action, as he knew from the start when he coined the striking phrase ‘Nous n’organisons que le détonateur’ (IS, VIII, p.28).

Conclusion

Jorn’s role in the Situationist movement (as in cobra) was that of a catalyst and team leader. Guy Debord on his own lacked the personal warmth and persuasiveness to draw people of different nationalities and talents into an active working partnership. As a prototype Marxist intellectual Debord needed an ally who could patch up the difficult human relationships and who could rise above the petty egoisms and squabbles of the members. Their quarrels came into the open the moment Jorn’s leadership was withdrawn in 1961.

Jorn’s contribution to S. I. literature consisted of five articles printed in the official magazine. These were designed (to use Jorn’s phrase in another context) to strike a balance between the serious and the fatuous (IS, I, p.23). He regarded absurdity and fatuity as important social values. Games, in his view, are absurdities conducted under a system of rules. In one of his articles, Pataphysics: a religion in the making (IS, VI, p.23), he quotes the anarchist slogan ‘to each man his own absurdities’. This article (printed after his resignation from the movement) earned him a footnote from Guy Debord, who vented his dislike for pataphysical humour by calling such humour ‘static and noncreative’. Better static humour, one feels, than none at all.

Jorn’s interest in any particular movement did not usually survive its novelty by more than a year or two. His four-year allegiance to S. I. *is therefore something of a record. In its heyday the movement had sufficient international ramifications to provide him with new personal contacts which gave colour and drama to his life. It must be remembered that Jorn had few personal friends, so he needed a pretext of this sort to provide him with meaningful companionship. While not underestimating the originality and dynamism of *S. I. (its vitality was proved by later events), it is not surprising that artists were eventually put off by the growing atmosphere of pedantry and chauvinism at Paris headquarters.

Chapter 5: Modifications and Disfigurations (1959-62)

The first group of Modifications was exhibited at Galerie Rive Gauche in 1959, with a double preface by the artist. The first preface was addressed to the general public. The following is an extract translated from the French.

‘Be modern,
collectors, museums!
If you’ve got old pictures,
don’t despair.
Keep your memories
but modify them
and bring them up to date.
Why reject the old
if it can be modernized
with a few strokes of the brush?’

In the second preface, ‘intended for connoisseurs’, Jorn refers back to an article he wrote twenty years earlier In praise of kitsch art. There he maintained that the greatest artistic masterpieces are completely banal (‘Les grands chefs-d’oeuvre ne sont que des banalités accomplies’) and he spoke with affection of those gilt-framed ‘lakes in forests’ that hang in thousands of homes. Now, in the preface referring to the current exhibition of Modifications, he writes T am erecting a monument in honour of bad painting. Personally I prefer it to good painting’.

Jorn once spoke to me about the ‘evergreen’ quality of certain national monuments, such as The Statue of Liberty, the Mannequin Pisse in Brussels, or the Mermaid in Copenhagen harbour. The musical equivalents, he said, were Lili Marlene or the Tango Solaire, and he might have added Silent Night. Jorn felt that he himself lacked the ability to create an ‘evergreen’. But perhaps the highly personal collection of modern art which he donated during his lifetime to the Silkeborg Museum will stand as his ‘evergreen’.

In his preface to the Modifications Jorn spoke of ‘sacrificing’ the pictures that he chose to overpaint. True, the landscapes bought in junkshops are treated as nothing more than ‘found objects’, which he proceeds to modify at will. These landscapes become the theatrical scenery for his romps or ‘landing parties’, as Alloway called them. The resulting transformation is, however, usually kept on a quite innocuous and even idyllic plane. This is due to the fact that whenever the rural scene contains people, Jorn makes a point of isolating these innocent folk from the invading forces. In this way he avoids any conflict at the human level. The environment becomes disturbed, but the human beings remain unaware of it. The good shepherd (Cat. 1192) continues to tend his flock, and the solitary tourist leans over the railings, admiring Paris by night (Cat. 1199), unconscious of the strange portents and illuminations in the sky. It is as if Jorn wants to protect the peaceful world of shepherds and fishermen from the rampaging hordes that he unleashes on the scene. In 1959 he was absorbed by the ‘play’ theories of the Situationists and their plans for social revolution. His overpainted canvases are the nearest thing to some kind of artistic spin-off, kept at a subdued and good-humoured level, from the Situationist ideology. These canvases were also of course an escape from orthodox, commercially viable picture production.

The New disfigurations of 1962 have a more serious intention. Landscapes are replaced by portraits and battle scenes, which lend themselves to sometimes quite sinister psychological adaptations. The exhibition at Galerie Rive Gauche was divided into three groups. The first was entitled Beauty and the human beast, containing eight pictures which all involved women. In these female studies Jorn’s misogynistic streak is given full expression. Woman’s ‘bestiality’ (the group title is deliberately ambiguous) is emphasized most strongly in two brilliant caricatures where the physical characteristics of the original female sitters are completely transformed, so that a new personality is grafted onto the old one. The fusion is so complete that it is impossible to detect an exact borderline between the two versions. The sweet life *(Fig.49) is Jorn’s masterpiece in this whole genre. It is a full-length portrait of a human freak. She confronts the spectator with a cool and ghastly aplomb. The monochrome pinkish background enhances the terrible plausibility of this lantern-jawed matron. *Sugar tart (Fig.48) is less monumental but equally disturbing. The victim this time is a lady of high society who has been turned into a pig, but she remains pathetically unaware of this transformation. The picture is signed ‘van Jorn’ in deference to the ‘cruel’ but fashionable portraits of Kees van Dongen.

The second group of disfigurations covers battle scenes and related episodes of combat and romance. The paint which Jorn spatters across these canvases acts as shrapnel, to intensify and modernize the drama. The mock heroes are mostly military men in uniform. Jorn once told me that, unlike Picasso, he was not interested in combats between men and beasts. If he had ever had to portray St George fighting a dragon his sympathy would have been with the dragon.

The third and last category in the series bears the title Anecdotal imagery from daily life. This is a mixture of oddments. At one extreme we have the almost entirely overpainted Faustrold (Fig. 185), while at the other end there is the macabre suicide scene of Out of this world (Fig. 187). In an earlier book I referred to Jorn’s vitalized landscapes of 1959 as ‘une nature morte prend vie’ and I wrote: ‘By 1962 (Nouvelles défigurations) Jorn had reached a high pitch of virtuosity and ferocity in raising the dead. One of the dead is raised to the ceiling by a length of rope (Ainsi on s’ensor). This levitation was the work of Jorn’s predecessor, but Jorn has anticipated the event, as it were, by scribbling a message on the sheet of paper which the cat is holding down with its paw.

The note says “Merde au Monde”. I am told that art lovers are reluctant to begin their Jorn collection with one of these pictures.’ (Bibl.373, p.(39)).

To this day Jorn’s overpainted pictures have not been widely understood or appreciated. Yet the best of them have a startling and surrealist clarity of vision. Their impact on the viewer is increased through the double layers of imagery, which may either be brought into harmony or allowed to coexist in a state of tension. Jorn’s own interest lay precisely in this complex courtship between old and new.

Chapter 6: Luxury paintings and after (1961-4)

The ‘luxury’ paintings of 1961 were made in Jorn’s Paris studio at 143 Boulevard de la Gare. The best of them were exhibited at Arthur Tooth & Sons in London at the end of May. Others were sold from the studio or given away to friends. The following year a related series of water-colours was shown at Galerie Birch in Copenhagen under the title Modest luxury pictures. That series completed the experiment, except for some lithographs from 1963 made by rolling marble-sized pellets, dipped in paint, over a metal plate. The use of a pure tachist technique was new to Jorn, although paint flicked from the brush or poured from the tin can be seen in some of the ‘modifications’.

Jorn’s first efforts in this direction were made as early as 1938/9. He told me that when he was staying in Paris before the war, his painter friend Ejler Bille came over from Denmark, and one day they visited the Danish sculptress Sonja Ferlov. She had a studio in the same building as Giacometti. From Sonja Ferlov’s studio balcony Jorn dripped some paint onto paper spread out on the floor below. Bille objected to this experiment and talked Jorn out of continuing with it.

The twenty-six ‘luxury’ paintings shown in London in 1961 varied in size from a mere 27 x 22 cm to a dyptich measuring 107 x 62 cm. The techniques and intentions of the artist were described by Lawrence Alloway in the catalogue preface. Alloway’s remarks are so precise and discerning that one cannot do better than to quote from his text.

‘… Jorn’s typical imagery persists in the new paintings, pulverised by the painting technique, but cohering in figurative constellations. (In this respect Jorn is fundamentally closer to Dubuffet’s Texturologies, the allover patterns of which are deeply allusive, than to the abstract painting which, at first sight, his pictures may seem to resemble) … He has, in fact, subjected Tachism to a methodology, making of it a three-tier technique. There is, 1, colour poured close to the canvas, which flows solidly; 2, line impressed on the canvas by means of string dipped in paint; and, 3, paint dripped, spattered, in showers of spots from high above the canvas. These techniques are used with different intensity and to different degrees, one to a painting, or mixed: in The Vegetable Cell and its Private Properties, for example, two methods, pouring and dripping, are clearly visible.’ (Bibl. 122, pp.(2) and (3)).

Many of the ‘luxury’ titles have Joycean associations, e.g. Plurabella. Shem the Gracehoper. Phornix Park. Jorn greatly admired Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, which he read over and over again. It may be that he felt a kinship with the ‘basic polarities’ implicit in Joyce’s writing.

The London exhibition of Luxury paintings enjoyed a spectacular success. All the pictures were sold at the time, but it must be admitted that a number of them have drifted back onto the market. Within the context of Jorn’s main line of development, only a few ‘luxury’ paintings are strong enough to hold their own. The rest now appear to be rather insubstantial.

Jorn’s dislike of avant-gardism did not preclude a lifelong interest in ‘experimental’ art, which - as we saw - was one of the chief platforms of the cobra movement and reappeared as a slogan in the Experimental Laboratory at Alba. Photographs from Alba show the MIBI *artists working like alchemists, stirring cauldrons in their open air studio (Fig.23). *MIBI was not without its amiably ludicrous side.

Antipathy towards avant-gardism and love of experiment are not irreconcilable attitudes. Experiment was, for Jorn, a way of selfrenewal. Avant-gardism, on the other hand, has had - particularly in the postwar era - implications of leadership, coteries, fashions, and commercial exploitation.

Jorn considered himself in later years to be a traditionalist. As such he felt free to use the discoveries of others who were working within ‘the tradition of the new’. This is why he had no compunction about publishing open-shutter photographs of gestural drawings (following Picasso) or ‘disfigurations’ of portraits (long after Duchamp and others), or torn poster collages after Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, Rotella, Dufrêne.

The years 1963-4 do not show any decided trend. Many of the paintings are routine performances, offset by an occasional triumph, such as In the wing-beat of the swans (Fig.231). Its limpid colours are like a giant aquarelle. The outlines of mermaids and sorcerers, and the cavernous blue depths, suggest one of Böcklin’s peopled seascapes.

At the smaller end of the scale White night fright (Fig.233) is an example of Jorn’s economy and assurance of technique. The wandering brushstroke outlines with absolute precision some figures in a complex charade. The white and yellow background fixes the scene as if it had been suddenly caught in the rays of a torch.

Pictures like these carry complete conviction. More typical for 1963-4, though, are paintings where Jorn’s mythopoetic powers have weakened to something close to self-parody. Examples are the benevolent Disney- ish twin monsters of The descendants (Fig.229), or the theatrical make- believe of the leering blue ogre zooming out of the sky and causing panic on the fairground in Something remains (Fig.230).

It is arguable that the scope of this volume should have been extended as far as the year 1967, because it is only after then that Jorn started to regain his full strength as a painter.

Chapter 7: Ceramics

by Erik Nyholm

Erik Nyholm lives at Funder near Silkeborg. He was one of Jorn’s oldest friends and his mentor in the technique of pottery. Nyholm’s article on the history of the Aarhus mural is reprinted, with a few additions and changes, from an illustrated brochure that came out in a limited edition in 1964 (Bibl.374).

Jorn, like other great image makers, found expression in many different media besides painting. He had a natural feeling for the materials he used, and in the case of ceramics he broke new ground. He began - without previous training - to make ceramics in Silkeborg in 1953, and he continued to work in clay periodically throughout the rest of his life. His work includes two murals, the large one in Aarhus from 1959, and another in Randers from 1970.

Most painters working with ceramics handle clay and glazes as though they were canvas and oil paint. Jorn knew his materials and used them with an originality and freedom not seen before. Picasso’s works come closest, but even he did not achieve the same fusion of image and material. Picasso’s colours were derived from traditional glazes, whereas Jorn often made his own colours, mixing glazes, engobes and clay in an unprecedented manner.

Jorn’s experiments were strengthened by his sense of tradition. He respected Danish artists such as Bindesbøll and Hansen-Jacobsen, and was influenced by Jugendstil, as well as by ordinary everyday pottery made with slips and horn painting. Northern European pottery is typical for its emphasis on the medium, the use of rough slips and expressive surface treatment.

While Jorn was convalescing from tuberculosis in 1953 he visited pottery workshops in and around Silkeborg. In one of his notebooks from this period he recorded old workshop traditions, glaze formulae, etc. The studio book has small sketches with a numbered description of his first ceramics. He started by decorating several dozen bowls and dishes at Nielsen’s pottery workshop in Silkeborg. The results of this were so fresh and remarkable that the museum in Silkeborg became interested. They agreed to sponsor him while he worked at the pottery of Knud Jensen in Sorring, where he was to make about fifty pieces. The museum would pay a sum of money for expenses and receive part of the output in return. As usual Jorn’s energy exceeded all expectations. He produced several hundred pieces from the dishes, pots, and bowls which Knud Jensen threw for him. He covered these with coloured slips of his own making, and often painted the backs of the pieces as well, so that the whole object was encompassed by the glazes. As he became more experienced he defied tradition by combining coloured glazes with engobes. He scrubbed, pressed, and scratched the surfaces. The potter’s conventional shapes got altered, and the big wood kiln was filled with the strangest objects. Knud Jensen, an expert potter, managed to fire the pieces successfully, though not helped by Jorn’s impatience - he could never wait to let the clay dry properly. In the end the museum chose thirty pieces; the rest were exhibited at Galerie Birch in Copenhagen. Jorn himself went off to Switzerland, leaving behind him an exhausted potter who never wanted to see another artist in his workshop.

The following year, in the late spring of 1954, Jorn and his family went to Albisola. This little Ligurian town has produced ceramics since the early Middle Ages, and many Italian artists have worked with ceramics there. Today the town has a flourishing trade in cheap ceramic goods.

Jorn moved into a small house at Via Isola 6. There was an old pottery kiln there, but it was at Mazzotti’s ceramics factory that the artists of the Bauhaus Imaginiste carried out their experiments in the summer of 1954. Tullio Mazzotti was a poet as well as a ceramist.

Jorn got his artist friends started on clay, which is the most malleable material in the world. He knew from Sorring how clay could be pressed, wrung, scratched, kicked, scraped, and sat on, then painted with wonderful matt or brilliantly coloured glazes. Clay is the ideal raw material for allowing the imagination to run riot.

In the late summer the results were shown at a joint exhibition in Albisola and later at the Triennale in Milan. A year later, in November 1955, twenty of Jorn’s ceramics were exhibited at the Kunstindustrimuseet in Copenhagen. Jorn himself had suggested the idea, supported by Erik Lassen, who was then a curator but later became the director of the museum.

Jorn’s new ceramics were different from the slip-coloured works made at the Sorring pottery two years earlier. In Albisola he had been able to choose from a whole range of modern factory glazes. He handled much larger objects and improvised on a much bigger scale than before. The exhibition contained a number of ‘free reliefs’. Some of these looked like the result of an explosion (Fig.60) : ceramic fragments were spaced wide apart, set in plaster of paris, forming what sometimes seemed like arbitrary patterns. Then there were large furrowed landscape reliefs, as well as some very strange individual three-dimensional creations.

This exhibition seemed both repulsive and fascinating to the Danish public. Jorn had pointed a new direction in ceramic art. It is not surprising that at this point official circles began to think of letting him try his ideas and experiences on a larger project. But another four years were to pass before he was allowed to begin work on what stands today as his greatest single achievement : the Aarhus mural.

Those who visit the secondary school (‘statsgymnasium’) at Aarhus in Denmark, where Asger Jorn’s ceramic relief fills one side of the large hall, will probably notice a certain incongruity between the mural and its rather severe architectural setting. To explain this contrast it is necessary to give a short account of how the mural came to be commissioned. Ideally the artist and the architects should have worked hand in hand on such a project from the beginning. Unfortunately such close collaboration was impossible in this case, because the school building was already completed by the time the Danish Arts Foundation gave its approval for the ceramic to be made.

The idea of including a large ceramic mural in the building plans was first discussed as early as 1954. Asger Jorn met the architects Arne Gravers and Johan Richter in January 1955. It soon became clear that the two sides had fundamentally different views on the principles of combining architecture and ‘decoration’. In the end they decided to work together in spite of their differences, probably hoping that the absence of compromise might have its own advantages. In any case it was by no means sure that the funds and permission for the mural would be forthcoming at all.

The issue was still uncertain when building was begun in 1956. It was not until December 1957 that the Arts Foundation invited Jorn to submit a sketch for the ceramic relief. He complied within a few weeks by sending drawings for several alternative projects. Months went by without a decision being reached. The school building was due to be completed by August 1958. As the completion date approached Jorn became impatient and was ready to abandon the whole idea. In November 1958 the Arts Foundation reached its decision and commissioned Jorn to construct a ceramic relief of approximately 3x27 m for the main hall of the school.

It is characteristic of Jorn that in a working period of four months he completed the project which others had been debating for four years.

Jorn chose Albisola as the best possible place for carrying out the work. From 1954 to 1959 he had spent several months every year in Albisola. There were various reasons why, when it came to making the large relief, it seemed natural to go there rather than anywhere else. The Italians’ fine craftsmanship, their interest in experimental work and their inherent respect for Asger Jorn as an artist - these things would provide the necessary stimulus and support for the arduous task that lay ahead. Jorn soon reached an agreement with the San Giorgio factory, so that after various formalities had been completed, he was able to start work during the early summer of 1959. The entire resources of the factory were put at his disposal.

The relief had to be made in three sections of unequal length to allow for two doors in the wall at the school. The overall dimensions of the ceramic panels, excluding doors, are c.3 m (10 ft) in height by c.27 m (89 ft) in length.

The sketch which Jorn had made for the Arts Foundation was in the proportion of 1:20. Now he began by firing a working model of 1:10. This ceramic sketch gives the impression of being a vision of things to come rather than an actual working model. The same is true of the earlier sketch. Yet the rhythm and colour scheme and many of the central figures are maintained throughout the three stages. In the end it was of course the physical encounter and battle with the material which produced such astounding results.

In his earlier and smaller reliefs Jorn had already shown that it is possible to improvise to a much greater extent than people had previously thought possible, but the work which he now had to undertake was on such a vast scale that one began to have doubts. Perhaps the tedious discussions of the past four years and the continual uncertainty might have undermined his enthusiasm. But such fears were quite unfounded. When Jorn finally went to work it was like an explosion.

At 4 o’clock one morning in June the first tons of clay were rolled from the factory onto a wooden floor in the open where Jorn was to work. He began before sunrise. The clay was heaped up, flattened, stamped firm and cut up. Images began to rise over an area of more than 8 cu.m of clay, amounting to about one-tenth of the whole relief. Some images were erased, others emerged, until every centimetre had been worked over. The clay masses were brutally or tenderly pressed, scraped, cut and kneaded from a thickness of 15 cm to over 60 cm where the figures burst forth. Coloured pieces of glass were pressed into small secret pockets, scooter tracks ran over the flat, surfaces (Fig.64), and so the work progressed while the day was still young. Bowls of slip were brought out, and with brooms and brushes the fresh clay was painted, splashed and sprayed with the light and dark engobes to emphasize the shapes. This first painting, which was largely obliterated later on, was a kind of overture to the final glaze painting. It served to bring out the rough pictorial effect of the relief. In the finished work there are many places where the raw clay colours have been allowed to remain, dry and flat, as a powerful contrast to the shining glazes. The idea of using glazed and unglazed slips together with coloured glazes, which had proved its worth in the smaller ceramics, was now projected on a big scale.

The sun began to stiffen the masses of clay. After it had been painted the whole block was marked out to be cut into smaller sections. Billowing, broken, horizontal and vertical lines began to furrow the picture surface with a rhythm so confident that it was a work of art in itself. By now it was only ten in the morning and the first part of the relief was done. It was ready to be hollowed slightly underneath, then lettered, numbered and pushed onto the drying racks. Every day Jorn and his helpers worked from five in the morning until shortly before mid-day. The relief was made in eleven sections. It took eleven days to mould more than 12 tons of clay and make about 1,200 single pieces ready for their first turn in the kiln. It was an almost superhuman task, but this was how it had to be done.

It was typical of Jorn that he did not begin at one end and work through to the other. He treated the relief as if it were a huge picture and he fought across the whole ground simultaneously. On the large middle panel he worked alternately on the left and right sections. In order to ensure the continuity of cutting and pictorial line it was enough for him to have a single row of vertical pieces from the last adjoining section to look at. The whole relief lived in his mind as a unified vision. The work progressed in a series of bursts. His intuitive knowledge, coupled with an iron discipline, gave him the freedom to improvise.

In former days Albisola had a fine clay. It is said that the Albisolan potters who founded the famous ceramic centre of Vallauris in the

Alpes Maritimes would travel back to Albisola to fetch their clay. Now the town has expanded over the clay pits, so that the clay has to be imported and mixed locally according to need. For Jorn’s ceramic four different kinds of clay were used and mixed with grog. This produced a clay similar to that used in stoneware, but with a low vitrification point and a stone-grey raw surface.

The June heat and the Mediterranean breezes soon dried the clay blocks and the kilns could be fired. In Albisola they still use the old woodfired Ligurian double-chambered oven with rising flames. The lower chamber is a muffled oven for glost firing at 950°C. The biscuit firing is done above with an open fire at about 900°C.

Kiln after kiln was filled and emptied until the whole relief had been fired once. Gradually the many pieces were re-assembled and glazing could begin again. Each of the three main panels was assembled separately and glazed by itself. The whole register of ceramic glazes was brought into play: bright and matt, transparent and opaque, running and crazed glazes ; and their as yet hidden colours ranged from grey and clayey hues across to blood red, topaz, emerald green and pure quartz crystal. They were all factory glazes from many different countries, but Jorn used them in a supreme and unprecedented manner.

Before long the kilns were smoking as the glaze firing got into its stride. Pieces were carried in and out, laid together, painted and fired again. Many went through the burning fiery furnace three or four times. The orange colours got a special firing at 600°C.

These were hectic and confusing days. Pieces of the relief were lost, switched or discovered in the wrong places. Between the finished sections there lay others with a shroud of unburnt glaze over them, for neither slips nor glazes reveal their true colours before being fired. It required strength and concentration to maintain - among the anonymous white-grey glaze clouds - the colour and rhythm of the ultimate work. Jorn did not falter at any point. He exploited all the materials with a self-assurance that sprang from a complete understanding of their potentialities. As the summer drew to a close the relief began to tighten and take its final shape.

Towards the middle of September it was finished and lay shimmering on the ground behind ‘Ceramiche San Giorgio’. Tourists and people from the town directed their evening stroll towards the factory to stand and admire : Il più grande pannello in ceramica nel mondo.

After loading the eight tons of fragments onto the train for Aarhus, Jorn put in dozens of cases of spaghetti and macaroni and pounds of best Parmesan cheese for the Italian team that would help to mount the mural in Denmark. They were maestro Salino and ceramicist Pastorino from the Albisola factory, and the expert mason Spotorno. Jorn was not risking Danish gravy on these men.

The relief reached Aarhus at the beginning of October. The 1,200 pieces were laid out in their right order in front of the long bare wall of the school. The last phase was ready to begin. Now the work had to be freshly created and its rhythm had to be recaptured for the final effort.

Danish masons helped the Italians (Fig.69). Iron supports were embedded in the wall. Calcium, sand and cement were mixed in a mortar. The ceramic was mounted from the floor upwards. The joints between the fragments were filled in and deliberately indented to form a living accompaniment to the drama that slowly took shape along the wall.

By the end of October all three sections were finished. The smallest to the right of the entrance bears the inscription san giorgio albisola -jorn 59.

The Arts Foundation presented the relief to the school at a ceremony held on 5 November 1959. Friend and foe met to see and discuss the great work. The discussion will probably continue, because Jorn has created a masterpiece of modern art. That’s not the done thing in Denmark!

Now it hangs in the autumn darkness of the north. Only a summer’s work, yet a life’s work. It was created in the south, but inspired by the north. A myth of Jutland!

Once more one walks along it and lets one’s hand follow the moving surface, the rough and the polished. It breathes a great humanity. It speaks for itself.

Chapter 8: Graphics

by Ursula Lehmann-Brockhaus née Schmitt

The author of this chapter has made a detailed study of the graphic œuvre of Jean Dubuffet.
In 1969 she compiled the catalogue with an introduction for an exhibition of Matta’s graphic work at the Silkeborg Museum.
An article by her entitled *Jorn als Graphiker appeared in the catalogue of the big Jorn retrospective exhibition organized by the Kestner-Gesellschaft in 1973.*

Over three-hundred prints make up the corpus of Jorn’s work in graphics. After the period 1937-40, during which he learned the mechanical principles of the graphic techniques, he employed lithography, etching, the woodcut and the linocut as regular means of expression. He studied in the ‘open’ studio at the Copenhagen School of Graphics attached to the Academy in that city. It was run at the time by Aksel Jørgensen.

Jorn’s graphic work continued to develop side by side with his painting, indeed it often grew directly out of it. It was interrupted only at times when he had no suitable studio in which to print. Whenever possible his materials included lithographic stone and metal plates in addition to canvas, paint and paper. The graver and lithographer’s crayon were tools he handled as easily as pencil and brush when he wished to commit to a surface the unending flow of images and visions that stirred his imagination. Jorn’s continuous output of graphic work mainly involved lithography and etching. As we shall see, the situation regarding woodcuts and linocuts was rather different.

The catalogue of Jorn’s print-making techniques includes hardly any of the increasingly popular photomechanical processes, the method and results of which reduce the image to the level of reproduction. Essential though experiment was for Jorn in the creation of his images, he was uninterested in purely technical experiment. Once learnt and their techniques fully mastered, those printing processes that might be called ‘classical’ remained for him a sufficient means of expression throughout his life. Though in content and form Jorn’s work unremittingly probes the limits of the possible, as regards his techniques in both graphics and painting it belongs to the classics of our time.

The Museum of Art in Silkeborg possesses the most complete collection of Jorn’s graphics. Beginning with the early sheets of the 1930s, which are rare because so few copies were printed, and extending to the last lithographs of 1973, the collection provides an almost complete conspectus of his graphic work.

Jorn himself deliberately, and, as regards graphics, fairly systematically, encouraged the Silkeborg Museum to collect his work. Moreover he exercised a rare and selfless form of patronage that made the place outstanding. He conceived the idea of assembling, in addition to his own œuvre, works by artists whom he considered important as his contemporaries. At the same time he endeavoured so to arrange the collection - in which he had set himself a definite goal and which he financed entirely out of his own pocket - that it would become a model of museum planning. He also wanted its buying policy to be exemplary, for he held that in this respect other similar institutions often lacked purpose and direction.

Thus Henri Michaux is represented at the Silkeborg Museum by a large group of works. The Museum possesses complete, or nearly complete, collections of the graphics of Dubuffet and Matta. Jorn planned to continue the series with the work of Wilfredo Lam and

Corneille, but his death put an end to the programme. Yet, incomplete though it is, the collection stands as a most impressive witness to the breadth of what Jorn considered as the contemporary context of his art. He included artists with similar aims to his own as well as others of different and even apparently opposite viewpoints. In this way he presented a personal attitude to art history that differed from the traditional approach, which tends to classify artists by their similarities.

The importance of the Silkeborg collection of Jorn’s graphics does not consist solely in the completeness of its run of published prints. It also contains many of the different states, proofs and variants that attend the production of a sheet. These provide an interesting insight into the process of printing; but, more importantly, they also throw light on the evolution of the image. And in Jorn’s case it was certainly more than a wish to preserve records and clear his studio of space-consuming rubbish that made him so often deposit in the Silkeborg Museum not only the definitive impression of a print, but also the many preparatory pulls, such as proofs, early states and variants. This studio material - the processes of print-making allowing for alternative versions - provides a kind of analysis of the image, which sometimes illustrates Jorn’s artistic thinking more clearly and penetratingly than do his paintings. For in paintings the process of creation is usually difficult to follow: one layer is laid on top of another, the layers merge, and the topmost and final one masks the successive phases through which the painting has passed.

Prints are different, for they allow many insights into the stages of creation. A form is clearly established on the surface by contour and content, is overlaid and displaced by a new system of forms. Then all is once more embedded in one, two, or more layers, until the image appears in a strange multiplicity of layers of meaning and form. This is one of Jorn’s ways of placing the image in the suspended state of ambiguity that he seeks. He also uses the opposite procedure, beginning with a dense coloured and graphic surface network, out of which he organizes the forms and defines the content when he comes to the final and uppermost layer, but not before.

Whichever method he adopts, he follows no preconceived plan but works in an automatic and haphazard manner that is derived from Surrealism. The field remains wide open to every fortuitous effect: success and failure are equally possible. The one necessity for Jorn is that he must apply his pictorial material in many layers, giving his image a multiple ambiguity and so creating a ‘chaosmos’. The word denotes a world of appearances, a world caught in the act of becoming, and retaining the quality of impermanence, a world which represents what Klee calls a ‘primal state of myth’. It signifies a world of images that extends from the imaginary through the marvellous to the magic, and encompasses the whole range of spontaneous imaginative experience.

The many variants or unique impressions he produces during the process of printing indicate his desire to keep the meaning of the image open. This might involve changing the colours, as well as the order in which he prints from successive plates or stones, in relation to those of the definitive printing. Jorn’s pleasure in playing with a material in which so many images lie hidden, questioning it layer after layer about the possibilities of expression it holds, has something of the quality of the ancient talent of the shaman magician raking for visions in the ashes.

Jorn undoubtedly put his main effort into painting. Yet he himself did not differentiate or make qualitative distinctions between the techniques he used. He said, ‘So, as far as I am concerned, collages, painting, ceramics or any other material all are the same to me. I have but a single hope and that is, by whatever means, to discover my face.’ And indeed, whatever material he has in hand, whether it be paint or the graphic processes, the image in his mind and the manner of its realization always stem from the same idea, as we shall see when we trace the history of Jorn’s voyage of self-discovery in the area of the graphic arts.

The sheets he produced from 1939 onwards form the real beginning of his print-making. His pictorial idiom was becoming more independent and he had begun to master the basic graphic techniques, after a more systematic study in the ‘open’ studio of the Graphic School in Copenhagen. He had done earlier work in all the graphic techniques. This work, like his painting of those years, reflects the heterogeneous character of the formal concepts to which he clung during this earliest phase of the development of his style.

Jorn made a series of woodcut illustrations in 1933-4 in an Expressionist manner in which both form and subject-matter were plainly delineated. Etchings done in 1937 depict female nudes in a system of minutely discontinuous lines and a manner that looks almost like classicism. But in certain lithographs of that time abstract configurations appear, which reflect Léger’s formal discipline - for Jorn had been exposed to this during 1936-7 when he worked for ten months in Léger’s studio.

With his final return to Denmark at the outbreak of war in 1939, Jorn’s first phase with all its different influences ended. In his new situation, restricted as it was by wartime conditions, and in contact with his Danish contemporaries who had now moved closer to him,Jorn’s own ideas became clearer. His manner of expression grows more personal. His artistic imagination is now expressing itself more and more clearly through a world of strange hybrid creatures that begin to crowd on to the scene. The marks of the characteristically northern concept of sentient nature, which was one of the mainstays of Jorn’s art, become more pronounced. The feeling for Surrealism, in the air at the time, deepens and again approaches magic and even myth. Side by side with this development of his subject-matter, Jorn’s artistic method - that is, in the present context, mainly his use of line - becomes more independent.

His progress can be followed step by step in a series of some thirty etchings made between 1939 and 1945. Comparison of an untitled sheet of 1940 on the one hand (Fig.73) with, on the other hand, The amorous river, 1942 (Fig.74), The small world, 1943 (Fig.75), and *The rare bird, *1945 (Fig.76) illustrates important stages in Jorn’s development.

The Surrealist appearance of the 1940 sheet, with its graphic and thematic extravagance, has given way in The small world to a microcosm beset by shadows. The inhabitants are no longer the earlier droll, partly organic, partly inanimate figurations : they are phantom creatures in the shape of humans or animals which seem to entreat (Fig.75) or to threaten (Fig.76). The latter sheet is also remarkable in itself on account of its graphic manner. As in other works of the same year, the dense bundles of parallel hatchings produce arched, arabesque-like lines that cover the surface with a wide rhythmical movement in a way that becomes characteristic of Jorn’s style.

This is only one of the means of graphic expression at his disposal, but it is one that recurs continually, whether it be etching, lithograph or woodcut. The other, partly opposite manner, occurs in the etching The amorous river from 1942 (Fig.74), a plate that is exemplary and interesting in many ways, with its chaotic system of lines furiously agitating the surface. The lines seldom clarify into representational signs, except for a mask, a motive that is highly characteristic of those years and the ancient, magic apotropaic form of a pair of eyes, often repeated in Jorn’s work, which emerges out of the wild tangle of the fabric. The hair-like lines of the early sheet of 1940 (Fig.73), always spending themselves in exuberant ornamentation, had their starting point in the graphics of Klee and Ensor, to which Jorn had devoted close study. This web-like net in which grotesque configurations are caught, has become a substance full of dramatic movement and expressiveness, yet the many layers of meaning that can be read into it remain below the threshold of any clear or tangible definition. Representation comes close to ‘informality’, to use a word that describes a whole movement among the styles of the period. Jorn’s manner, as just described, can in fact be classified broadly as ‘informal’, though he never goes to the limits of non-representation. His imagination is too figural for that, his responses too dramatic. He is much more interested in handling the raw material of his visions, the ‘chaosmos’. He wants to seize the image before it has fully materialized, so that it retains something of its crude state. The image must preserve its ambiguities as well as its mysteries, without becoming either refined or precise.

It was in the nature of things that most of Jorn’s early graphics, executed at a time of personal poverty and public emergency due to the war, should have been issued in very small editions. Nor had these sheets, often extremely modest in format, yet acquired any great collector’s value, so they easily became scattered and have often survived in but a single copy. In order to preserve the important incunabula of his graphic art Jorn was in later years occasionally persuaded to print new impressions. Thus in 1960 he collected twenty- three etchings of the series dating from 1939-1945 and issued them in portfolio (see Figs.74 and 75). He gave the portfolio the suggestive title Occupations, meaning ‘occupation’ in the private and military sense: the sheets are the fruit of Jorn’s activity at the time of the German occupation of Denmark.

The first lithographic work of any stature undertaken by Jorn in the Copenhagen studio was an edition of Chinese poems called The jade flute, for which not only was he the calligrapher and illustrator but he also translated the poems from French into Danish. The little book was printed in 1940, again in very few copies - Jorn says about ten - and a few years ago he finally agreed after much hesitation to bring out a new edition printed by the offset process. It was only the thought of tracing back to its Chinese origin the poetic echo that had reached the Danish language by way of French, that induced Jorn to take this decision. So the book was reissued in an enlarged edition containing the poems re-written in pidgin English by the Chinese artist Walasse Ting from an English version translated from the Danish! Walasse Ting also transcribed the text into Chinese characters. Despite all these linguistic metamorphoses the poetic spark did in fact survive. The delicate poetry of the verses inspired Jorn to create images in a related key. They are characterized by a lyrical sentiment otherwise rarely found in his work. An example is The girl with tears in her eyes, of which there is also a painted version.

It was not only the poetry that fascinated Jorn as he worked on the lithographs to The jade flute, his imagination was also quickened by his interest in the Chinese characters, which he studied with some thoroughness at the time. For his mind was full of the notion of a pictorial script that would render the sense of a word in visual terms. This was the beginning of the idea which he was to pursue in other works up to Word pictures executed in collaboration with Christian Dotremont.

Quite different in character from the lyricism of the little Chinese book are the following important lithographs. There are eight of them, some coloured, and they were printed by I. Chr. Sørensen in Copenhagen in 1945 and published by ars Sweden. They might be described as representing the sum of Jorn’s experience as a painter during the previous important years, transposed into lithography.

The large size of the sheets in itself reflects an entirely new desire for monumentality and pictorial quality. The surface is now organized with greater deliberation. A good example is an untitled sheet (Fig.77), in which the composition flows along in a sequence of definite horizontals, like lines of print, so that the imagery unfolds itself as in the plot of a story.

Simple lines or a surprisingly modest system of hatching (rare for Jorn), brings into the picture an imaginative world that is sometimes heightened in its expression to the point of pathos, as for example in Pin men (Fig.78). This subject must have moved him greatly, for it reappears in a painting and again in a drawing.

Certainly these variations on a theme in different techniques were nothing unusual, especially in earlier years when the sense of an image depended more heavily on tangible and objective figuration. And the relation between painting and graphics becomes even closer in the prints of the period 1952-4, which marks the next important phase in Jorn’s work and is, in fact, one of its peaks. All the techniques - lithography, etching, woodcut, and linocut - were brought into play during the period of intensive creativity that followed Jorn’s recovery from an illness which had nearly cost him his life. The months of inactivity opened the gates to a stream of work in which the phantasmagoric element in his imagination had strengthened and given his images the force of myth.

Central to his thinking was a work to which he gave the significant title On the silent myth. A great deal of preparatory planning and working out, in the form of drawings, slight oil sketches, lithographs, etchings and linocuts, went into this cycle before and during the time when it was transposed into its monumental format. This was contrary to Jorn’s usual practice and may have been connected with his state of health, for he found the exertion of painting quite beyond him at first and wearying for a long time to come.

Jorn’s future development was to bring an ever-increasing versatility into his artistic processes. At the same time colour and line became more autonomous and expressive. The anecdotal element in his art receded, along with its occasional echo of Nordic folklore. And later the interplay of form and colour gave rise to associations and suggestions which became less and less clear and literal, sometimes to the point of vagueness. But none of this occurs as yet in the cycle On the silent myth. In this group, and the works associated with it, Jorn’s imagination once more created a wealth of images of mythopceic power. During those years he found a form that was both powerfully expressive and rich in symbolic meaning. This applies to many of the imaginary creatures that reappear in his work in a variety of guises at all periods and are permanent features of his iconography - if, indeed, this term, with its associations of academic systematization, is in any sense appropriate to Jorn’s art.

An example is the strange cat-like beast with the hypnotic stare that appears in a lithograph of 1952 as The laughing cat (Fig.79). Comparison with an etching of 1942 (Fig.80) and one of Jorn’s last lithographs of 1972 (Fig.81) clearly illustrates the curve of the development that we have just described.

The earlier sheet (Fig. 80) shows a feline creature with a malevolent snarl. Its disproportionately large, clear-toned head suggests a magical presence. A simple system of lines distinctly describes its anatomy, down to the details of its ribs. The latest is another cat-like apparition depicted in the 1972 lithograph and suggested simply by patches of different colours. Between the two comes The laughing cat (Fig.79). It differs both from the early sheet in the simplification of the shape, consisting of an enormous head, the abode of an uncanny microcosm, and the paw with its birdlike claw - and from the late lithograph in the wealth of curiously fantastic concrete associations that develop in it and out of it and conjure up a whole fabulous world in the sign of the cat.

Yet it is etching rather than lithography that uses the same themes as the paintings at this period. When Jorn was convalescing in Switzerland during the winter of 1953/4 he produced many sheets, of which a high proportion were associated with paintings. We cannot be certain of the number of etchings he made, for he had no opportunity to print an edition, so he simply pulled a few proofs which soon became scattered and lost. As far as we can judge the material today, it must have amounted to some forty dry-point etchings. Twenty-three sheets from this series, of which the plates had survived, were published in 1960 as Swiss suite.

Like Occupations, this suite was issued only after mature reflection but was then put together more or less at random. Yet the twenty- three sheets of the Swiss suite combine to form an unforced and

natural cycle. For despite the numerous different modes of expression open to him and the range of his formal development, Jorn’s art flows from an unusually consistent imagination. This goes for his manner as well as his choice of motif, as we have just seen in the example of the lithographs, and it applies to all the techniques.

There could be no better example than the Swiss suite of this, and of the way in which Jorn is able to transpose images that are primarily based on colour into the graphic medium. Examples are The eagle’s share (Fig.82) - a key image for these years, Cosmic creation (Fig.83)and Space woman (Fig.84) to mention only the most striking. The transposition is made possible by a graphic style which, compared with the sheets of Occupations, is capable of subtler description and reflects a more conscious feeling for the graphic element. It has retained something of the early fine hair-like character, and forms a minute, tangled surface pattern of innumerable filaments, dots, broken lines and humorous flourishes, as, for example, in A stranger in the village and Flooded landscape in Holland (Fig.85). Yet the surface is freer, less crowded: it has acquired a strangely suspended transparency that expresses an oddly enigmatic irony. These sheets are surprisingly close to certain etchings by Ensor, but the resemblance comes less from any use of Ensor as a formal model - though Ensor had once been an important factor in Jorn’s development - than from an intellectual affinity that expresses itself in related graphic structures.

There are also, however, etchings such as Cosmic creation (Fig.83) and Space woman (Fig.84), in which the line swirls and meanders and achieves an expressiveness reminiscent of Munch. The arabesque-like rhythmic movement - which may be conveyed by either the line or the flow of colour - becomes more and more of a determining factor in Jorn’s art and anchors it ever more firmly to the tradition of Nordic Expressionism.

I would mention one more sheet from the Swiss suite: King of the birds - or Beheaded. In a signed and titled proof in the Silkeborg Museum the image is printed upside down and called Décapté [sic] (Fig. 86). It is a most impressive example of that Double delirium - to borrow the title of another sheet from the Swiss suite - which makes use of the same ambiguity: the power of the image to mystify that always fascinates Jorn.

The woodcut and its close ally the linocut give Jorn’s graphic work a very particular accent. Their total number is not large by comparison with the lithographs and etchings. Jorn did not work at these techniques as consistently as he did at the others. One reason for this was that he did not always have suitable means of printing to hand. The fact that Jorn’s interest was engaged by the woodcut - a technique that is rarely used nowadays - has a significance beyond the technical and tells us much about his artistic vision. The woodcut is the most ancient and

least flexible of the graphic processes. Its quality is entirely its own: austere, and always rising to an expressive resonance that eludes painting, drawing and the other graphic techniques. Its history is also more checkered than theirs, being punctuated by periods of neglect. Its last peak of excellence came with the work of Munch followed by that of the German Expressionists. The fact that Jorn’s woodcuts belong to this tradition is also in a wider sense indicative of the whole creative tradition in which his art is rooted.

Like the lithographs and etchings, Jorn’s output of woodcuts and linocuts greatly increased during 1952-3. A series of large sheets date from this period : some are linocuts, like Council for the propagation of Danish beauty in foreign lands, others a skilful combination of woodcut and linocut, like Imaginary solitude (Fig. 87) and *The wheel of fortune *(Fig.88), in which Jorn has used a wood-block to spread a delicately grained film of colour over the linocut motif. Jorn’s linocut gives the ancient theme of the wheel of fortune - which he used also in his paintings of the period - a strange, eccentric form. With its arabesquelike interlacings, among which the movement of ascending and descending human bodies is suggested, it is oddly reminiscent of the symbolic ornamental forms of early Nordic art.

The linocut illustrations to Risk and chance, the book that Jorn wrote during the fateful crisis of his illness in 1951, date from the same period and show the same pronounced feeling for ornamental abstraction.

Jorn gave up the woodcut after 1953, returning to the technique only after a long intermission, in 1964. He then produced a great many small illustrations to his book published in that year, *Ting og polis *(‘Moot and City State’). He also worked on a few larger sheets, which, due to technical problems, remained unpublished until 1970, when they appeared as a suite of nineteen woodcuts (see Fig.89). They were followed in 1971-2 by further sheets, among them twelve coloured woodcuts which were issued in a portfolio and called *Études et surprises *(see Fig.90). It is interesting to see that this fairly intensive preoccupation with the woodcut had been preceded by a series of collages dating from 1968. With their similar precise, angular outlines - dictated, of course, by the medium - the collages bear a striking resemblance to the woodcuts.

After considering Jorn’s woodcuts we must turn again to his etchings and lithographs. These were produced over a long period during which their modes of expression developed continuously and along the same lines as those of his painting. In the late 1950s, in both paintings and graphics, an impassioned movement begins to invade the picture area and almost no forms are decipherable in the swirling, sometimes chaotic, motion of the handwriting (see Figs.91 and 92).

However, towards the middle of the 1960s a certain clarity and concentration returns to the structure of his work. Contours again become legible within the flow of lines and colours, and intelligible associative themes emerge from the incidents on the picture surface (see Figs.93and 94). The motive, existing now in a more diffuse atmosphere, is certainly far removed from the earlier world of fable. The imaginative drive of Jorn’s deeply disturbed nature is no longer personified in a multitude of magical and mythical beings. It is now wholly confined to the field of visual metaphors for the perceptions and states of the artist’s spiritual experience, and the reflection of these in the image become increasingly intense and powerful.

The change is well demonstrated by Jorn’s last works in lithography, his illustrations to The story of the costly loaf by Halldor Laxness. He uses small cryptograms that are oddly fugitive, as though a gust of wind had caught them, to provide a kind of running commentary on the Icelandic author’s hand-written text. And five lithographs (see Fig.95) give a linear and colourful illustration to a story that is very much after Jorn’s own heart: it tells of a girl who gets lost in the wilderness as she goes to fetch bread. Though perplexed and on the wrong path she is saved by the miracle of light.

So ends Jorn’s work in graphics. It is an important chapter in the painter’s activity: in graphics, as in the other branches of his art, he ‘discovers his face’. And the result is an imposing and lasting monument, human as well as artistic, to Jorn himself and to our time.

(Translated from German by Janet Seligman)

Chapter 9: Tapestries

by Pierre Wemaëre

We’re going to make a tapestry! This is what we promised ourselves as we parted after our reunion in 1946. Asger and I had not met since 1940. He had continued with his painting, while I had taken up weaving. Why should we not try to make a tapestry? The two techniques couldn’t be so very different, particularly when you know nothing about the subject. You can be as daring as you like without worrying about convention. In a piece of weaving the threads of warp and weft crisscross in every possible and imaginable direction, leaving more or less of the warp or weft visible. This produces the great variety of effects that we see in all the different cloths around us. In tapestry, on the other hand, the weft threads must completely cover those of the warp. The latter remain invisible and the design is made by a series of passes of different coloured wools.

In order to start our new venture I took a Peruvian pattern which appealed to me and I copied part of it during our first day when neither of us left the loom. I worked busily, using my hands and feet, while Asger kept up a never-ending commentary on my work or told me about all the things that had happened in the six years during which we had been parted. All this took place in the Normandy countryside, where I had been living since my marriage, and after long hours spent in the studio, we would go out and enjoy the warm spring evenings. Next morning I would resume work with zest, following my Peruvian pattern. The design was a bird perched on a decorative motif. When Asger got up late, as was his habit, he was pleased to see the progress I had made. Then, suddenly, he would jolt me out of my rut. I stopped my painstaking copying of the pattern and we launched out into free invention. This did not make the work any easier and it caused the bird to fly off to new worlds!

We then decided to put a round yellow shape above the bird, like a moon, as we said in joke. While we worked on, the yellow ball began to look monotonous, so we turned it into a reddish-brown. We had almost finished doing this when my wife joined us in the studio, which was at the far end of the garden. As she came in she told us to go out and watch the eclipse of the moon. There, in the garden, the three of us gazed up at the sky and saw the very event that we had just woven on the loom. A sign indeed! Our work must obviously go on.

Asger took his turn at the loom and became as excited as I was. He was always having new ideas and would brook no obstacle. Yet we were forced to abandon certain eccentricities which would have been either impossible or unsatisfactory if we had tried to carry them out. We worked together, handling the stretched warp threads as we pleased. After a few days of this absorbing exercise Asger went back to Denmark, promising to return the following year.

On my own once more I returned to my weaving (my bread and butter) and decided to buy a proper tapestry loom and more conventional materials, so as to obtain more durable results. I received little encouragement and support from the professionals whom I met, but at least they helped me to procure a horizontal loom, cotton for the warp, a comb beater for beating in the weft, and bobbins for coiling the threads. I tried out several things on my own, using the new materials.

I now saw I needed a guideline by which to work, not the traditional cardboard pattern, but at least a sketch that I could use as a basis and that we could discuss when we were together. The sketch would be something that I could refer to, though as I worked I would probably modify some of the forms and colours as inspiration dictated, or to fit in with the appearance of what I had already done. It was essential that the work should remain alive as long as it was on the loom, with all the mistakes that this might involve, as well as all the useful ideas that I might stumble upon. Whatever happened, the work must not become set, there must be no break between the moment of conception and that of completion. This was clearly the main problem, as the future was to prove.

Asger arrived in Normandy the following year, accompanied by his whole family. We resumed our joint work and made a number of small pieces, as well as the sketch for The bird in the forest (Fig. 100), which we started together and which he left me to finish when he set out for Tunisia. This was our first important piece. It had certain technical faults, but it symbolized our determination to avoid the constraints of the traditional methods.

At Djerba in Tunisia, where we met again a few months later, we often discussed our work and we made visits to the blanket weavers, familiarizing ourselves with their primitive looms and their handspun, home-dyed wool. We were fully resolved to use handspun wool in our next tapestries, or at least to vary the threads. We would use wools of different thicknesses, or we might choose different materials, perhaps mixing wool and cotton with synthetics, or matt textures with shiny ones. We gave no thought to the imperfections that this would cause in the finished work. But where could we find help? We had little time to spare, for we both had our own work to do, and the linen worker’s loom is very exacting. You have to be at it, bobbin in hand, hour after hour. Several Danish pupils came and spent a few months with me, learning and making small tapestries while I was continually there in the studio doing my weaving. Then everything came to a standstill. Asger went into a sanatorium.

The moment he was back in Paris we decided to make a big tapestry. Since we had no loom large enough for such a job we visited M. Beaudonnet, a linen worker living in the Paris area. We explained to him our technique for designing and executing tapestries. He smiled and refused to weave anything for us without a full scale model of how the work was to look when finished. In Versailles we went to work to paint Summer flower (Fig. 102) in water-colour on paper. We took our drawing to M. Beaudonnet. From time to time we called on him to see how he was getting on. Sometimes we created a disturbance by taking up our places at the loom and upsetting his routine. He was very kind and tried to enter into the spirit of our venture, but his long experience as a weaver and his technique got the better of our desire for experiment. The finished work showed us quite clearly that it was like all the tapestries made in traditional studios rather than being our own. It was much better made than ours, but also much less alive. We would have to adopt another formula in future.

Asger longed to get a commission for a very large tapestry. He was not at all worried as to how or when it would be produced. The perpetual wanderer himself, he relied on my perseverance and stability to carry such a job through. It was at this point that the Danish Arts Foundation invited him to make a large ceramic mural for the new secondary school in Aarhus. When he came to see me he told me that he would only agree to make the ceramic on condition that they would at the same time commission us to make an important tapestry. We felt fairly optimistic and we set about making a first model to submit to the Danish committee. And so negotiations began.

In Dijon in the autumn of 1957, together with M. de Bazelaire, we organized a retrospective exhibition of tapestry, with demonstrations. My loom was set up in the Cellier de Clairvaux alongside the exhibits, and a linen worker using one of our designs showed the public how it was done. This linen worker was called Paola. She became a friend and stayed on to work with us until our experiments came to an end. In fact, when the exhibition was over we asked her to weave one or two small things. She agreed but was rather slow in getting started, which didn’t altogether please me. Time passed and the Danish committee vacillated, agreeing and then again refusing to commission our tapestry.

One fine morning in the spring of 1958 Asger rang my doorbell in Versailles and rushed in to tell me that we had at last succeeded: the commission was ours and now we had to get busy. We made some slight alterations to the first sketch and then produced a model on a scale of 1:5. Having filled in the main outlines and some of the solid areas, our method was to paint on the model turn and turn about in our respective studios, working independently, and only meeting to compare results. This meant that certain parts painted by one of us and approved by the other remained intact, while others were changed by both of us in collaboration. Such were the origins of The long voyage *(Bibl.341), the culmination of our joint work in tapestry. It had to be finished by 1 January 1960 and was to measure l.80x 14 m. We had eighteen months in which to do it, no studio and no weaver apart from Paola and myself, since Asger was off again on his travels and had entrusted the work to me. I discovered premises in the Rue Saint-Denis in Paris, where the painter Yvette Prince rented me a room in her lodgings. She herself became interested when she saw us beginning to set up the studio and she asked to be initiated into our work. She soon acquired a taste for the job, so that she and Paola were the first weavers of *The long voyage. Later two other artists who were also new to weaving produced many a large area.

I was in the studio almost every day and took an interest in everything. Physical tasks, all the dull chores, had to receive the same care and attention as the most interesting activities. Only by such dedication could the work acquire a life of its own. I supervised the choice of wools. On some days I had to dye certain skeins in order to finish a piece or modify the shade of colour. On other occasions I would weave a motif or elaborate it to show how I thought it should be done, or I would simply smooth out a skein of wool that was so tangled that no one had the patience to wind it on to the bobbin. Our working tools were extremely primitive, but it all created an atmosphere. In fact there was no lack of atmosphere in the Rue Saint-Denis - whether on the pavement outside or in the studio itself, particularly when Gilbert played the guitar!

The model had been photographed in black and white to the size of the finished work. The enlargement inevitably contained some fuzzy passages. The weavers then had to interpret, which made their work more interesting but also led to mistakes from time to time. I was in charge and had to decide whether to make the weavers undo a piece or whether to let the misinterpretation stand, which meant modifying the next section to fit in. This kept the work alive throughout the eighteen months. We did not fall into the standard error by which an artist paints a cartoon which is then handed over to a craftsman, without contact between invention and realization.

Alongside the loom on which we were weaving The long voyage there was another loom for beginners who wanted to learn from us. Some of these became enthusiastic and joined in our work, others lacked the necessary patience or interest and left without more ado. In this way the little experimental community continued to acquire helpers until The long voyage was completed and our collaboration came to an end.

In December 1959 we at last unrolled the work we had so patiently carried out. Now we could look at it before sending it to Denmark. We exhibited it, along with all our other tapestries, at the Galerie des Quatre Saisons in Paris. We wanted to give our exhibition a suitable send-off, so we called on Gaston Bachelard, whom Asger was seeing frequently at this time. We described to him how the big tapestry had been conceived and woven and we asked him to write a few words about our joint enterprise. In a few minutes he had grasped the point and he wrote us a catalogue preface which he called *La création ouverte *(‘Open creation’).

Open creation

Two painters who appreciate the wealth of creativity that exists in modern painting have pooled their resources. They have discovered a common source of inspiration which engages their energies. Now they have completed their task with the help of others who were persuaded to join in.

At one time the two men were painters. Now they are tapestry makers. Each of them once stood alone in front of his canvas. Now they have become leaders of a team that practises a technique which calls for patience and a slow tempo. A master tapestry maker usually puts all his talent into the design of the ‘cartoon’. He plans the whole range of skeins in advance. After that, skilled craftsmen come and translate his splendid drawing into the language of wool. This causes a break between creation and execution.

By becoming complete tapestry makers - creators and craftsmen combined - Asger Jorn and Pierre Wemaëre have been able to exercise their creative powers at every phase during the growth of the work. Tapestry is for them, in the words of the philosopher, ‘a continuous creation’.

The cartoon implies a closed world. It imprisons the craftsman. As his bobbin picks its way from cell to cell, his only moment of pleasure comes when he discovers a fine wool that exactly matches his needs.

Partnership had an immediately liberating effect on the two artists. But two alone could not have produced the tapestry fast enough. Work that drags loses its vitality, so they enlarged their community. Their loom became an open workshop to which came new workers who were eager to realize their dreams in this enterprise. What a splendid example of open creation! When one craftsman replaces another he says to his predecessor: T shall base my work on yours, but I shall also add something of my own.’ Little by little a world is woven. It takes many creators to make a good universe!

Jorn and Wemaëre, the two movers, returned from time to time to encourage the work of creation. They put new sap into the growing tree. They gave a new impetus to the imagination. And so the image of wool worked itself free from the stiffness of the sketches. It escaped the tyranny of the masters of the cartoon.

The tapestries of Jorn and Wemaëre came into existence by a gradual process. Their history of continuous creation makes them pulsatingly alive to those who now look at them and touch them.

I find it good when work expresses life and when it imparts its own life to the life of the artefact. So I admire this image in wool that started as a plant. I admire those great leaves that rise so slowly under the patient hand of the dreamer. And as the dream takes shape, so the plant becomes not a flower but an eye!

Anything is possible for those who dream long enough, who dream in their work.

(Translated from French by Janet Seligman)

Chapter 10: Writings

‘Eisbären sind jedoch nicht weiss, es sind vor allem Bären.’
(Gedanken eines Künstlers)

In 1964, on the occasion of Jorn’s 50th birthday, there appeared a bibliography of his published works, which then already amounted to more than 200 entries, if we include the ten newspaper interviews listed at the back of the book.

The bulk of Jorn’s literary output consists of books and periodical articles written mostly, but not exclusively, in Danish. Although one is told that Jorn’s untranslated Danish books have considerable intrinsic merit, this chapter is confined to works that are accessible in German, French or - in the case of one article - English. For publication details the reader is referred to the bibliography.

Where did Jorn find the time for his prodigious literary output? On what subjects did he write? How do the writings fit into his main preoccupation as an artist?

The first question is probably the easiest to answer since it is merely a matter of timetable. Jorn was in the habit of going to bed late, and he was capable of concentrated reading and writing at all hours of the day or night, regardless of the noise made by children or other domestic disturbances going on round him. Every now and then in later years he would take long holidays from painting in order to refresh his mind. During these periods he read, did library and field research, wrote and travelled. His choice of reading tended to run in two opposite directions : serious scholarly works and trashy fiction in paperback. Most of his serious reading was in the natural and social sciences, and in the history of art of the so-called Dark Ages, which he had made his special field. His enormous literary output would be unthinkable if he had not worked at great speed and - be it said - without troubling to revise or refine what he had written. I once asked him why his books are so incoherent. His answer was typical. ‘When I write I climb around the building and sometimes I don’t know if I’m still in the building or somewhere outside on the scaffolding.’

The subject matter of Jorn’s writings covers a wide range, even including economics. His main book on economic theory has not been translated from Danish, but there is a pamphlet in French called Critique de la politique économique: suivie de la lutte finale. Economics apart, two of his major works were translated from Danish into

German as Gedanken eines Künstlers. The first part of this book is Heil und Zufall (‘Risk and chance’), described in the preface as ‘a defence of my adventure as an artist’. It was written in hospital at a time when Jorn’s life hung in the balance. He found it difficult to come to terms with his illness, as he wrote at the time: ‘To become reconciled to illness is one of the hardest things to ask of anyone who comes from one of the northern countries, where good health is the great and (today I have the courage to say it) sick dream.’ The climax of the illness coincided with the collapse of the cobra movement, whose last exhibition took place in 1951. The book therefore reflects a confrontation with death and the failure of a dream.

In the second part of Gedanken eines Künstlers we find Die Ordnung der Natur (‘The order of nature’), where Jorn discusses the scientific theories of some of his favourite physicists and mathematicians, Niels Bohr, Lupasco, Nicolai Kozirev. He entered into discussion and controversy with these men, putting up his own counter-theories under the heading ‘Silkeborg interpretation’. Most readers, however, will turn with special interest to those passages where he digresses from science and handles topics that apply directly to his own personality and creativity or where he analyses the inner motivation of certain artists from the past and present.

At one point he refers to an article in which Werner Haftmann described him as a ‘nocturnal’ human being. ‘That must be taken to imply that I am a “dark” painter. The idea came to me as a shock because I love the light. Does it mean that we northerners are dark? Are we light in appearance simply because we long for the light? Are people in the south [of Europe] light people who look dark because they are searching for darkness? This idea struck me as strange. But suddenly I remembered that Kant had written something on the aesthetics of night. When I found the place I suddenly understood what my book Risk and chance is really about. It’s about the aesthetics of the sublime, the longing for great height. The sentence from Kant that stuck in my memory was “Night is sublime, day is beautiful”.’

Jorn went on to consider the secret significance that black and white had for Munch and Delacroix. ‘Lupasco maintains that light and death are synonymous. This is a very interesting claim because in European culture black symbolises death. Edvard Munch thought that his fear of black was a fear of death. But in fact it was a fear of life, caused by his warped upbringing. When Delacroix was mortally ill he spoke about the profound nostalgia for black which he had always felt. This expressed his deep will for life.’

Four of Jorn’s major books are published in French: La roue de la fortune (1957), Pour la forme (1958), Signes gravés sur les églises de l’Eure et du Calvados (1964), and La langue verte et la cuite (1968).

Les cornes d’or ou La roue de la fortune sets the pattern for all the other iconographie studies, in that it contains more than 400 illustrations to some mere 100 pages of text. The image takes precedence over the word. Jorn never worried very much about captions and ‘explanations’ for pictures. He wanted images to tell their own story. In later years he tried, whenever possible, to enlist the help of academic experts to supply captions and texts, but he ran up against the well-known reluctance of professional scholars to collaborate with amateurs. They are afraid of being branded as ‘amateurs’ themselves. Also there is no doubt that Jorn’s idiosyncratic approach to art history cut across too many well guarded academic boundaries.

Pour la forme is a work of quite a different nature. It is made up of essays on various subjects related to aesthetics. It therefore continues within the tradition of Risk and chance. Both books are aphoristic rather than systematic. The essays in Pour la forme correspond to the period of MIBI and Jorn’s achievement of maturity as a painter. By this time he had fully absorbed the lessons of cobra: improvisation and experiment, the exploitation of chance, and the mediumistic relationship between painter and canvas. Certain statements in *Pour la forme *are highly revealing for his attitude to life and art :

‘La véritable création met l’artiste dans une situation de dépaysement qui ne peut être maîtrisée qu’au prix de ses ultimes efforts. Cette mobilisation de toutes les resources inventives et formelles, cette lutte passionnante avec la matière est inimitable. C’est à chacun son tour.

C’est cela le secret de la puissance magique de l’art.’

‘Il y a dans toute véritable expérience un point zéro, où absolument rien ne peut être prévu.’

‘L’intelligence et la pensée créatrice s’allument en rencontrant l’inconnu, l’inattendu, l’accident, le désordre, l’absurde et l’impossible.’

‘Ce qui mesure le caractère génial d’une œuvre d’art, c’est d’être perpétuellement énigmatique.’

‘La tolérance est l’unique chose intolérable dans le domaine artistique.’

‘L’art ne se discute pas.’

In 1962 Jorn founded his ‘Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism’. The unattractive name was deliberately intended to put off art lovers. It also managed to repel Art Foundations, who might have been willing to subsidize the Institute if it had been called, for example, the Viking Art Centre, particularly if the President had been an eminent Professor or Civil Servant, instead of the controversial painter Asger Jorn. In reality the Institute consisted of Jorn and two friends, a cameraman and a girl, who helped him to collect the vast photo library of sculptural motifs along the Viking trail from Norway down to the South of France.

The first result of the vandalist adventure was a book of pictures and texts on the graffiti on the walls of Normandy churches - remembering Normandy had been named after the Norsemen who once occupied the province. Already in this first book the imagery is discursive, eclectic and ambivalent. Digressions are provided by a large number of line drawings and borrowed illustrations from other parts of the world. Then there were Jorn’s own diagrams to illustrate ‘triolectic’ schemes, side by side with three-headed motifs, ranging from those of William Blake right back to Bulgaria in the 2nd century ad. The book is Gothic, bizarre and rather splendid in its proliferations.

The tongue book (La langue verte et la cuite) also belongs to the picture book genre, but this time we have a satirical opus of giant size. The book is, at one level, a parody of the famous French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, who uses gastronomic metaphor for structural analysis (Le cru et le cuit). At another level it is a typical Jorn-inspired picture-poem of great complexity. The volume contains over 300 illustrations of Gothic and pre-Gothic sculptures, interspersed with ethnographic, oriental and modern images. The common factor is a protruding tongue, whether that of an attractive girl student during the riots of 1968 (No. 195) or the bilingual tongue of a three-eyed god in Katmandu (No.221). All the tongues are coloured green, red, or yellow. The text, on which Jorn and Arnaud worked together, accurately burlesques the bizarre style of Lévi-Strauss.

La langue verte is by far the most brilliant as well as the most successful of Jorn’s literary works. In Noël Arnaud he had found the perfect collaborator. The book was extensively reviewed, particularly in England, where reviews found their way unexpectedly into some of the most exclusive literary and scholarly journals. Francis Huxley in encounter called the work ‘… a parody of inescapable logic … the perfect antidote to Lévi-Strauss and his semantic Buddhism …‘Other notices appeared in the times literary supplement, man,**and THE BULLETIN OF THE SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN **studies. Lévi-Strauss himself wrote to Noël Arnaud: ‘Scholarship is usually so dull that one has to envy those who know how to make it cheerful’.

Now we come to the third question: How do Jorn’s writings fit into his main preoccupation as an artist? We can begin to answer this by quoting the artist himself:

‘People often ask me what I hope to achieve by my writings. They tell me that my intentions are not always very clear. But I am not aware of having any very definite intentions in this matter. When my intentions are too clear, it makes me feel rather sad. One reason why I write is to oppose any clear-cut schemes or directives about art, whether the motives are moral, scientific or apparently liberal: like the attempt to free art by cutting it off from the rest of human activity.’

If this statement applies to the essays on art and architecture and to some of the polemical articles in the Danish press, then the picture books occupy a rather different place. Those on early Scandinavian art are motivated by a search for personal roots: in the imagery and inscriptions on runic stones, and at the literary level in the epic poetry of the Edda and Kalevala. Jorn’s Nordic urge has sometimes caused people to draw wrong conclusions about his political stance. Politically, as an old Marxist, he stood well to the left of centre. His unfashionable preoccupation with Nordic art was based on a search for congenial motifs, such as that of a warrior biting into his shield or the deadly duels between anonymous heroes and monsters. To quote Lawrence Alloway: ‘… the primitivism of the Danes is not idyllic … On the contrary their primitivism assumes a primal scene fraught with conflict’ (Bibl.363, p.51).

Lastly, a word about Jorn’s smaller writings in Danish. These were mainly contributions to Scandinavian periodicals and the daily press. The most famous article, because of its anticipation of pop culture, was that in praise of kitsch art (1941), which was republished in Énglish 23 years later (Bibl. 166, pp. 102-3).

Most of Jorn’s Danish articles (as distinct from his Danish books) can be regarded as ephemeral: a private diary kept in public. With the solitary exception of the Guggenheim Award dispute, he studiously avoided controversies in the world press. He found the Danish language ideal for his soliloquies. And there was no risk that what the silkeborg avis published today would be picked up by the new york times tomorrow.

Chapter 11: Dealers and collectors

During the period under review Jorn had six dealers who regularly showed his latest work: in Denmark, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and USA. That is the chronological order of his major shows in those countries.

Børge Birch represented him in Copenhagen from 1948 onwards. Birch, in doing so, made an exception to his normal policy, which was to show foreign rather than native artists. He liked Jorn and admired his work from the start. Jorn later found an opportunity to repay this early devotion at a time when Birch had gone out of business, Birch sold his gallery in Bredgade, Copenhagen, in 1956 and became a hotelier. It was Jorn who encouraged and helped him, during a visit to Birch’s seaside hotel in the autumn of 1959, to open a new gallery in Copenhagen. Premises were found at Admiralgade 25 the following year.

In an artist-dealer relationship lasting twenty-five years there is obviously a strong basis of mutual sympathy and understanding. In this case the bond happened to be strengthened by a common interest in music. Jorn was an ad hoc musician, always willing to play on almost any instrument that came to hand. Although he did not read music he was quick to pick up a tune or an accompaniment. Birch specialized in the drums and cymbals. When Jorn bought his farm on Læsø, Birch bought himself a property on the same island. He installed a music room with space enough for a whole band or orchestra, but this was unnecessary when he and Jorn got together, particularly if they were joined by Nanna Jorn, who is a good self-taught concertina player.

An example of Jorn’s approach to music - or anti-music - is to be found on four double-sided records which he made with Jean Dubuffet in 1961 (Figs. 119 and 120). The duets have titles such as Broken nose, Mosquito dance and Blood.

Birch’s high-powered methods of salesmanship meant that he was always short of pictures and asking for more. This did not suit Jorn, who applied a rota system to his dealers, as a method for ensuring (among other things) credit facilities in several different countries.

Jorn’s first dealer outside Denmark was Carlo Cardazzo, who owned Galleria d’Arte del Naviglio in Milan and another gallery in Venice. He gave Jorn a one-man exhibition in 1955 and bought many of his paintings from that period. This provided Jorn with practically his only means of subsistence in Albisola. Cardazzo at one time probably owned about forty Jorns, which he was in no hurry to sell since he was aware of their potential growth value. After Carlo Cardazzo’s death the gallery in Milan was taken over by his brother Renato, and that in Venice by his son Paolo. A few of the original Jorn paintings from the 1950s still remain in stock.

As soon as Jorn had found a flat in Paris he began to look round for a suitable gallery. The one gallery he was determined to avoid was Rive Droite, which represented all the current tendencies he most disliked. One day a friend introduced him to a gallery with the opposite name. This seemed a good omen. He came to terms with the owner, Monsieur R. A. Augustinci, and had his first exhibition at Galerie Rive Gauche in 1957. He stayed with this gallery for ten years before transferring to Galerie Jeanne Bucher in 1967. During those ten years Augustinci handled many hundreds of Jorn’s best paintings, drawings, and graphics.

Although born in Trieste, Augustinci is in many ways a typical Parisian gentleman of an older generation : formal in dress and manner (when preparing an exhibition he would address Jorn as ‘Maître’) and possessing a caustic wit which he hides behind an air of deep melancholy and disillusionment. Unlike Birch, he never expected to sell pictures on a large scale. Therefore the sudden and ruthless demand for Jorn paintings in the late 1950s caused him a good deal of distress.

Galerie van de Loo in Munich has been by far the most active gallery in promoting Jorn’s work. Since his first Jorn exhibition in 1958, Otto van de Loo has built up a large private collection, partly in trust for his children, while the gallery always maintains an important selection of Jorn paintings, collages, drawings, graphics, and lately also sculpture. This stock is constantly kept up to strength through new acquisitions, as with the purchase of Letter to my son in 1974. Many of Jorn’s best etchings and lithographs were printed in Munich.

Otto van de Loo was for fifteen years one of Jorn’s closest friends. He is a marvellous raconteur and a good host. An evening at his house in Grammstrasse was always a festive occasion. His wife, Heike, was indispensable in the house and she took an active interest in supporting the gallery. Jorn had two rooms put aside for him, whenever he wanted them, on the first floor of the house. Downstairs his favourite drinks (which included strong freshly made coffee) were always there for the asking. When Heike died in 1963 Jorn, who was very devoted to her, made a set of fourteen water-colours in her honour. These were published privately ten years later In memoriam Heike van de Loo.

Unlike the galleries mentioned so far, Arthur Tooth & Sons in London is not a one-man firm but a family partnership. Even so Jorn dealt almost entirely through one of the directors. Peter Cochrane began by buying Jorn’s pictures through Galerie Rive Gauche, but later arranged exhibitions in London.

From 1957 to 1961 modern art in London - particularly that of the younger British artists - came under the influence of Lawrence Alloway, who organized exhibitions and meetings at the ICA. These bore the imprint of his personality and taste. He admired Jorn as an artist and thought of writing a book about him. He went so far as to visit Denmark but he never got started on the book.

Peter Cochrane’s best customer at Tooth’s was Ted Power, who eventually owned about twenty Jorns. Ted Power, in later years, used to invite Jorn to his flat in Grosvenor Square, where they conducted far-ranging discussions over glasses of malt whisky or brandy.

Jorn liked the atmosphere of London and its pubs. He felt anonymous and unmolested here. It was characteristic of him that he preferred to be under- rather than overrated by critics and the public. British critics in fact took little notice of him, under the convenient pretext that he was a ‘Nordic Expressionist’.

Jon Streep, who was Jorn’s American dealer until 1962, had the useful habit of turning up unannounced and buying pictures for cash. He never, like other mortals, sent telegrams to try and find out where Jorn was. He preferred to trust to his instinct and he was usually right. One hot summer’s day he arrived in Albisola, had a swim in the sea, and sat down in a café near the beach. A moment or two later Jorn and his family strolled past.

Streep did not own a gallery in New York. He showed pictures from his apartment on Fifth Avenue, but paradoxically he always disliked the business of selling. Even so, his extraordinary flair for recognizing artistic quality enabled him to make plenty of money as a dealer. At times he was known to drive a hard bargain.

At present Streep probably owns about thirty-three Jorns, of which ten were acquired in 1972 as the result of a long-standing debt which Jorn eventually paid off in pictures. Streep’s collection is housed inaccessibly in a lock-up in New York, while he himself spends most of his time outside the USA.

In 1962 John Lefebre took over from Streep. In his first Jorn exhibition at Lefebre Gallery, New York, he included a number of Jorn paintings belonging to Streep. After that he developed close personal links with Jorn and gave him regular one-man exhibitions. Apart from Jorn, Lefebre Gallery has exhibited many of the other leading ex-COBRA artists.

It is difficult to know on what principles Jorn chose his dealers. Sometimes of course it was they who chose him. He never signed a contract with any of them. He was cosmopolitan enough to conduct his affairs with reasonable efficiency in several different countries and languages. His policy in commercial matters was to ensure that any arrangement he made should always preserve an element of mutual advantage. As long as it did so he was not worried if the balance was tilted slightly against him.

The biggest public collection from our period is in the Silkèborg Museum (40), followed by the Henie-Onstad Art Centre in Oslo (11), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (5).

Paolo Marinotti in Milan once owned by far the largest private collection, numbering at its height fifty-five Jorns dating from 1954 to 1964, with others from outside those years. Marinotti’s activity as an art patron and collector spanned the years 1959-70. He founded the ‘Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume’ (CIAC) at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (Fig. 13) with a special purpose in mind. The art exhibitions were to promote the sale of fashion fabrics, which formed the basis of his interest in the firm of Snia Viscosa.

The artists knew that the big mixed exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi were subsidized by the textile firm. After all the name of the Centre proclaimed the fact. They were nevertheless glad to show their work under these auspices because of the warm-hearted and sincere personal interest taken by Gretel and Paolo Marinotti. It was obvious that they, as organizers, were overwhelmingly involved in the art events they sponsored. The high marble halls of the Palazzo Grassi were too forbidding for the smaller and more delicate works shown there, but the sheer weight of numbers carried conviction: 142 works by Michaux (Campo Vitale, 1967); or thirty-nine Jorns and thirty-five Bajs under one roof (Visione Colore, 1963). Marinotti as a showman had something of the same grandiose and fanatical drive that activated Jorn in his policy towards the Silkeborg Museum: the urge to show the maximum and then, if possible, to buy up the whole lot at the end!

When Marinotti sold the bulk of his collection in 1970, it was - as far as one can tell - out of pique and disappointment that times had changed and that the artists he had loved had gone their own ways.

Other substantial private collections from our period were those of the late Hans de Jong in Hengelo (Netherlands); Matie Jorn (Paris and Bergen N. H.); Genia Richez (Paris); E. J. Power (London) and J. P. W. Cochrane (London).

In the catalogue section of Jorn in Scandinavia it was possible in many cases to show the changes of ownership of a picture from the studio right through to the latest owner. Most of the pictures from that early period were still in Denmark or in one of the neighbouring countries. Those that had moved further afield could often be located by various methods. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Not only have pictures changed hands frequently during the seven years of preparing the present book, but the increase in picture values has led to a corresponding increase in the reluctance on the part of some dealers and their clients to disclose information. Fiscal considerations, in the shape of wealth tax and death duties, have contributed to the difficulty in tracing private sales of modern art.

In these circumstances the choice lay between publishing the available information on provenance with all its faults, or else omitting this particular rubric. Several factors have led to the decision not to publish the data on provenance. First, a good deal of the basic information - particularly on the more important pictures - will be found in the detailed extracts from exhibition and museum catalogues.

Second, our information on changes of ownership is of such a fragmentary nature that to publish it could be positively misleading, since there would be no way of showing which entries are reliable and complete and which are not.

An example of how we have lost track of one entire group of important paintings is the Marinotti collection. The content of this collection is known through the exhibition catalogues published by CIAC, even though the ownership is there described as ‘private collection’. When the collection was broken up in 1970 the pictures disappeared - mostly without trace - into galleries and new homes. To have gone in search of the new owners would not only have delayed the publication of this book even further but would also have exceeded our financial resources. The data on provenance which we have succeeded in collecting will be sent to the Library of the Silkeborg Museum, where it will be available for consultation.

The most difficult paintings to trace are those which have not gone through galleries. This applies particularly to pictures which were given by the artist direct to individuals - in many cases as birthday gifts to the children of friends. Owners of any paintings that are not listed here are asked to supply details, so that photographs and descriptions can be included in the Appendix to Volume III.

Chapter 12: Titles of paintings

Only about 100 paintings from our period are untitled. This is a much lower number than in the previous volume. The reason is that by now Jorn’s paintings had gained sufficient prestige for dealers to insist on titles whenever possible. Jorn’s titles often have a special literary flavour of their own, although he claims to have chosen them without anything of that sort in mind. Here is an extract from his statement on the subject:

…for me the aim is to find a title that cannot be confused with that of any other work, and which at the same time is the least deceptive, the least meaningful, the most neutral, the most abstract, the furthest removed from any resemblance to what I myself had visualized, so that the title obliterates, as far as possible, my own intentions in relation to the work, which is why I often, very often, have left it to other artists or other people to invent titles for my pictures, not because I think they’ve hit upon the right title, not at all, since I maintain that the value of an image lies in its adaptability to several interpretations, the aim of art being precisely to achieve a universal and general meaning, which is why I select titles very much at random, and at the same time I’m careful not to be too specific, and not to give too precise and unequivocal a name to a picture, so that the title shall always contain an ambiguity that allows the spectator to read his own interpretation into the image, without feeling restricted by a title that forces him in this or that direction, which is why I always go for a title that has the maximum number of meanings, yet applies to only one single object.’

This statement is disingenuous insofar as most titles were not picked entirely at random, nor were they usually left completely to other people. It is true that Jorn would sometimes ask one of his friends for a suggestion about titling a new picture. But he would then be quite likely to alter the wording, or cap it in some way, or find a formulation of his own. Similarly he allowed his own versions to be ‘improved’. An example of this complex process is a painting from 1966 with the curious name The murderer’s grand polly. This name came about, in the first place, because of a canary-yellow patch in the picture. This reminded Jorn of Hitler’s boast that he would dispose of Denmark as easily as wringing the neck of a canary. The yellow patch in the picture happens to be rather large, so the canary became a parrot or Polly, which suggested folly - a folly which in Hitler’s case was a folie de grandeur or ‘grand’ folly or Polly! This long-winded story explains the otherwise meaningless string of words, which nevertheless has a subconsciously suggestive power.

The wording of Jorn’s statement on the subject of titles was no doubt influenced by his annoyance at having to speak about his titles at all. Like other artists he suffered from people who took the title of a picture as the starting point for the picture’s interpretation. To counteract this habit he overstated his case in regard to the randomness and neutrality of the titling.

There are in fact some genuinely ‘neutral’ titles. These consist of disjointed words and phrases which sound as if they had cropped up in the course of discussing what title to give a picture: That’s obvious, There they stand, A head like that, Enough said: He’s a Soandso. (The Danish Noksagt, when written as one word, has a derogatory implication: ‘the less said about the fellow the better’.)

His borrowings, adaptations and pastiches from Joyce for the Luxury paintings include Narcolepts on the Lake of Coma, Phornix Park, Shem the Gracehoper, and others.

In 1961 the term ‘underdeveloped’ was in vogue and supplied some amusing associations : Underdeveloped fertility, Underdeveloped ferocity, *etc. Paradoxes and improbabilities always had a strong appeal : *Memory of amnesia, Unilateral exchange, Powerful weakness, The young dotard. *His favourite language for puns was French: *Voleur volant, Fleur du mâle, Roussignoble, Arbre arbitraire, Le barbare et la berbère, Ainsi on s’ensor, Les mégatonomanes se regganent (Reggane in the Sahara was a guided missile base).

Titles with local associations include several from Bavaria : Giesinger Frühlingsbraut (‘Spring bride from Giesing’, a suburb of Munich), Der Maler vom Walchensee (referring to the painter Lovis Corinth), Herr Wiesenpräsident von Edelstojf (‘Lord President of the Beer Festival’, the annual festival held in the autumn on a large common in Munich).

Occasionally the languages get mixed : Geliebte Viecher in the night, Plein air with noseless horse, or they exist side by side as in Gipfelruhe or Toppeace and Finnfinn the fainéant.

The real distinction of Jorn’s capacity for finding picture titles can be seen in those 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: Wiedersehen am Todesufer (‘Re-encounter on the shores of death’); Im Flügelschlag der Schwäne (Tn the wingbeat of the swans’) ; En place pour le rite; Down to earth, lonely birth; Tarass Boulba (a fictional Cossack chief from a novel by Gogol).

A curious practice is Jorn’s use of overall serial titles to group certain pictures together. The dream pictures are the only fully catalogued and illustrated series. These twenty-three paintings range in size from 8F (46 x 38 cm) to 12F (61 x 50 cm). Each has its individual title (Cat.885- 907).

Another straightforward group is the Glimpses of the obvious series of 1964. Nine paintings are known, all in the format 4F (33x24 cm), cf. Cat. 1587-95.

problematical set. The relevant exhibition catalogue (Bibl.74) listed only five paintings. The English translations of the titles are :

1. Naughty postcard

2. Fine people intended for exhibition

3. A stupid pig (self-portrait)

4. Nuremberg Allsorts

5. Firebird

Nos.92 and 95 are ‘loose titles’, for which the pictures have not been found. Two other paintings, now in the Aalborg Museum are known to have been exhibited hors catalogue at the time: Telly-visions(Cat.948)* and *A turd (Cat.949). Mascot (Cat.950) also belongs to the group. A particularly puzzling feature of the frivolous pictures is that one of them is inscribed as ‘No.10’, suggesting that the series consisted of at least ten pictures. However, this point need not be taken too seriously. Jorn’s serial numbering was apt to be so eccentric that special tabulations have had to be set up to account for the gaps and irregularities (cf. Bibl.426, pp.79 and 90).

The strangest example of a ‘series’ is The living souls (Fig.228). The canvas is inscribed Sentimental spectator series. This ‘series’ consists, as far as we know, of this single picture!

Makeshift titles such as Head or Heads. Figure or Figures have usually been rendered here as Untitled, though in a few cases such titles have been quoted in brackets because they have gained currency through appearing in well-known exhibition catalogues.

An inscription on the canvas is not always the only criterion of authenticity for a Jorn title. He would sometimes obligingly provide a title which he would jot down on a piece of paper or in an exhibition catalogue for the benefit of the owner; or he might inscribe a title on the back of a photograph, but not on the painting itself.

The most sparsely documented entries in our catalogue are those where only a photograph has come to light and the painting itself has not been traced. Such photographs have been included because there is no doubt about their genuine nature. They were either supplied by the artist himself or - if coming from another source - they were shown to him and authenticated by him. Even so, the questions of title, date and size often remain in considerable doubt in these cases. In giving descriptions one has had to resort to question marks and terms such as ‘circa’* *and ‘SM’ (sight measurements). Luckily some of the photographs taken by Jorn’s friend Gunni Busck contained a few helpful features. If the picture was perched on a chair it was possible to make a guess at its size, as also when the background was a stone wall.

Jorn’s Studio Book (Bibl.60) has not always proved a reliable guide to the exact wording of a title. This is because Jorn was apt to write down a mnemonic version purely for his own use, e.g. ‘Tête rouge et vert [sic] (1954)’. Some of the titles in the Studio Book were later altered : Brev til Ole became Lettre à mon fils and Ballet coreographique [sic] became Choréographie de Vinstant. Unidentifiable titles from the Studio Book have been listed in the index, in the hope that it may be possible some day to establish their identity.

In translating Jorn’s foreign titles into English the intention has been to preserve something of the original flavour, rather than giving a slavishly literal rendering. Jorn’s mistakes of spelling or grammar, particularly in a few of the French titles, have been corrected whenever the mistake was obviously unintentional. Jorn gave permission for this to be done in the earlier volume (Bibl.426, p.120).

In the catalogue section (pp.309-80) foreign titles have been treated in two different ways. If the original title was in Danish (or Swedish), an English translation has been printed alongside it. Titles in other, better known languages have only been given in the original. In the main body of the book nearly all the titles, whether appearing in the text or the captions, have been quoted in English. The index contains all the necessary cross-references.

Chapter 13: Forgeries

In 1961 a review of a Jorn exhibition in Rome appeared in art international (V, 5-6, Jun-Aug, p.84), with a photograph of a painting which Jorn identified as a forgery. He wrote ‘falskneri’ (forgery) under the photograph in the magazine and sent the cutting to the Silkeborg Museum Library, where it has been preserved in the archives (Fig. 133)

Since Jorn’s death there has been a great increase in the number of faked Jorn paintings on the market. They emanate mainly from ‘Brussels’, Milan, Turin, and Rome. During 1974 I received altogether seven photographs from Italy, showing paintings signed ‘Jorn’, etc. which were clearly not painted by him. A group of four seemed to be by the same hand and carried unconvincing titles: Wolf-oiseau (undated), 73x75 cm; Oiseau-gazou (undated), 73x75 cm; Songe, 1954, 73x75 cm; Persephone, 1954, 100x80 cm. The signatures ‘Jorn’, ‘A. Jorn’ and ‘Asger Jorn’ bore no resemblance to Jorn’s handwriting. In the same package there was a photograph of Natura morta, 60 x 50 cm, c.1958, a picture where the paint had been applied in short and fairly regular strokes of the palette knife. It was said to be signed ‘Jorn’, but the signature was not visible on the photograph.

A more plausible pair of photographs (one in colour) came from Italy at about the same time, but from another source. The paintings were in the manner of the apollo forgeries (see below).

At the Art Fair in Basel in June 1974 a Milanese gallery showed a forgery of *Giesinger Frühlingsbraut *(Cat.1273). This painting was at one time in the Marinotti collection. The original is an oil painting, whereas the forgery is in acrylic colours.

There was a joint stand at the 1974 Art Fair in Cologne: the owners of the stand were a gallery from Paris and one from Geneva. The painting on display was a false ‘Jorn’ (alleged to date from 1957), which had been bought from a dealer in Milan.

In October 1974 apollo printed an advertisement article of a most unusual kind (Fig. 135). The article was headed *The work of Asger Jorn *and signed ‘E. M.’ It appeared in the advertisement section of the magazine and was headed in small print ‘Advertisement’. The name of the advertiser did not appear on the advertisement, but the index of advertisers (p.167) named him as Venizio Izzo. The article contained seven colour illustrations with the following captions :

1. Collection M. May, New York, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, 1966-7.

2. Private collection, London, oil on canvas 81 x 100 cm.

3. Collection F. Shapiro, New York, oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm, 1962-3.

4. Collection D. Paniche, New York, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, 1959-60.

5. Collection Busca, Milan, oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, 1959.

6. Private collection, London, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, 1952.

7. Collection F. Shapiro, New York, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, 1972.

No.2 (above) is copied from Trois personnes regardant la lune *(Cat. 1205), while No.4 is copied from *Le four carré, 1972, 149.9 X 195.6 cm, which is owned by the National Gallery, Berlin. Some of the other illustrations show details that are reminiscent of genuine Jorn paintings. The signatures that are visible are clumsy forgeries. It would seem (from a search of the New York telephone directories, made by John Lefebre) that the New York collectors cited in the article are nonexistent.

As soon as the article appeared in print, apollo magazine received numerous protests, including one from the Art Dealers Association of America. At the time of this manuscript going to the printer there had been no further developments in this affair.