Asger Jorn - The Final Years 1965-1973

Guy Atkins
with the help of Troels Andersen

Asger Jorn

The final years
1965-1973

A study of Asger Jorn’s artistic development from 1965 to 1973 and a catalogue of his oil paintings from that period

Borgens Forlag • Copenhagen

Introduction

This volume completes the trilogy on Jorn’s life and work which was begun almost twenty years ago. Jorn in Scandinavia appeared in 1968, followed in 1977 by Asger Jorn: the crucial years.

The number of oil paintings recorded in the three volumes amounts to over 2,000. This includes the pictures listed in the appendices. Despite our efforts, some paintings will almost certainly have remained undiscovered. We hope in due course to publish a supplement to the œuvre catalogue. For this reason owners of unrecorded paintings are invited to send details to: The Museum of Art (Kunstmuseum), 8600 Silkeborg, Denmark.

The two most important creative phases described in the present volume both occurred near the end of Jorn’s life. The year 1970 saw a renewal of his serious and almost exclusive dedication to painting - after the distractions of the previous years. The result of this newly found concentration was a sequence of works of the highest order, comparable in quality with those of the mid- to late 1950s.

In 1972 Jorn turned, for the first time, to sculpture in bronze and marble. His major achievement as a sculptor during this short but important period is described by Ursula Lehmann-Brockhaus in Chapter 4.

By including chapters, contributed by Frank Whitford, on acrylics and collages, a large part of Jorn’s œuvre (in its astonishing variety) has now been sketched out - bearing in mind the chapters on ceramics, graphics and tapestries in the preceding volume. It has not been possible, for reasons of space, to take account of Jorn’s pen-and-ink drawings and gouaches. These run into thousands and are very widely dispersed. A catalogue of the drawings in the Silkeborg Museum of Art is in preparation and will help to fill the gap.

In 1971 Jorn published Magi og skønne kunster (Magic and the Fine Arts), the last chapter of which contains the following passage:’Our life as individuals is short. It is no longer than the memory of our deeds, the immediate consequence of our existence. But if we look upon our life as a link in the long human chain, then it is as long as the life of art, and then the problem of life acquires a perspective, for we see life within the perspective of art. When we look for an answer to man’s eternal question: “What are we - where did we come from - where are we going?” we can appeal to art for the answer to the riddle of life, just as we look to life for the answer to the riddle of art.’

Translated by Jytte Hardisty.

Chapter 1: The final years

Vandalism and ‘Mycenean treasuries’

In 1965 Jorn decided to close his Institute for Comparative Vandalism which had become a source of controversy and annoyance to him. It had, amongst other things, led to a breach between himself and his old friend P. V. Glob, Denmark’s leading archaeologist and Director of the National Museum. Moreover, the ‘vandalist’ project had lately cost him a good deal of wasted time and energy, as well as money.

Jorn had for some time been trying, in vain, to persuade various art foundations, ministries, and art scholars in Scandinavia to collaborate with him - on his own terms - in a series of publications under the general heading ‘10,000 years of Nordic folk art’. The idea of documenting the history of early Scandinavian art had haunted him, as he explained in his valedictory report from the Institute, for the last 25 years.

Jorn’s private war against officialdom centred on the question whether he - an artist - was best qualified to be in charge of the programme, or whether the editor-in-chief should be an established academic, such as Professor Glob. Jorn pointed out that previous studies of Viking art had failed in one vital respect: the pictures were treated as a minor appendage to the text, whereas Jorn insisted that the images should take precedence over anything that might be written about them. To prove his point he had just published, at his own expense, a pilot volume of great beauty, on the stone sculpture of southern Sweden. For this he had used a top-ranking photographer whose camera work he directed, somewhat after the manner of a film director, in order to achieve the best angles and lighting for each subject.

When negotiations finally broke down, Jorn had at least one consolation: he could now pursue his ‘vandalist’ hobby unmolested. He might even be able to devote more time to painting.

Another ambitious scheme of Jorn’s was, at about the same time, reaching an impasse. This was his plan to rehouse the Silkeborg Museum of Art in a new building to be designed by Jørn Utzon. It goes without saying that Utzon’s design (published in a Danish architectural journal) was extremely daring and unorthodox. The drawings, with a commentary, were printed in the London architectural review. The writer of the review drew attention to the central problem of such a commission. The architect designing an art gallery has to create an environment which is not only favourable to the objects that are to be displayed, but he also has to make sure that the setting is congenial to the visitor.

It is doubtful whether Utzon’s design, if it had been carried out, would have met either of the above two criteria. For one thing the design was too grandiose to suit the intimate and personal character of the Silkeborg collection; for another, one feels that a visitor could hardly fail to be distracted away from the exhibits by the sensational ups and downs and the self-conscious avant-gardism of the structure. However, the writer of the London review was willing to give the architect the benefit of the doubt:

‘Very clever’, said the cynics looking sideways at Joern [sic] Utzon’s prize-winning design for Sydney Opera House, ‘but where do we go from there?’ Silkeborg, for instance, is one answer. His project for a new museum there to house Asger Jorn’s legendary collection of modern art has just been published… All sorts of hoary objections will promptly be raised, no doubt, but after Saarinen’s unfunctional design for TWA at Idlewild, which works so well and so convincingly, square functionalists who believe that only square buildings are functional, will perhaps phrase their questions in a more moderate tone. On the other hand, those who cheered too soon for the Guggenheim Museum only to find that it was an intolerable environment both for pictures and visitors, will perhaps forbear to cheer until they have actually tried this one… Utzon’s brooding half-buried kiln-forms (or are they Mycenean treasuries) will have to wait until completion, and even later, before much of value can be said about them.

Although no reliable financial estimates are available, there can be little doubt that the final cost of the museum would have been far beyond the resources of a small provincial town, even if aided from government funds. But Jorn’s proposals had at least stirred up a hornet’s nest. The arguments for and against continued until after Jorn’s death, when a second and much more modest Utzon design also had to be abandoned (Fig.5).

In 1966, a year after Jorn had freed himself from most of his external commitments, he decided, once more, to put himself to the test as a painter. He did so by agreeing to mount a London exhibition for which

all the pictures had to be completed within three months. He told me at the time that the question for him was not whether the pictures were any good, but simply whether he could still paint!

In the event the exhibition was a commercial failure and only a qualified artistic success. Toni del Renzio, with scrupulous tact, pointed to the main weakness in his catalogue preface (Bibl.23): ‘The recent canvases have been beautifully stroked with brushes charged with colour, just as beautifully jabbed and blobbed and scratched. Fine eye and hand calculated the nuances…’ Even some of the best pictures from the show, such as Seven types of ambiguity (Fig.2) were perhaps rather too sensuously ‘beautiful’.

The main artistic success of Jorn’s London visit in 1966 lay in his experiment with acrylic colours, as described in Chapter 2.

Cuban interlude

In 1957 Jorn had thought of going to Cuba in order to escape from his marital troubles. But it was not until ten years later that an opportunity for such a visit offered itself through the medium of his Cuban friend Wilfredo Lam. In 1966 Lam had persuaded his government in Havana to stage a major cultural event by bringing over all the available works from the Paris ‘Salon de Mai’ of 1967. The paintings and sculptures duly arrived and were displayed in a large exhibition hall in the centre of Havana. The show was a new experience for the Cubans, most of whom had never seen a big exhibition of contemporary Western art. Among the exhibits was Jorn’s Stalingrad painting.

The exhibition happened to coincide with the arrival in Cuba of a valuable consignment of European prize cattle, brought in to improve the quality of the indigenous dairy herds. The Ministries of Culture and Agriculture decided upon an act of collaboration: they would show the art exhibits in conjunction with the prize cattle. So it came about that an important painting by Miró was paired with a stud bull, which was tethered in a stall next to the picture. Lengthy notices explaining the pedigree of the bull and that of the artist could be read alongside each other.

The success of the ‘Salon de Mayo’ led to an even more ambitious project for the following year. It was decided to stage a mammoth ‘Congreso cultural de la Habana. Reunion de intelectuales de todo el mundo sobre problemas de Asia, Africa y America Latina’.

To attend this congress Jorn travelled over from Paris with Lou and Wilfredo Lam towards the end of January 1968 in a plane specially chartered for the group coming from France. Altogether about a thousand guests assembled in Havana. The entire Hilton Havana Hotel (renamed ‘Free Havana’) had been booked for the visitors. Among those who represented their different countries were Antonio Segui (Argentine), Matta (Chile), Michel Leiris (France), Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Germany), Roland Penrose and Herbert Read (Great Britain), Ezio Gribaudo (Italy), Corneille (Netherlands), Antonio Saura (Spain), Tom Messer (USA), and a very strong contingent of Afro-Asian representatives.

The Congress had a full programme of daily sessions on topics such as how to raise the level of cultural life in underdeveloped countries. Sheafs of resolutions were passed. Afro-Cuban folkloric manifestations took place on the Cathedral Square, as did a mass banquet (Fig. 12).

Jorn did not join in the formal activities of the Congress, apart from the statutory action of planting a coffee tree. He explained that he wanted to paint - on a monumental scale if possible. To meet his request he was given a free hand to do as he pleased with the entire wall area of a disused bank in the town (Fig. 10). He went to work in one of his huge bursts of energy. The result can best be judged from the colour illustrations in Jorn/Cuba (Bibl.166).

A similarly monumental task had been carried out by some 30 artists working on a ‘collective’ painting in Havana at the time of the ‘Salon de Mayo’ the previous year (Fig.7).

During a morning off from his murals Jorn accompanied Lou and Wilfredo Lam and others to the oddly named ‘Centre pour la récuperation des bureaucrates’ (Recreation centre for office workers), which had been set up by Señor Llanusa, the Minister of Culture, in the market place in an old quarter of Havana. Here those who were tired of the monotony of working in an office were usefully engaged in making, amongst other things, visual aids, out of papier mâché, for use in schools.

It was typical of Jorn at this stage of his life that he opted out of organized political and cultural activity in order to ‘do his own thing’ - just as three months later he stood back from the ‘Events of May’ in Paris, confining himself to making a set of posters with mildly humorous inscriptions (Fig. 13).

Galleries, workshops and studios

Jorn continued to exhibit his pictures in half-a-dozen countries in turn, with regular dealers of his choice in Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and USA. In 1966 he decided to move from Galerie Rive Gauche, with whom he had been associated for ten years, to Galerie Jeanne Bucher (J.-F. Jaeger). Since the death of Carlo Cardazzo Jorn had not had a regular gallery in Italy, but in 1969 he put on a one-man exhibition with Gianni Schubert at Galleria Arte Bor- gogna in Milan. It was Schubert who helped Jorn, during the last two years of his life, to plan and finance the big programme of sculpture in bronze and marble.

While working in London in 1966 Jorn first discovered the advantages of using acrylic colours. From then on acrylics became an important element in his repertoire of media - together with drawings, collages, and a great variety of graphic techniques. The œuvre catalogue of his graphics (Bibl.202) lists no fewer than 161 sheets published during the period under review. They were carried out in a variety of workshops: Clot Bramsen et Georges, Paris (in close collaboration with his friend and fellow-countryman Peter Bramsen); Erker-Presse, St Gallen; Galerie van de Loo, Munich; Permild & Rosengreen, Copenhagen; Fratelli Pozzo, Turin; Georges Visat, Paris.

As the above list shows, Jorn’s places of work were far enough apart (not forgetting the studios in Læsø, Colombes and Albisola) to enable him to escape whenever life in one place threatened to become unbearably monotonous.

Picture titles

Jorn’s picture titles, during the eight-year period of this book, were, as always, full of idiosyncrasy and exuberant word-play, as in La flemme des flamands enflammés, Cat.1794. Once in a while a title is apt to be so obscure or bizarre as to call for a special note. Red meadows, green youths, Cat. 1671, is likely to be unintelligible to people outside Denmark. It harks back to the time of the German occupation when members of the resistance movement were executed by firing squad.

Kläuse - Urness bei Appenzell - Norwegen, Cat.1757, contains a mixture of Swiss folklore and Norwegian church architecture. Urnäsch in Appenzell is noted for its strange masquerades or ‘Kläuse’ held once a year on 13 January. Jorn was taken to see one of these performances and was impressed by the weird headdresses and costumes and dances. Urnes, which is situated in the Sogn region of Norway, possesses one of the oldest stave churches.

Sometimes a title is radically changed, either at the request of the owner or for reasons unknown or because the artist has reworked the painting and decided to rename it. Thus Herr Wischi-Waschi becomes Herr Spökenkieker, Cat. 1685, and The feast of St Vicious becomes The minstrels of Meigle, Cat. 1695.

On one occasion Jorn supplied a whole set of English titles, unrelated to the original French titles. This was for the one-man exhibition of 1970 at Lefebre Gallery, New York. The alternative offerings included Haute surveillance/Technological retreat, Cat. 1858, Pas de quartier/Companion circuit, Cat.1860, Sous l’œil des barbares/The thirsty land, Cat. 1861.

The paintings of 1970

The studio photograph taken in Colombes in 1970 (Fig.21) shows Jorn surrounded by some of the canvases that were shortly to go on exhibition at Galerie Jeanne Bucher. This group of paintings constitutes one of the peak achievements of his artistic career. If 1958 was an annus mirabilis so was 1970. In between there were the ‘defensive’ phases, partly designed to combat success. These were followed by long absences from the studio in pursuit of ambitious programmes such as those described at the beginning of this chapter.

The exhibition in Paris was entitled, with a touch of Jorn’s familiar self-irony, The luxury of aestheticism (La luxure de l’esthésie). The format of five of the canvases ‘pulverized received ideas’ (to quote a phrase from the catalogue introduction) by being a good deal larger than usual. Size itself is of course no criterion of quality, but for Jorn a canvas size of 100F (and above) implied an essentially greater investment of risk and commitment than the more ‘human’ size which he normally preferred and which falls within the easy and natural span of the shoulder and arm. In fact, the smallest painting at Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Tilted unreason (Fig. 188), was amongst the most successful.

A great sense of freshness and assurance radiates from the pictures that surround Jorn in the studio photograph. The colours are warm, sensuous and joyful, while the range of composition is, as always, surprising in its variety of invention. The two paintings hanging above each other in the centre are tightly composed, with an overall harmonization of the colour scheme, whereas others, such as the painting that hangs behind the artist’s head (subtitled peinture alchimique), contain a loose and rambling central area, with figures emerging only gradually out of the ‘alchemy’ of the paint. Altogether the display is one of amazing virtuosity.

There are one or two favourable events that must have contributed to the artist’s well-being and new creativity at this time-. The big studio in Colombes had just been built in accordance with his specifications.

The living quarters consisted of a three-room apartment which had been modernized and provided with a long window frontage facing the small garden. The township Colombes, known to outsiders only for its Rugby stadium, provided all the essential amenities: in particular a café-restaurant (Le Cadran: Taverne de la Bavière) whose orchestra was soon made welcome at the studio.

Nanna Enzensberger, who later became Nanna Jorn, entered this scene in the spring of 1970, having met Jorn in New York at the time of his show at Lefebre Gallery. They travelled together to - amongst other places - Las Vegas. Jorn then made a rapid tour of the Far East to visit his daughter, a student of Chinese, and bring her home (Fig.24). Nanna joined Jorn in Colombes soon after he had completed this trip and remained with him to the end. Their son, Ib, was born in 1971.

A task that Jorn viewed with mixed feelings was the preparation of a large retrospective exhibition planned by the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover. The planning involved meetings with the chief organizer, Wieland Schmied, as well as with two or three other persons who had a close knowledge of Jorn’s work and knew where the best examples could be found. Jorn disliked these sessions and in particular the final conference in Hanover early in 1971. He arrived in Hanover on 5 February. After spending the evening with Wieland Schmied he returned to his hotel. During the night he got up, determined to leave straight away, without bothering to look at the brand new building where the exhibition was to be held (Fig.27). Nanna had difficulty in calming him down. He complained bitterly that he was being ‘turned into an art historian’ of his own work.

The Hanover exhibition opened exactly two years later. It provided, for the first time, an opportunity to see Jorn’s œuvre in almost every phase of its development. Apart from ceramics all the media in which he had worked were well represented, including a selection of the latest sculptures in bronze and marble. The arrangement of the objects was bold and imaginative, as in the room where the two large Silent myth paintings from 1952 invited comparison with the later, more refined picture on a similar theme (a creation myth) with the title In the beginning was the image (Fig. 163). The exhibition, which later travelled to Belgium and Scandinavia, failed to arouse the critical appraisal it deserved. Out of line with the mainly polite and rather bland notices, a scurrilous review appeared in die zeit (with a wrongly captioned photograph) which brought an angry response from the artist Horst Antes. Jorn by now was fatally ill but it is doubtful, in any case, whether these polemics would have caused him much concern.

The last illness

Jorn’s main creative concern during the last weeks of his life was to complete a book - in the richly illustrated ‘vandalist’ series - which set out to interpret the imagery surrounding Theodoric the Goth (c.453-526a.d.), who reappeared in medieval poetry and legend as Dietrich von Bern.

Jorn had collected all the material he needed for the book and he was busy putting the manuscript together. Three other writers had made contributions which eventually filled the first volume. Unfortunately Jorn did not live to see the work published. It was printed five years later by his friend Verner Permild who had helped Jorn to plan the layout of the text and the hundreds of illustrations (Fig.30). The editors of the posthumous work were Troels Andersen, Poul Pedersen and Jørn Street Jensen.

An account of Jorn’s last illness was written and privately circulated by Dr Knud Buhl, Chief Physician at the Aarhus Kommunehospital. An excerpt is reprinted here with the permission of the author:

When Jorn was admitted to the department for pulmonary diseases of Århus Kommunehospital on the 16th of January 1973 he may well have suspected the vicious nature of his disease. Patiently he awaited the result of the examinations and as the suspicion proved to be true his self control and strength were remarkable.

Jorn knew that the treatment was to be long and exhausting and that the chances of a good result were doubtful. All the same he was determined that the treatment must be carried through - and as long as it was going on he showed that he maintained the hope of his recovery.

As soon as the treatment was finished Jorn wanted to be discharged and although he was very tired he felt that now he had to carry on - travelling first to Copenhagen in order to discuss the printing of a book and then to Italy, to Albissola where he hoped to regain his health and strength.

His stay in Albissola lasted only a short while. Jorn’s condition grew worse, and after no more than two weeks he was brought back to Denmark in an ambulance plane and was again admitted to Århus Kommunehospital. Here Asger Jorn died in the evening on the first of May 1973.

Jorn was a very unusual patient. He was indomitable. His disease and the intensive treatment which had to be attempted conveyed periods of fever followed by exhaustion which caused anxiety. But as the fever went off he recovered with a surprising swiftness. Over and over it happened that,-a few hours after you had seen him lying drowsy and faint, you could find him sitting at his table absorbed in his work on the book he had almost completed.

Asger Jorn was modest in his demands to the staff of the ward; always kind and grateful - and generous. He was industrious and worked as long as he was able to. Even in the last phase of his life when he was very weak and drowsing for long periods of time there were moments in which he recollected his spiritual resources and radiated a personality and a power of will which worked with tremendous effect on his surroundings. As long as he was conscious he would receive you with a kind smile and a small greeting gesture of the hand.

His smile one can not forget.

The cremation took place in Silkeborg. The ashes were flown to the island of Gotland in Sweden. The urn was buried there, close to the church of Grötlingbo where Jorn had studied the sequences of stone reliefs depicting the legend of Theodoric (Fig.31).

Commemoration day

A gathering of Jorn’s friends took place on midsummer day 1973. The programme had been arranged by Nanna Jorn and was carried out with the help of the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum. Formal speeches were followed by a reception and a concert at the museum. In the afternoon the guests were taken on the river in a hired paddle steamer (Fig.35). During the return journey the traditional bonfires, to celebrate the summer solstice, were being lit in gardens along the river bank. Later that evening the guests attended a dinner at the Hotel Dania, which had often been a meeting place for Jorn and his friends.

Chapter 2: Acrylics

by Frank Whitford

The author of the following two chapters is an art historian who has made a special study of Expressionism. He visited Silkeborg and other major collections of Jorn’s work in Europe and America in order to examine the acrylics and collages at first hand.

Acrylics are a modern variety of paint based on plastics. More technically, they consist of polymer resins of the kind that produce Perspex. Employed by artists only since the 1950s, acrylics are extraordinarily versatile. Together with a variety of media, chief among which is water, they can be used like oils, gouache or watercolour and can be made to look like them, too. There is, indeed, little about the look of acrylics that is unique to them, that proclaims them as acrylics in the way that the substance of an oil painting or the transparency of a watercolour immediately reveals the material in which they were produced.

The hues of acrylics can be overbright, harsh and even strident in the raw state, but the artist can combat this if he wishes. Acrylics are ideal, as indeed is tempera, for the creation of detailed drawing and other graphic effects, but neither this nor the strident colours of plastic paint can properly be described as characteristics peculiar to the medium. The only unique characteristic of acrylics is, paradoxically, that they can so readily imitate the appearance of other media and can combine effects usually associated with, say, oils with those otherwise peculiar to gouache or watercolour. In acrylics it is possible to combine thin washes of great luminosity with rich, creamy, textured and opaque areas of impastoed paint.

The versatility of acrylics is attractive. So, too, is the fact that they dry very quickly. They can be applied to paper, board, primed or unprimed canvas with equal ease and they can combine happily with any other medium. Many artists now execute their underpainting in acrylics, completing their work with slower-drying oils. Many artists also claim that the colour-range of acrylics is larger than that of oils. This is erroneous. What is certainly true is that some colours are unique not only to acrylics but to certain acrylics-manufacturers, so that the practised eye can tell whether a painting has been made with, for example, American ‘Liquitex’ or British ‘Winsor and Newton’ materials.

Determined to try his hand at every artistic medium known to man, Jorn obviously had to use acrylics, too. He almost always used them on paper and although many of his acrylics look very much like gouaches, he mostly used them as though they were oils, applying the paint directly from the tube with brushes, knives and fingers. He never employed the very large formats for acrylics which he sometimes chose for his oil paintings, however. In spite of those acrylics which look like

gouaches and a very small number which could easily be confused with watercolours, Jorn’s work in plastic paint naturally belongs with the oils and most of it cannot easily be distinguished from them.

It is this similarity between Jorn’s oils and acrylics which explains the need for a separate chapter on the works in the latter medium, not merely because the techniques and imagery employed in the acrylics make them of a piece with the oils, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because paintings in both media can so easily be confused. Indeed, short of chemical analysis there is no infallible method of telling whether some works are in one kind of paint or another. Jorn almost always used acrylics on paper and this is one indication of the medium. Many of his acrylics combine impastoed areas with diluted, transparent passages of paint and this is another clue as to the medium used. But neither of these facts provides entirely reliable evidence.

Acrylics masquerading as oils appear on the market from time to time. For some reason an oil painting will fetch a higher price than an acrylic and some of Jorn’s acrylics have been mounted on canvas to add to the impression that they were executed in the more expensive

medium. This began to be done during the artist’s lifetime and in an attempt to discourage the mounting of his acrylics on canvas, the artist applied his signature to the verso of the paper of some of his later acrylics. But he did not invariably do this and there is no doubt that many acrylics will continue, both wittingly and unwittingly, to be catalogued falsely as oils or even as gouaches.

With all this in mind there are excellent reasons why the acrylics should have been included in the œuvre catalogue, but this has not been done. The identification of medium can only be reliable when a work has been examined in the original and even then mistakes can be made. It has not been possible to see every putative Jorn acrylic because most of them are distributed widely throughout Europe and the United States. To avoid the risk of error and the subsequent confusion it was therefore decided to devote an essay to known acrylics but to leave them out of the catalogue. No catalogue entry at all is better than an erroneous one and the lack of a catalogue is preferable to one which is obviously incomplete.

There are other reasons for the inclusion of an essay on the acrylics.

Since Jorn produced so many of them during a very brief period in 1966 and since almost all of these were photographed or otherwise recorded, they enable us to look in detail and depth at the way he worked at that time and to examine closely his technique and imagery. As we shall see, Jorn later modified some of these acrylics and they were photographed again in their later state. Such photographs provide fascinating evidence of Jorn’s ideas of ‘completed’ works and of his attitude to imagery and composition.

Since speed of execution was so often of paramount importance to Jorn and since he so often derived his major effects from the interplay between various thicknesses and textures of paint, acrylics must have suited him perfectly. Since they dry so quickly, he did not need to pause while painting to avoid muddy colours and since they are so versatile, he could use them as easily for heavy impasto as he could for delicate glazes and ethereal washes. Since he applied acrylics to paper, there was also something less formal and less inhibiting about them. Mistakes could be risked more boldly, accidents invited more rashly and almost completed works abandoned more easily. Paper is less expensive than canvas.

In view of this it is perhaps surprising that Jorn chose to use acrylics infrequently and even then turned to oils for other works at the same time. Perhaps he was unable to overlook the classical connotations of oils, to reconcile himself to the modern and synthetic implications of the newer medium. Whatever the reason, Jorn produced far fewer paintings in acrylic after 1966 (when he began to use the medium on any scale) than he did oils during the same period.

Jorn painted all (or nearly all) his acrylics during the last seven years of his life. Around five dozen of these date from 1966. The first large

group was produced while staying in London during the summer. He had rented a studio in Belsize Park from the English surrealist painter Conroy Maddox and was producing work for a one-man exhibition at the Arthur Tooth gallery in October and at the Lefebre gallery, New York, in the February and March of the following year. None of the paintings shown at Tooth’s was an acrylic, but the Lefebre show consisted entirely of them. This proved to be the only occasion when the acrylics were exhibited in any numbers and all the works sent to Lefebre were photographed.

Most of these acrylics were on the same standard sizes of paper and all of them were executed in paint manufactured by George Rowney and Sons. Rowneys are one of the two largest British firms of artists’ colourmen and their products are readily available. In 1966 acrylics were still regarded as something new in Britain and Rowneys had been selling them only since 1962. This is worth mentioning since, although some American painters had been using synthetic paints for a decade or more, they were relatively untested in Europe and most painters here were unconvinced by the claims being made for them. Nevertheless many of them did try their hand at polymer-based paints, partly because they were new, partly because they were being advertised widely. Although no doubt attracted to acrylics because they offered a range of exceedingly intense hues, Jorn must have taken them up as a kind of experiment and must have thought the experiment successful. Otherwise he would not have agreed to show his acrylics in such numbers.

In his brief introduction to the catalogue of the Lefebre exhibition, Lawrence Alloway thought it necessary to say something about the medium itself. It gave Jorn ‘a wide range of color of high intensity’ but was not used by the artist to create effects different from those he had already achieved in oils, watercolours and gouaches. The acrylics ‘are not a modification for graphic purposes, of his full style. (For example, the watercolours that followed the luxury paintings of 1960 are responsive to the change in medium, but the acrylics, though on paper, are close to Jorn’s recent paintings.)’ Implying that one of the traits peculiar to acrylics is their potential for graphic effects, Alloway nicely describes one of the major elements in the 1966 works. It is ‘the use of black. It began, maybe, as a drawn line but its function continually turns into not that of a contour but that of a still area in the flux of stains, dabs, and lines.’

In spite of the fact that many of the black lines in the 1966 acrylics function as descriptive elements and often create still points in the midst of constant movement, the dominant impression made by these works is one of boundless energy. They are free and lively arrangements of sweeping coils, dabs, splatters and other marks which look as though they have passed through the brush like some powerful electrical charge. But the various marks are rarely allowed to function simply as illegible signs. They are resolved into suggestions of ‘portraits’, of strange creatures, or even of landscapes. These ‘portraits’ range from the sinister anonymity of Etymologic fury (Fig.39), through the horrific Ricanement intérieur (Fig.40) and the Fascinating gold-digger *(Fig.42) to *The yellow consumer (Fig.43), one of the friendliest and most accomplished images in the series. The technique and, as a consequence, the result is different in each case.

In Etymologic fury the hammer-headed figure was clearly created first from a variety of more-or-less relaxed marks which twist and turn back upon themselves like a piece of Oriental calligraphy. Other thicker marks of lighter tone were then added simultaneously to provide a background and to emphasise the contour of the figure. Black, calligraphic marks are also the basis of Ricanement intérieur, although the use of heavier paint has been restricted to a group of blobs around the face and neck while one of the most important effects derives from the splatters which suggest an explosion. These splatters, the single round eye and the protruding teeth give the impression of a person who has just experienced some terrible accident which has reduced his head to a twitching mess of torn flesh.

Fascinating gold-digger is happy and even funny. Reminiscent of the 1960 ‘luxury paintings’, it is based on a series of controlled splatters and the caricatured, idiotic face appears against them like a vision of the Cheshire cat against a starry sky. The yellow consumer, another pleasant image and, colouristically, one of the most satisfactory works of the 1966 series, could almost be mistaken for a watercolour because of the transparency of the marks and the way in which Jorn has allowed the edges of some of the areas to bleed.

At first sight The yellow consumer seems to be the freest of the group now under discussion. Jorn has done nothing to modify and therefore to clarify his first spontaneous brushstrokes in order to make the figure more legible. But on closer inspection pencil lines can be made out. These indicate the rough shape of the figure and the position of its mouth and shoulder. In other words (and we shall return to this point later), Jorn did not begin to work with no aim in mind, resolving an image from a mass of improvised lines. He began to paint having first decided, however vaguely, what the subject of the work was to be.

Fanciful convention (Fig.40) is perhaps the most memorable of this series of ‘portraits’. Stern, heroic and awesome, the subject looks like some Roman emperor, an impression reinforced by the snaking line across his brow which suggests the laurels of a conqueror. The marks employed here are, once again, different in kind and expression from those used in any of the other works we have examined here. They are rougher, more nervous and less relaxed. It is as though Jorn’s attitude to the emerging figure forced him to manipulate his brush in keeping with it.

Jorn also produced some non-figural acrylics in 1966 of which Composition (Fig.45) must serve here as the only example. Although the dramatic colours are impressive and although allusions to landscape may be assumed, these free exercises in gesture are, as so often in Jorn’s painting, less satisfactory than works in which some reference to external reality is made.

It is sometimes suggested that Jorn habitually began to paint without any clear idea of what he wanted to do, that he forged ahead with his free mark-making until accident suggested an image which appealed to him and which he then clarified on the paper or canvas. His working methods might seem to support this view. He almost invariably worked at high speed, oblivious to his surroundings and to the mess he was making of his studio. Conroy Maddox remembers Jorn working in the studio in London rented from him and recalls a picture which the artist produced in ten minutes flat and subsequently presented to his landlord. Maddox also observed Jorn during explosive bouts of production during which several elaborate paintings were completed within a few hours. Maddox formed the impression that Jorn began by groping in the dark as it were and tried to define Jorn’s attitude to creativity by quoting the answer a child gave to the question ‘what are you painting?’ ‘I don’t know,’ replied the child, ‘I haven’t finished yet.’

Attractive though this theory of Jorn’s approach to creativity sounds and tempting though it may be to see Jorn employing the kind of automatic techniques introduced by the surrealists and adopted by the abstract expressionists, he clearly worked in a much more disciplined fashion. We have already noticed the preliminary pencil drawing in The yellow consumer which shows not only that Jorn wanted to paint a figure before he started but also that he had a firm idea of the kind of figure he wished to paint. Pairs of acrylics made in 1966 suggest the same clarity of intention without the evidence of pencil drawing.

Jorn worked from the beginning in a way which was likely to result in a particular kind of image. How else can we explain the striking similarity of both image and composition between paintings like Superiorità disordinata and La finta unità dei contrari (Figs.47 and 48)? In both, what looks like a standing figure at the right relates in almost the same way to the shapes around it and both figures are suggested by brushstrokes of similar weight, tone and direction.

Even more striking is the similarity between The amateur in subtle suffering and Very well indeed (Figs.49 and 50) which only becomes completely clear when the latter is turned on its side. This reveals not only a similar disposition of tones and marks, but also suggests that Jorn’s hand movements were frequently virtually identical while painting parts of both pictures. Notice, for example, the wheel and spoke shapes at the left and the curving, heavy lines at the right. Clearly, Jorn had a fairly clear idea of the result before he began work on one or both of these pictures.

Such acrylics provide clear insights into Jorn’s intentions and methods. Other acrylics are equally revealing in other ways. Look at what was first exhibited at the Lefebre show as Phonologic image *(Fig.51) and the painting known as *La vittoria della felicitalogia *(Fig.52). In spite of the different titles they are, of course, essentially the same work, the differences in the latter caused by subtle modifications and additions. The same thing happened to *Botanic syllable *(Fig.53) some time after it was removed from the walls of the Lefebre gallery. *Dissenso fermentato (Fig.54) is the former with obvious modifications. Two other examples of Jorn adding to acrylics some time after they had been finished are also known: The realism of ironical imagination (Fig.56) became Sgom con nervi belloruti (Fig.59) while Solid shadow was reborn in a slightly changed form without a title (Fig.58).

That Jorn occasionally modified pieces that he considered good and finished enough to exhibit suggests that he rarely considered anything definitively complete and, more important, that he thought of some things as being significant enough to merit further clarification. Such a conclusion is not what we might have expected from Jorn who is usually credited with a cavalier attitude to his work and is thought to have preferred to start again from scratch rather than return to something on which work had ceased some time before and which had grown stale.

These examples show that clarification of the image was the purpose of the later modifications and additions. In every case passages have been painted over, marks added, tonal differences emphasized in order to enrich or dramatize some aspect of the original. This is most clear when Solid shadow is compared with its untitled version. The bird-head gains an eye, its magnificent beard becomes more obvious and a ghostly face appears nestling in its body. With the addition of thick paint the figure also becomes more substantial.

All the other modifications to 1966 paintings were made during the same year, but Jorn waited until 1969 before returning to Solid shadow. There are certainly other examples of such a process, but since only photographs of every state would reveal them, no others are known, at least among Jorn’s acrylic works.

Since Jorn concentrated on acrylics only from 1966, and since his use of the medium declined gradually after that, it is difficult to talk about a development either of style or imagery. What one can do, however, is illustrate the slight changes that occur from year to year and notice the variety of techniques employed.

In 1967 Jorn used acrylics increasingly like oils. Effects of transparency now give way to heavy impasto and rich, creamy colours. This is true even of Untitled (Fig.60) which, with its splattered background, recalls the Fascinating gold-digger of the previous year. The bird-like figure in profile which observes us with a calculating eye is familiar from both oils and sculptures and seems like a creature from one of the artist’s private myths.

But animals and other non-human beings are characters from the artist’s repertoire less important than strange, often tortured physiognomies of people (Figs.62 and 63). Like portraits of mutants or the survivors of a nuclear holocaust, they stare at us, dumb and uncomprehending, their faces lacerated, their features rearranged.

If Jorn used acrylics more like oils in 1967 and 1968 the similarities between the two media in works of 1969 are more obvious still. In many paintings generous areas of sonorous colour provide the background for dancing figures who appear to move in space or to combine, as in Seldom he smiles (Fig.61), to create a face.

Jorn is at pains to exploit the quality of the paint itself in these pictures. In Lecherous imagination (Fig.65) and *Hysterical enjoyment *(Fig.66) areas of heavy paint are superimposed on delicately washed grounds. These are rubbed, splattered or applied so as to emphasize the grain of the ground (they are among the few acrylics painted on canvas) while the thicker paint is applied in a way which emphasizes the kind of brush used and the way it was used.

The colours of these works are impressive. In Fatal man (Fig.67) a bewildering number of hues applied straight from the tube is resolved against the dull brown which serves as a background for the upper part of the composition while other subtler mixtures contrast with the various yellows at the bottom. Even more beautiful with its mauves, blues and violets is Seldom he smiles.

Such juxtapositions of colour, combined as they are with precariously balanced compositional devices help to create an optimistic, light-hearted atmosphere quite unlike that evoked by the horrific ‘portraits’ of 1967 and 1968. But in other acrylics of 1969 the horror breaks through again, as in an untitled work (Fig.67) which shows the violated features of an apparently female figure, her eye and teeth frozen into a deathly smile. Defeat of the invincible (Fig.70) might so easily have become the kind of ghost from a comedy cartoon film. But its anguished expression and the powerful effect of the heavy lines swirling around it make it deeply affecting, recalling as it does the central figure in Munch’s Cry and the air around it experiencing the same unbearable pain.

1970 was a good year for Jorn. He had met Nanna and he seemed to be at an especially creative moment in his life, producing not only a large number of outstanding paintings, but also important collages and graphics, especially woodcuts. But he was less interested in acrylics than before and made but few things in this medium. Since almost none of these is resolved into any kind of coherent image they do not reproduce well. Indeed, 1969 was the last year during which Jorn used acrylics extensively. After 1971 he concentrated to such an extent on sculpture that there was little time and energy left for other media.

A small number of acrylics may be taken as representative of the work during the final period. L’uno sopra l’altro, 1971 (Fig.71) and Impostazione incartellata, 1972 (Fig.72) show that Jorn returned to a technique that was much closer to watercolour or gouache than to oil. Both use large areas of highly diluted paint to create blurred or misty effects and both visibly exploit the given whiteness of the paper.

The former is interesting in view of Jorn’s obsession with sculpture at this time because it suggests a complex, three-dimensional form conceived in tiers and, like much of his sculpture, suggests faces and parts of other figures within the main structure.

The most dramatic acrylics of the last years make no figurative allusions however and show Jorn coming to grips with exciting though difficult materials. During 1971 and 1972 he painted a number of acrylics on a high-gloss ground. This ground was silver acetate. Some of these paintings, together with a number of gouaches were exhibited in Paris at the Jeanne Bucher gallery in May 1972 where they were erroneously described not as acrylics but gouaches.

Foil is an almost impossible substance to paint on, even with acrylics which will take to almost anything. The decorative appearance of polished materials and the way in which they catch and reflect light so capriciously also invite disaster. But Jorn succeeded in coping with these enormous difficulties and managed to use his foil grounds as if they were just another colour but without killing their inherent properties.

Because of the quality of foil and of the numerous reflections it is difficult to photograph and impossible to reproduce accurately paintings made on it. At least colour reproduction can hint at their richness and at the unusual textures Jorn was able to achieve by painting on this material. One of the best of them is Untitled (Fig.69) in which marks seem to be as wet as they were when first applied and the colours perfectly complement the metallic sheen of the foil ground.

It must be admitted that Jorn’s acrylics do not constitute a major part of his œuvre. He did not bring the kind of original approach to them that he brought to his collages and décollages and, in spite of some individual works of great beauty, there is nothing in the acrylics to compare with the Didaska series of watercolours. There are, moreover, no acrylics as rich and complex in their imagery and painterly effects as some of the oils produced during the same period.

Because the acrylics relate so obviously to work in other media however, and because some of them provide insights into Jorn’s working methods and attitudes to imagery, to study them is to be richly rewarded. Relatively minor works can sometimes be more eloquent than masterpieces.

Chapter 3: Collages and décollages

by Frank Whitford

Jorn made collages intermittently. Only during the years of 1956-7, 1963-5 and 1967-9 did he produce them in any quantity and his collage-making rarely interrupted his painting in oils or acrylics. It might seem, therefore, that he regarded his production of collages as a minor activity, at most tangential to his main work or at least as something which provided brief respite from the more strenuous activity of painting. But appearances, as so often with Jorn’s work, are misleading. In spite of the fact that collage only occupied Jorn’s attention at certain relatively brief moments of his career and in spite of the playful, even casual appearances of many of the collages themselves, their high quality and the intimate links in both form and method between them and Jorn’s work in other media suggest that the artist took them very seriously indeed.

Many of these collages are strikingly beautiful; but it is not their beauty alone that makes it necessary to consider them on their own. They are more than a mere footnote to Jorn’s work in more familiar media. The way these collages were made, the kind of imagery that appears in them, and the connections between the collages and the paintings and prints shed light on the nature of Jorn’s achievement generally.

First, something must be said about Jorn’s use of collage before 1956 when he began to employ the medium in a distinctly personal way. The earliest extant collages are in the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum and since they were intended to be used as illustrations for a book published in 1939 it is fair to assume that they were made in 1938 (Fig.73). The book Kommodety ven (The stolen chest of drawers) was a poetic novel by Jorn’s friend Jens August Schade who decided, in the event, to illustrate it with his own drawings. Jorn had blocks and proofs made, intended for a post-war French edition of the book which, however, never materialized.

These collages consist of scraps of wood and steel engravings arranged either to create bizarre but coherent images or groups of disjointed details. Whether coherent or disjointed, the collages are held together by geometric drawings something like constructivist ‘cages’ imposed upon them. In 1938 Jorn (in Denmark between two periods in Paris) was still searching for an individual voice and was examining the various languages of contemporary modernism and especially surrealism for the idiom in which that voice might speak. Paintings and drawings executed between 1936 and 1940 reflect various influences: cubism, the mechanical ‘realism’ of Léger, Kandinsky and Klee, but most obviously the surrealism of Miró, Picasso and Tanguy. The Schade collages are also surrealist in technique and subject, and the inspiration was obviously provided by Max Ernst whose books of collages brilliantly made from wood and steel engravings - La femme 100 têtes, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel and Une semaine de bonté, ou les sept éléments capitaux — had been published in 1929, 1930 and 1934, respectively.

Jorn’s collages are very different from Ernst’s, however. In combining disparate elements - for example, a man with a bird’s head in a railway carriage passing the sphinx of Gizeh which is being attacked by rats - Ernst achieved a convincing, autonomous whole. In short, the joins cannot be seen. Jorn on the other hand is content to leave many of the parts unconnected and unifies them only with the pen-drawn lines.

The results are consequently informal and although the images are mysterious they do not evoke dreams as the Ernst collages do; nor are they as profoundly disturbing. They are more playful and appeal to the intellect rather than to the subconscious mind.

Although a few collages are known from the period 1939-55, Jorn began seriously to employ the technique only in 1956. In 1957, whilst living in Albisola, he produced a large group for an exhibition at the recently opened Van de Loo gallery in Munich. All of these collages are made largely of newsprint, brown paper and the dark violet wrapping from the classic spaghetti packet. All of them include elements drawn in black ink with both pen and brush and some of them also employ coloured gouache and a small number of coloured papers. They conjure up a grotesque face, a curious animal, bird or insect.

The look of these collages makes it clear that they were produced in an informal, improvised manner, that the final images emerged during the making and were not determined by Jorn’s imagination before he began to work. To begin with, the papers are torn, not cut and this suggests that Jorn playfully ripped his material whilst waiting for his fantasy to be stimulated by the chance emergence of a meaningful shape. Once the beginnings of an image had been established he would clarify it by the addition of smaller elements and then complete the work by quickly drawing in a few essential details such as a crude outline, eyes, mouth or hair.

A few examples will help show the ways in which Jorn employed and varied this process. In Bashful information (Fig.75) two pieces of newsprint are transformed into a figure by the addition of coloured paper strips to thicken the neck and provide legs while the face and body are described by ink and gouache and a pen and crayon outline. The whole is framed by a variety of papers which extend to the frame. The torso of Papernose (Fig.76) was conceived as a negative shape, casually torn from a sheet covered with informal marks in gouache, while the crucial details of the face were provided by torn paper and ink splatters, dribbles and squiggles. Disbelief (Fig.74) seems more controlled, less casual than the previous examples. The nose is suggested by a tear and wrinkles in the paper, while the eyes, mouth and details of the torso are brilliantly suggested by pen and brush marks.

An untitled collage of 1956 (Fig.78) demonstrates how a coherent figurative image can emerge from even a small number of roughly torn shapes. Here, a winged insect, apparently mutilated, has alighted on the ground. The delicate balance and graceful movement of the insect contrasts uncomfortably with the ink splatters on and emerging from the body, suggesting blood.

The colour of many of these collages is striking. One of the most impressive is Beauty (Fig. 79) in which a female face has been created out of dark violet and turquoise papers with a scarlet triangle for the lips.

In spite of its title, Beauty, like the damaged insect, is a disturbing image, and most of the collages of this period are unsettling, possibly because they achieve a precarious balance between the witty, the sad and the horrific. Violet and green bird (Fig.81) is at once pathetic and threatening: both a wounded bird and a winged predator descending, claws extended, with great force upon its prey.

The multiplicity of meaning embedded in these images, the way in which they provoke the spectator’s imagination into providing clues to their significance, are surrealist traits; and this fact (together with the vivid titles) demonstrates the continuing importance of surrealist ideas for Jorn at this time (although it must be stressed that there was much about surrealism, especially its group philosophy and doctrinaire theories, which Jorn had never been able to accept). The informal, improvisatory method results in enigmatic creatures, ‘personnages’ (to borrow a term from surrealism) which exist only in the deeper layers of the mind. They rise to the surface and engage the intellect with the aid of ambiguous titles which wittily play with both the substance of the collages and the look of the imagery. Jorn’s titles are therefore strikingly similar to Klee’s. Thus the original German title Verschämte Information (Bashful information), Fig.75, refers to the news item (information) and to the bashful expression and gesture of the newspaper-man. The ‘information’ may also allude to the TV advertisement, upside down, on the man’s body. Thus the title becomes an important part of the work, sparking off the spectator’s intellect and imagination and initiating a train of thought which progressively deepens the work’s meaning. The fact that Jorn, like Klee, gave his works titles after he had completed them emphasizes the improvisatory method he always employed. Jorn’s earliest collages were inspired by Ernst and probably specifically by Ernst’s books. By the time Jorn produced collages for books again the influence of Ernst had entirely disappeared, though surrealism and perhaps even dada seem to have provided him with a powerful impulse. Jorn’s first collage book project after the Schade collaboration was in 1957 when he published Fin de Copenhague with Guy Debord. In 1959 he again worked with Debord to produce Mémoires: structures portantes d’Asger Jorn which declared ‘cet ouvrage est entièrement composé d’éléments préfabriqués’. The whole of each of these volumes should be regarded as elaborate collages, from the binding (the first is bound in a variety of flongs - the hard letterpress mould of papier maché - for a Danish newspaper, while the second is bound in sandpaper) to the contents which consist of collaged texts, dribbled ink blotches and splatters, photographs, woodcuts and line-blocks of a wide variety of objects and illustrative material (Figs.83 and 84).

The collaged texts are reminiscent of both dada and surrealist poetry, the object being either wilful obscurity or the kind of unexpected and illogical imagery that can only be produced by the accidental juxtaposition of phrases and words removed from their original context. The jokes which litter the pages also look back to dada and surrealism. In the earlier volume, for example, a splash and dribble is transformed into a cockeyed map showing Silkeborg, Copenhagen and Aarhus in impossible places which has the title Un splendide paysage que Bernard Buffet a souvent peint (Fig.85).

But the enduring impression is of neither dada nor surrealism but of early pop art, itself a dada progeny. The most striking images in both books are those derived from advertisements and comic strips, mined from the rich seam of popular culture and mass consumerism (Fig.86).

These two books are fascinating and demonstrate the extent to which Jorn continued to operate within parameters established by surrealism while extending the range of his found imagery to touch upon areas which were to assume major significance at the hands of the British and American pop artists during the next decade.

Jorn continued to explore the potential of improvisatory collage methods but not of the kind of imagery he introduced in the Debord collaborations, for he never worked on books like these again. Instead, he developed another kind of collage which he first exhibited in 1964 and which occasionally engaged his attention until 1969.

The collages of this period are essentially different from the earlier works. Where the latter are additive the former are subtractive. Instead of assembling elements to create a whole, Jorn now began with a complex whole from which he removed pieces to arrive at a final result. The technique of the earlier collages is thus allied to painting, while the later ones are more like sculpture. Accident and improvisation continue to play vital roles in the creative process.

All of these collages began life as posters. The French habit of sticking up new posters without first removing the old ones results in dense layers of paper which, when they start to peel, reveal interesting shapes and colours at various depths. Jorn, fascinated by both these accidental effects and the attractive substantiality of the thick layers of paper, would remove the posters from billboards and advertising pillars or collect discarded piles of posters from the Paris pavements. By tearing off parts of successive layers and stopping only when an exciting juxtaposition of colour and texture appeared, Jorn gradually arrived at a conclusion which either made sense in itself or achieved it by the addition of a few drawn or brushed-on marks. Since he was subtracting and not adding, peeling and not sticking, the term ‘décollage’ is preferable to ‘collage’ which more properly describes the earlier works that were made in a more conventional way.

Peter Bramsen, the Danish lithographer with whom Jorn worked in Paris at this time, recalled Jorn’s working methods in a conversation with the author in March 1977.

Often up to fifteen posters are stuck on top of each other on French billboards, and because they are so heavy it is easy to rip them off. In 1967 and 1968 Jorn worked extensively on such poster décollages in our house where he was living at the time. Sometimes I would collect the raw material for him, delivering posters to him in car loads at a time. Sometimes he would arrive with heaps under his arm or, when I was driving him around Paris he would suddenly tell me to stop because he had seen something interesting on a billboard that he thought would make a good décollage.

He had a lot of fun making these things, sitting in the studio in scraps of torn paper so deep that they reached to his knees. He laughed a lot when he was tearing away. Some décollages took a long time, some required frequent reworking, but usually he could make ten or fifteen in a day.

There is no doubt that décollage is a more hit-or-miss affair than collage. Without knowledge of what the tearing would reveal, with nothing to guide him as to where to begin, continue or finish a tear, Jorn was subject to the vagaries of chance to an extraordinary degree, but he was also likely to be surprised by an unexpected and beautiful juxtaposition of colour or texture. Because of the role of chance many of these works were abandoned during or after their making and even some of those thought suitable by Jorn for presentation seem incoherent and unresolved. Bramsen remembers ‘exhibitions’ in his garden where Jorn would set out a large number of décollages and would ask Bramsen to help him choose which were good enough to preserve. Significantly, the majority was always thrown away.

When the décollages succeed, they dazzle with their colour and impress with their presence, a quality inherent in the nature of the material used. The paper is thick. When torn it has a three- dimensionality like that of impastoed paint and the ragged edges work like brushstrokes. Jorn exploits the substantiality of the paper to the full and also cleverly exploits the various kinds of printing, so that flat, rich colours contrast with a glossy surface, with bold fragments of script or the dense screen dots used in the colour reproduction technique. Sometimes fragments of larger images emerge which acquire new meaning from the new context.

Most of these décollages are abstract, consist of bold arrangements of colour, subtle, apparently weathered textures and the lines created by the torn edges of the papers. The best of them, like the best of Jorn’s work in any medium, do contain a figurative element, however. In Untitled (Fig.88), for example, the paper has been peeled so as to create a face reminiscent of both a savage mask and the head of a robot. Fortinbras suggests the torso of a mutilated figure, while the unusually large number of layers in Untitled (Fig.89) helps create a relatively explicit description of a face that is both human and simian. Fragments of photographs, symbols and letters evoke the eyes, nostrils and mouth, while the torn edges around the face provide an actual three-dimensionality to the bone-structure beneath. The errant flowers *(Fig.90) provides imagery of a different and less disturbing kind while in *Waiting for Snaily (Fig.92) the spiral of the snail’s shell is provided by a brushed-on line as a final flourish. One of the most amusing décollages and certainly one of the most successful of this period is the Black potentate makes a rude gesture across the English Channel *(Fig.94) in which the black king’s expression is both lecherous and amused. Although the figurative image in *Purveyoress (Fig.93) is less legible than that of Black potentate…, the spectral form has great presence and the ‘found’ colours of the posters have a richness and delicacy reminiscent of a Matisse.

The figures in The errant flowers are described by means of a piece of cut and torn paper which Jorn pasted over the top five-sixths of the composition. This is something he did occasionally when he was unable adequately to particularize an image which occurred to him during the tearing process by peeling alone. What he always did, indeed a vital part of the method, was to cut from the large sheet of layered posters the much smaller area which had emerged as significant during the working process. He then stuck this area to a card or board to become the final work. Often, according to Bramsen, he used rejected proofs of lithographs as a support - which explains why several of these décollages have part of a print on the back. This choice of image and format was, of course, crucial and required the greatest exercise of artistic control in a process marked by chance and continuous improvisation.

Several of the décollages just described were shown at the largest exhibition of Jorn’s collages ever organized, in March 1969 at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris. The show was called Au pied du mur *after one of the works in the exhibition and the catalogue consists of reproductions and a long conversation between Jorn, Noël Arnaud and François Dufrêne (Bibl.50). Arnaud and Dufrêne had been among the first artists in Paris to see the potential of layered posters for décollages which they first exhibited in the *Nouvelles réalités salon of 1960. Another exhibitor was the Italian Mimo Rotella, whose first poster collages date from 1954.

There was, therefore, nothing new about the use of posters in this way, but Rotella and Dufrêne used their raw material in an attempt to comment on society and to suggest an interpretation of the nature of society through the symbolism of advertising. They were not concerned, as Jorn was, to suppress the given meaning of the source material and to create images which more often than not manage to disguise the nature of the source. Jorn may have borrowed the method and the material from Rotella and Dufrêne, but he employed the layers of printed papers as though they were paint, without significance beyond their colour, texture and pattern.

There is an obvious connection between all of Jorn’s collages and his work in other media. It is not only a connection of imagery, but also consists in the improvisatory method and the importance of chance. There is another, more subtle connection between the collages and some of the prints, especially the lithographs which Jorn made in Bramsen’s workshop in Paris from 1967 onwards, but especially in 1969. In these prints Jorn employed a technique derived from collage to help him change parts of the print during the various proof stages. He would alter parts of the image on the stone by using a proof from which he had cut both positive and negative shapes. Thus Jorn could modify, develop and consolidate certain effects by using a collage technique even though the results appear to have nothing to do with collage whatever. The series of working proofs for Too early (Bibl.202, No.347) preserved in the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum is especially instructive in this respect and shows how Jorn adapted images and colours by means of this collage-stencil process (Figs.95 and 96). The use of this unusual method stresses an important aspect of Jorn’s work in general: the apparent informality of the final image was achieved by a judicious mixture of the spontaneous and the considered. The gestural freedom was in fact controlled by interruptions for thought and modification.

No collages dated later than 1969 are known and it must therefore be assumed that Jorn produced none during the last years of his life or considered none worthy of preservation.

Chapter 4: Sculpture

by Ursula Lehmann-Brockhaus

In 1972 Jorn executed thirty-one sculptures either in bronze or marble, making use of these classical and time-honoured materials for the first time. In so doing he placed an entirely new and highly significant emphasis on the sculptural side of his art. For decades all his three- dimensional work had been in clay, a material entirely without pretentions; and he had made his sculptures in an apparently casual way against the craft background of small potteries.

He delayed so long before venturing to use bronze and marble partly perhaps because he was in awe of sculpture itself, an art in which he had no training, but possibly also because he felt unable to realize his complex pictorial ideas in three dimensions. He may well have feared that the subtlety of his imagery would be lost in sculpture, that its ambiguity would be destroyed. Jorn needed a great deal of time before he felt able to liberate his imagery from the dense network of coloured planes in which it is enmeshed in his paintings and to translate it, without using colour, into the tangible reality of sculpture.

It was only in the last creative year of his life that Jorn ventured to produce work that can be described as sculpture in the fullest sense of the word. He exploited all the possibilities of the art and succeeded in making objects which can justly be regarded as sculpture of a high order. Jorn’s understanding of the inherent quality of materials and his unique gift speedily to grasp the potential of any technique enabled him to comprehend the secrets of metal casting in the shortest possible time and to understand the methods for achieving subtle patinas. He also mastered and learned to improvise with the technique of carving marble so quickly that he was able to produce thirty-one sculptures in bronze and marble (some of them masterpieces) in the space of less than a year. It is this body of work that makes it possible to refer to ‘Jorn scultore’.

The works in bronze and marble are the culmination of Jorn’s contribution to sculpture. They also shed light and confer a completely different kind of significance upon his earlier three-dimensional pieces which played some role (admittedly always a modest one) in his artistic production. We can speak of a sculptural development similar to the evolution of his painting; and we can construct an œuvre in the sculpture as we can in the painting.

But the sculpture cannot be categorized and described as clearly and as easily as can the paintings and prints. There are two reasons for this. One is the fact that not all of Jorn’s three-dimensional works have as yet been documented. Since his achievement as a sculptor became clear so late (in the works of 1972) not much importance was placed on earlier pieces either by the artist himself or by those close to him at the time. No-one attempted therefore to gain any kind of extensive view of his work in three dimensions by photographing or cataloguing all the available pieces. There seemed little point, especially since all the earlier sculpture had been made in clay, much of it together with bowls, plates and vases, and most of it developed from the potter’s basic, standard shapes.

Here we arrive at the second and principal problem: how do we distinguish between sculpture proper and the ceramics? Since so much of Jorn’s three-dimensional work is in clay we cannot make the obvious and convenient distinction between the materials employed; instead we must base our judgement on formal differences alone. But when we ask ourselves whether a figure developed from, say, a basic jar-form is in fact a sculpture or a ceramic we have to weigh up so many subtle nuances of shape that any classification we arrive at is inevitably subjective and blurred around the edges.

In 1970 Jorn made a large ceramic mural commissioned by the municipality of Randers, Denmark (Fig.111).

The first of these two problems will be solved when more of Jorn’s work is documented. But the second problem will remain unsolved because there is no precise way of defining what, in Jorn’s terms, constitutes sculpture. It is therefore not possible to provide a definitive catalogue of Jorn’s sculpture. For a general picture of the 1972 bronze and marble sculptures (which form the focal point of the œuvre and are too numerous to be reproduced in toto) the reader is referred to Jorn scultore which has already been cited. Those works which are basic to an understanding of Jorn’s sculptural development are reproduced here, however, and photographs of the other pieces can be found in the archive of the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum. The latter possesses prints of all Jorn’s ceramics in the museum collection and many others as well.

The problems described above and faced by anyone wishing to classify Jorn’s sculpture as a whole are partly offset by a positive factor which assists in understanding the work. Important groups are concentrated in only three places: the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum; Jorn’s house and garden in Albisola; and Gianni Schubert’s Galleria Arte Borgogna in Milan. There is nothing fortuitous in this. The present location of the sculptures is intimately connected with the circumstances of their making.

In the summer of 1978 (when this chapter was being written) almost all the 1972 bronze and marble sculptures were in Gianni Schubert’s gallery in Milan. Schubert gave Jorn practical assistance with the making of these pieces. The happy result of this is that the most important sculptures can be viewed, for the time being at least, as a unit. Although each work is individually very complex, charged with a multiplicity of meaning and allusion, it acquires even more significance when seen as part of an ensemble. It is as though nothing and no-one can breathe such convincing life into these subtle and complex images as can the companion pieces: the dialogue that ensues between the forms of one sculpture and another.

A group of important ceramics, most of which date from the 1960s, can be found in Albisola: inside and on the exterior of the house as well as in the garden. The position these works now occupy was chosen by Jorn himself. He made them appear actually to have grown out of the masonry and stones and he thus achieved a strange symbiosis between nature itself and the alien figments of his imagination which invade the rural peace of this Mediterranean garden.

A large number of the ceramics which Jorn produced during 1953 is preserved in the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum. Although most of his ceramics at that time were decorated plates, bowls, vases and ashtrayshe did execute some free-standing figures in clay (Figs. 100, 101) as well as some pieces which, developed from a basic jar-form and then decorated, possess the unmistakable look of a true Jorn and may consequently be seen to verge on sculpture proper (Figs. 105-107). Most of the work of this period consists of decorated ceramics because Jorn was chiefly interested in the traditional craft of the potter at this time and sought to influence it by providing ideas for tasteful functional objects and artistic décor.

Jorn himself has given us a brief but vivid description of his impressions of the potteries of Silkeborg and of the neighbouring Sorring where he worked. This short text is larded with anecdotes and vibrates with the enthusiasm he felt for the potter’s craft at that time. The enthusiasm with which he made ceramics was equally intense. In the space of a few months he not only made close on two hundred pieces but also brought the potters to the verge of exhaustion.

Jorn’s essay clearly shows how the joy he had from the actual making of objects was similar to the emotions caused by the act of artistic conception itself. He was fascinated by the dedicated atmosphere of a craft workshop, which gave a powerful stimulus to his art. He was very impressed by the degree of experience and knowledge that was daily applied in these potteries: a mixture of instinct and training which each craftsman needed constantly to renew when handling the materials - as though starting afresh every time. He also delighted in the subtle, wise and yet at the same time untutored ways of the craftsmen in these surroundings.

Jorn’s description of his activity in Silkeborg highlights certain characteristics which he displayed in all the workshops and studios where he worked. Everywhere he experienced that almost magical fascination which the alchemists sensed in the mystery of matter. And for all those potters, printers, bronze casters and stone carvers with whom Jorn worked his passionate creative personality, his spontaneous, cordial, generous humanity (which he perhaps revealed most clearly in such surroundings) remains unforgettable.

Jorn’s essay is also interesting for the light it sheds on the ‘prehistory’ of his sculpture. It tells us that he made some clay figures in 1933 (probably his very first work in three dimensions) and that he took them for firing to Niels Nielsen’s pottery in Silkeborg. What happened there is once again typical of Jorn whose creative drive was set off whenever he came into contact with his materials and by the activity of working with his hands. He was so enchanted by the atmosphere of Nielsen’s small, backyard pottery and by Nielsen’s personality (which he describes with affection and admiration) that he not only fired his clay figures but immediately tried his hand at pottery. He made drawings for jars which Nielsen threw and which both then decorated, experimenting with new processes. Twenty years later Jorn applied what he had learned from these first efforts in Nielsen’s pottery and we shall discuss this continuity below. What became of these first clay figures is not known. One of them may be the small reclining female figure with the wilfully extended and hollowed body that is now in the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum (Fig.98). It is at least certain that this figure was made during Jorn’s period as a trainee teacher in Silkeborg from 1932-3.

Six figures in clay or plaster make up the next documented group of significant sculptures. Jorn showed them in 1944 in Copenhagen at the annual exhibition of the Høst group to which he belonged. Only two of these works are now known to exist and one of them, that owned by Marinus Andersen in Copenhagen, is reproduced here (Fig.99). The bizarre silhouette and the way holes penetrate the body anticipate (if only in a timid and hesitating fashion) works of the 1950s like Weirdwolf and Rigoletto (Figs.100 and 101).

Einer Madsen’s collection in Silkeborg includes a unique work, a granite sculpture executed around 1941 or 1942 by Jorn, Heerup and Robert Jacobsen in collaboration. Each artist carved a kind of signet in the stone and it looks at us with its tripartite face without providing any clue as to which part was carved by whom. More interesting than the division of labour on this curiosity is that Jorn collaborated with precisely these two Danish contemporaries. For Heerup’s theory of sculpture corresponds to Jorn’s own ideas about plastic representation and it indeed determined his later approach to sculpture. Heerup’s theory has its roots in Scandinavian history and in traditions associated with rune-stones and rubble-stones. The theory is concerned with the intuitive recognition of form in the material itself, with improvisation which exploits the inherent qualities of the material and with the dialogue between the eye and the effects suggested by the natural characteristics of the material. For Jorn, the essence of making images in sculpture (as in painting) lay in improvisation, in the dialogue between the artist and his materials, in formal play and in experimentation with the tools, even though sculpture is a more difficult and intractable medium than painting.

After these first sporadic works (which are nevertheless prophetic of later developments) Jorn began to produce sculpture more frequently and at the same time as he made ceramics. Both gained increasingly in significance. Sculpture and ceramics were intimately related throughout his career and this fact justifies a detailed examination of Jorn’s development as a ceramic artist. After his first efforts in 1933, he acquired a solid grounding in ceramic techniques and his work achieved greater artistic importance during the seventeen months he spent in a sanatorium in Silkeborg in 1952-3.

Jorn himself touched on several significant aspects of this development in his Danish article of 1954 to which we have already referred. We learn that on this occasion it was Erik Nyholm who reawakened his enthusiasm for clay. Nyholm’s improvisatory application of colours and glazes suggested to Jorn the possibility of introducing what for him was the important principle of spontaneity into ceramics and of producing work which, in its texture and expressive colouring, could become a suitable vehicle for his pictorial ideas at that period. In addition, Nyholm’s working-method seemed fruitfully to combine modernity on the one hand, and the tradition of Danish art nouveau on the other. Jorn particularly had in mind Thorvald Bindesbøll (1846-1908), Joakim Frederik Skovgaard (1856-1933), Niels Christian Skovgaard (1858-1938) and Niels Hansen Jacobsen (1861-1941), whom he held in particularly high esteem. These four artists deserve credit for having revived ceramics as an art form in Denmark.

Significant here (and this is made repeatedly clear in the artist’s statements) is Jorn’s constant awareness of tradition. He was very conscious of art in its historical context and he knew exactly how his own ideas fitted into the historical framework.

Nyholm had established a small workshop with its own kiln in the village of Funder to the north of Silkeborg and it was there in 1952 that Jorn fired Weirdwolf, as far as we know the first work of this period. It was here, too, that his friend introduced him to the mysteries of the potter’s craft and where both men attempted in various experiments to bend the craft to accommodate their artistic ideas. Nyholm likes to relate how amazed he was when Jorn grew bolder and more ambitious than he was himself and at the way in which Jorn triumphed over the intractable nature of the medium and was able to perform technical tours de force.

At this time Jorn also studied the traditional methods of the craft in detail in potteries, especially Nielsen’s in Silkeborg and Knud Jensen’s in Sorring, the ancient pottery town in central Jutland. He greatly admired the simplicity of the regional style, the simple forms and colour range restricted to greenish and brownish tones which also characterize the work Jorn himself produced in these places. We have already mentioned that most of these pieces were functional objects. This was because Jorn was thinking not only of his own interests as an artist but also of those of the Silkeborg and Sorring potteries, the decline of which he demonstrated with impressive statistics and attempted to halt by providing new energy and ideas. What he had in mind was the impetus which Picasso had given the ceramic industry in Vallauris. Picasso’s example may have provided a direct artistic stimulus. In the works made in Vallauris from 1947 onwards Picasso demonstrated how variously and how freely the traditional repertoire of forms can be employed in ceramics. At the same time he showed in impressive fashion how the painter can discover fresh and stimulating possibilities in this medium, where line and colour contribute to the expression of three-dimensional form.

After studio pottery acquired a new lease of life and achieved a first climax in the work of Gauguin during the second half of the nineteenth century no artist has exploited the formal potential of ceramics in so various and original a fashion as Picasso. Although several painters contributed something to the field in France after the turn of the century, they mostly restricted themselves to the decoration of complete objects and did not attempt to influence their form.

Picasso’s attitude was completely different, as too (and we shall see this later) was Jorn’s.

Jorn’s interest in ceramics was not confined to the surface decoration of given shapes and he was not attracted to ceramics only because they offered him different kinds of colour effects he could not achieve in painting. The works we shall now consider make it abundantly clear that what he was rather concerned with from the very beginning were the actual formal possibilities of the three-dimensional clay object combined with colour and draughtsmanship.

From the first Jorn exploited all the rich formal potential of ceramics. The earliest works in clay include the dissimilar pair Vase man *(who has a lid) and *Jug woman (Figs.104,105). In the former Jorn did not tamper with the standard vase shape with which he began but added paint to transform it into a creature from his imagination. In the latter he did manipulate the basic jug form here and there to produce a new image which he then painted to add the ambiguity and variety of implication that are typical of all his work. The two Jug animals *(Figs.106, 107) also belong to this group. In a similarly simple fashion Jorn here modified the basic jug shapes and then added a few evocative brush strokes and spots of colour to suggest the body and head of a frog or birdlike creature. Another dissimilar pair resulted from a different kind of formal transformation. The humorous-looking *Moon girl *(Fig.103) was put together from simple dish and cylinder shapes and this work has obvious connections with an important portrait made in 1972 (Fig.125). *Moon girl's contemporary companion, the Man in the moon (Fig.102) occupies a position half way between the ceramics just described and those which, like Weirdwolf and Rigoletto, were freely made without utilizing any of the potter’s standard shapes.

Striking about the latter is their skeletal construction. The complicated structure consists of a variety of twisting, interlacing, branching and tunnelling shapes. The bizarre skeletal body of the Man in the moon stands in bold and grotesque contrast to his dish-like face which he turns benevolently towards the spectator with gigantic, circular eyes. The entire form of the other two pieces consists of a curious kind of scaffolding. Rigoletto is rough and gnarled, made up of pieces like oddly pruned branches; while *Weirdwolf *is formed from a number of similarly proportioned ribs which cross to form an ornamental interwoven pattern. After producing many subsidiary growths (some of which are like fabulous animals) this skeletal construction culminates in a menacing double-headed form, half man, half beast. This hybrid creature evokes - as its title suggests - the evil and legendary werewolf and we can indeed sense in this image, in which abstract form and imaginative power combine, something of that spellbound fascination exerted by a magical sign.

It would almost certainly seem wrong to look for an aesthetic theory behind these highly artistic and precarious balancing acts between negative and positive shapes, and especially the kind of theory about the dissolution of mass or the penetration of form and space in modern sculpture. What Jorn’s formal method reminds me of is rather some kinds of ancient Scandinavian, and especially Viking art. Weirdwolf *in *particular is like a lattice work pattern realized in three dimensions; and the magical spell cast by such primitive objects is retained both in the form and content of Jorn’s figuration.

When Jorn left Silkeborg in the autumn of 1953 and went to convalesce in Switzerland he was forced to interrupt his work in three dimensions. But the short Danish essay (op. cit.) which Jorn wrote at Chesières in Switzerland during the November of that year shows how the experience of the previous months continued to occupy his thoughts. He could hardly have suspected that the knowledge and the ideas gained in Silkeborg would very soon be of great importance - albeit in an environment so different that it might be described as the opposite pole to Silkeborg: Albisola in Italy.

In April 1954 Jorn moved with his family to this small town on the Ligurian coast. Albisola has been a centre of pottery manufacture for centuries. It might be described as the Italian Vallauris, even though studio ceramics were made here before they were in the French town. To describe Albisola as the Italian Vallauris is more than a mere literary conceit. There are actual links between the two places: clay was traded back and forth and workers from Albisola went over to Provence.

In the Jorn context it is interesting to know that Mazzotti, the leading pottery in Albisola, which we shall get to know better later, had family ties and friendly contacts with Vallauris. An uncle of Tullio Mazzotti (alias Tullio d’Albisola) went to Vallauris before World War I and turned pots in various potteries there. The family connection of the Mazzottis and Vallauris acquired a new meaning and a new dimension when Picasso started to work in Ramié’s pottery in 1947 and when Tullio himself established friendly relations with Ramié. There are literary references to two visits to Vallauris which Tullio d’Albisola made during the new Picasso era. He himself refers to one of the visits in Amore del ‘gran fuoco’ (Bibl.137, p.92). He states that on 2 December 1947 he worked at the potter’s wheel in the presence of Picasso. Another visit took place in the summer of 1948. Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, a friend of Picasso’s and editor of xxe siècle gives a humorous account of this in his book Parigi era viva (Bibl.147, pp.231-3).

Jorn’s choice of Albisola as a new home in 1954 was accidental or, to be more accurate, forced on him by financial considerations. After only a short time in Switzerland he no longer felt able or inclined to carry on working there and so he looked round for somewhere else that might offer a reasonable means of livelihood. Italy seemed the obvious place. Jorn looked the more willingly towards the south because he had been in regular and stimulating contact with Enrico Baj since the end of 1953. He followed the activities of the nucleari movement with interest and even planned a collaboration between it and his own Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste. The idea of moving to Italy in order to pursue these interests appealed to him. When Baj finally suggested Albisola as a possible place for him to live, he gladly agreed, attracted as he also was by the prospect of being once again in a pottery centre.

For his artistic development this was a vital decision. In Albisola he discovered a fertile field for his ceramic work. Unlike Silkeborg, studio pottery and ceramic sculpture had been produced in Albisola for almost thirty years. Craft traditions and an awareness of the artistic avant-garde were both equally alive here.

The move to Albisola proved fortunate not only in its effect on Jorn’s painting, but also because all his future work in ceramics and sculpture was to be carried out in the Italian environment. We must, therefore, give a brief description of the art situation as Jorn found it in Albisola in 1954.

Albisola shares some aspects of its history with all the other pottery centres. After a gloriously productive period which reached its height in the Cinquecento and lasted for centuries, pottery manufacture in Albisola (as indeed elsewhere) began to decline around the middle of the nineteenth century, damaged by industrial competition. Some potteries met the new circumstances by joining the competition: in other words by producing simple, unimaginative utility wares on a production line. Others went in for a craftsmanlike eclecticism by turning out series of traditional and folkish objects.

Towards the end of the 1920s a decisive change occurred in this artistically bleak situation. A sculptor, Arturo Martini, was one of the pioneers. Martini had learned the craft of pottery as a child. In his sculpture he sought to free himself from oversophisticated academic rules while looking for new primitive qualities of both form and material. He found clay modelling appealing, and in 1926 came for the first time to Albisola (from neighbouring Vado where he was then living) to work in the local potteries. Memories of Martini are still fresh in Albisola today and his lessons are still remembered, as in the case of Eliseo Salino, the artistically gifted and experienced potter whom Martini taught the elements of sculpture. It was in Salino’s ‘Fabbrica di San Giorgio’ that all of Jorn’s ceramics were made from the moment it was founded in 1958.

The true originator and guiding spirit of Albisola as a centre of artists’ pottery was, for more than thirty years, Tullio Mazzotti who called himself Tullio d’Albisola. Tullio learnt the craft from his father, Giuseppe, who was himself an Albisola potter. Tullio combined technical knowledge with strong artistic leanings and to these were added the flair and talent of the impresario - all gifts that were to be of great importance for Albisola’s future. He had a sharp eye for the talents of others and knew how to persuade them to come and work in the town.

It was fortunate that Tullio’s activities stimulated interest among artists in Turin, the nearest cultural centre to Albisola. After World War I a circle of artists had assembled in Turin beneath the banner of a ‘second futurism’. Tullio managed to attract them to Albisola and to the Mazzotti pottery. Several of them made ceramics there and F. T. Marinetti, a poet and the group’s leading theoretician, regularly visited Albisola until World War II.

This neo-futurism consisted of a far-reaching though somewhat superficial extension of futurist ideas in which the universalist philosophy of art and life of futurism was applied, rather pedantically, to every conceivable area. In consequence there had to be a ‘futurist ceramic and, quite naturally, there had to be a futurist manifesto of ceramics to go with it. This was the Ceramica e aeroceramica written by Marinetti in collaboration with Tullio d’Albisola in 1938 (Bibi.133). It is, in fact, more of a posthumous panegyric than a programme for action, since it is limping ten years behind the relevant artistic events. By 1938 pottery in Albisola (according to Marinetti the ceramics capital of Italy) had developed beyond Marinetti’s ideas and there was already the germ of something entirely new in what was being done there.

Lucio Fontana had been in Albisola in 1935/6 to fire a series of ceramics in Tullio Mazzotti’s kilns - assisted by Eliseo Salino. Salino was impressed by Fontana’s improvisatory methods and his novel results. These were forms of a strangely mixed appearance: not completely shaped, but nevertheless surprisingly evocative. With hindsight it might be said that they anticipated the informal style. This experience with Fontana undoubtedly prepared Salino well for Jorn’s way of working when he came to help that artist too. After the war Fontana introduced the ideas of spacialism to Albisola, gaining several adherents there.

In 1935, the sculptor Agenore Fabbri also came to live in Albisola where, during the early post-war years, he made a series of polychrome terracotta sculptures. These exhibit a kind of expressive realism new in Italian art and one which Jorn, quite understandably, found very interesting.

This brief historical sketch is sufficient to show the vitality and the widespread love of experimentation that were in the air when Jorn arrived in Albisola in 1954.

Fontana and Fabbri merited more comment than the many other talents who contributed to the vitality of Albisola because both were of importance for Jorn for personal as well as for artistic reasons. The most lively description of the many artistic activities in Albisola can be found in an attractive short book by Tullio d’Albisola, Amore del ‘gran fuoco’ (Bibl. 137) in which he discusses an impressive battery of names, showing a poetic verve and a thorough knowledge of his subject. They are names which made the artistic history of Albisola from the 1920s onwards. Jorn’s presence in Albisola and that of those artists in whom he fired an interest in ceramics forms an important part of that history, a part which gives Albisola an international dimension. In the summer of 1954 Jorn organized a meeting between artists from several countries, in the course of which his friends Matta, Corneille and Appel gave short but memorable guest performances. At the end of the 1950s Jorn also persuaded Wilfredo Lam to come to Albisola. Lam liked the place so much that he decided to live there and he regularly worked in Albisola for a large part of each year.

It is, however, time we left this lengthy diversion into the history of Albisola and returned to the development of Jorn’s work in three dimensions. In Albisola as in Silkeborg he continued to restrict himself to ceramics. Clay remained his only material and the techniques of the potter continued to provide him with the basic forms for every image. Jorn’s involvement in three-dimensional expression (which emerged fully in the bronze and marble sculptures of 1972) continued to be confined - intentionally as I believe - within ceramics, a hybrid medium which affords a wider variety of formal means than do other modelling materials. The possibilities afforded by ceramics extend from the unpretentious, utilitarian form via its many variations to the freely invented, entirely autonomous sculptural image. Clay is the most malleable material. It provides great potential for improvisation and play - Jorn’s guiding artistic principles. Clay, moreover, could give the earthy nature of Jorn’s images an adequate substantiality while evoking associations with the soil. Colour, too, has an important formal role to play in ceramics and this was important for Jorn the painter for whom the abstraction of colour involved the most demanding and thought-provoking process. Rarely prior to 1972 did he manage to abandon colour in sculpture. But we must not anticipate events and should first concentrate on what happened in Albisola after 1954.

To begin with Jorn worked in Tullio Mazzotti’s workshop, where he made a humorous portrait of Mazzotti in clay (Fig.109). From 1958 onwards he produced his ceramics in Eliseo Salino’s newly-founded ‘Fabbrica di San Giorgio’ (Fig.l 12). Salino’s experience and lively understanding of artistic problems (he had once worked for Mazzotti and his contacts with Arturo Martini and Lucio Fontana have already been mentioned) assisted Jorn in his work and experiments. The first substantial result of this collaboration (which continued, enlivened as so often by a friendship between artist and collaborator, until Jorn’s death) was the great ceramic mural executed in 1959 for the High School in Aarhus. Erik Nyholm has written at length about this technical and artistic masterpiece.

One can sense how Jorn’s three-dimensional work, now drawing on the new artistic atmosphere and the new technical possibilities provided by Albisola, quickly changes and grows increasingly free. It can already be seen in pieces made in Albisola during the first summer of 1954. Simply compare Death’s dog of this year (Fig.l 13) with the two Jug animals (Figs. 106,107) of the year before. The bodies of all three consist of generously formed planes yet the modelling of the earlier pieces is more tentative, their contours more hesitant than they are in Death’s dog: this frightening creature from Hades, its body twisted convulsively, its sightless head pathetically upturned.

Jorn’s handling of form becomes increasingly assured, and the objects he makes acquire a pronounced individuality. Whenever he employed existing basic shapes (mostly cylindrical vase forms which he had turned on the wheel, but also occasionally clay discs) he would model, knead, twist and tunnel through them until they were transformed into the kind of image that is unmistakably his own. The extent of his progress is made abundantly clear by a comparison between the Jug woman of 1953 (Fig.105) and the owl-headed figure of 1966 (Fig.l 15), both of which were developed from a similar basic shape. Whereas Jug woman remains obviously tied to the elementary form with which Jorn began, and exhibits minimal modelling (which the artist used colour to emphasize), he evoked his owl creature by energetic and rigorous shaping. The body emerges from the bellshaped base in a powerful turning and squeezing movement. Thick rolls and deep recesses of clay make it look like a gaping, greedy mouth upon which the head of the decoy bird (with what for Jorn is a typical owl-like look) is enthroned. And the figure is no longer clothed in a carefully applied layer of colour. The glazes are used rather to create a rough, irregularly shimmering surface which scarcely covers the earthen figure.

There is another sharp-eyed creature which is similarly formed and has a similar personality which he set up in his garden in Albisola (Fig. 116). It sits on a pedestal which he made by piling up pieces of different stone and from this position which is half guard-post, half hiding-place this goblin Lynceus with a Janus-face surveys and spies out the terrain. Not far away in the same garden is another no less artistically arranged pedestal assembled from pieces of multicoloured stone. A terrifyingly white head sits upon it, which has a kind of jester’s cap protruding at the back, whose folds once again suggest an owlish image (Fig. 117). The prominent folds at the rear of this large and grotesque outgrowth (admittedly so well hidden by a conifer that it can only be seen after a precarious climb and can scarcely be photographed at all) contrast dramatically with the flatness of the face which, with its deep recesses for the eyes and mouth, looks like a death’s head. Even in the siting of this image Jorn plays a double game of concealing and revealing. There is an ambivalent principle directing his sculpture as well as his painting, and it follows from this that none of his figures is conceived to be seen and comprehended from only a single viewpoint.

On the contrary, they are multi-figured and multi-faceted, so that at every turn one is confronted by something new, which serves to hide the previous configuration.

Albisola is not only the place where Jorn’s ceramics were made but his house and garden there also seem to provide that entertainment in which his three-dimensional works come most completely alive. This is not surprising since it was Jorn himself who created the setting. Although the rural buildings themselves look unremarkable enough (Jorn’s presence betrayed only by the occasional ceramic relief let into the outer walls), the inside of the house was taken over and dominated by the artist. With the aid of murals, ceramic reliefs that fill entire walls and three-dimensional, free-standing figures he opened out the primitive narrowness and banality of the rooms into the poetic infinity of visionary spaces.

The shaping of the garden is even more unusual and astonishing than the transformation of the house, and he worked on this over several decades. Once he had taken the garden over in 1957 he seems to have been directed by some primeval urge to transform this piece of nature in terms of his own vision. To be there is like walking through a maze. One is continually lost in the terrace-like areas between the proliferating foliage and the small walls, continually denied any view beyond the immediate surroundings. Jorn himself designed and built the walls and emplacements with the help of Umberto Gambetta. They used many different kinds and shapes of stones, some of which were culled from the vicinity, as though assembling an exhibition to show the inventive richness of the surrounding countryside.

He confronted such artistically arranged, bizarre configurations of inorganic matter with the creatures of his imagination. And within this network of contrasts the stones, no matter how attractive, remain dead while Jorn’s constructions breathe with elemental life.

Although he almost certainly did not intend it, he provides in this small ‘artistic landscape’ an instructive example of one of the formal principles of his art: never to adopt pre-formed elements or given structures without first modifying them. This helps us to understand what he meant when he rejected these ready-made objects as lifeless and why he insisted on manipulating them and imposing his ‘automatic’, spontaneous procedures upon them. He believed that only in this way could he give his inner vision and emotion artistic expression. He applied this principle in all his works.

Although only a few ceramics were permanently placed in the Albisola garden, Jorn occasionally used the garden as a photographic backdrop for his other sculptures. He loved to see his sculptures in the kind of environment that would provide a certain resonance. The photographs of the bronze and marble sculptures published by De Micheli make this clear in impressive fashion (Jorn scultore, Bibl. 181). They were arranged by Jorn and his photographer Recrosio and look like stage settings. Perhaps it is Jorn the painter we see at work here, for the sculptural images, like those in his paintings, are seen in a particular context which is designed to reduce the clarity of the form while at the same time adding to its complexity and ambiguity.

There are two figures which are almost amorphous but with strikingly flowing contours and which are related to the series of goblin-like images from the 1960s (Figs. 118,119). We know them only from two photographs taken in 1968 which provide a terminus ante quem for their dating. Once again it was Jorn himself who arranged them before the camera and thus emphasized that although their shapes were similar, their personalities were quite different. He cheekily stuck an oxe-eye daisy into the face of one and turned her into a funny flower girl. The softly-flowing body and smooth curves of the other are reminiscent of a pebble; and this, together with the sinter-like glaze, make it look like the evocation of a fountain spirit.

We have seen such curious, embryo-like creatures with their visionary gaze in his paintings and there are indeed always strong links between all his images in every medium. There is a unity about Jorn’s repertoire of images throughout the various media he employs, a fact I have already commented upon in my chapter about his graphics. His imagination is fired by the single drive that compels him to discover and reveal his inner ‘face’.

The basic ‘earth’ tone which characterizes the ceramics of the 1960s gradually disappears in the figures produced after 1970. Their contours are more taut and regular, their surfaces smoother (Figs. 120, 123, 125). Occasionally he covers part or all of the figure with a shimmering white glaze reminiscent of porcelain. In some of the 1972 ceramics, however, the polished elegance of the contour and a neutrality of surface seem dramatically to contrast with the overpainting, as if the latter were intended to do violence to the solid form. The painting is no longer subservient to the form, but added contrapuntally, put on as an expressive device (Fig.123). It heralds a new freedom (in the polymorphous, incongruous shaping of the figure) that Jorn achieved entirely sculpturally, without the aid of painting, in the bronze and marble figures of the same year.

So far we have only looked at those of his ceramics which were made after 1954 (the year of his arrival in Albisola) from standard shapes produced on the potter’s wheel. Since he now increasingly modifies these shapes in a freer and more personal fashion, the nature of this process is less obvious than it was in Silkeborg. Nevertheless, these images which might be described as ‘ceramic modifications’ (no matter how minor or major the modifications are) possess a certain regularity of construction and contour which clearly distinguishes them from the freely modelled works. These were described as ‘free forms’ in contrast to the ‘turned forms’ in the catalogue of the exhibition staged at the Copenhagen Kunstindustri-Museet in 1955 and it is these that are the direct and true predecessors of the 1972 bronze and marble sculptures.

There are far fewer of these freely modelled ceramics than there are ‘turned forms’. Until the decisive year of 1972 Jorn did not often throw off the restrictions imposed by a given standard shape. This may have something to do with his hesitant attitude towards committing himself to sculpture proper, and it is for this reason that the strange hybrid figures like goblins live on longer in his three-dimensional works than they do in his painting and graphics. They are figures which, in spite of all their strangeness, have a definable presence and spirituality. Not until 1972 was Jorn able to apply his improvisatory method with complete confidence to his sculpture, even though it had long determined the nature of his work in other media. But he then achieved in three dimensions the kind of indefinable yet living beings which he had already conjured up on the flat surfaces of his paintings.

Because there are so few ‘free form’ ceramics the development they reveal seems especially clear. It is a development towards increasingly free manipulation of the material, towards an ever stronger sense of movement and a modelling of the surfaces. Great differences separate Weirdwolf of 1952 (Fig.100), the figure made in Albisola in 1954 (Fig.l 14), and the head of 1963 (Fig. 121)-merely to isolate the major stages of this development. A comparison between Weirdwolf and the Albisola ceramic is especially instructive since a similar formal method was responsible for both. But the Italian piece possesses an entirely new kind of monumentality. The complicated body structure is carried on five feet (only vaguely recognizable in the photograph). It is pierced by many gaping holes and encrusted with thorn-like outgrowths. Certainly there is little actual modelling on this figure whose form had arisen more from squeezing, boring and cutting. There is something violent about the shape and expression of this black-and-white chequered image, by comparison with which the representational method of Weirdwolf seems disciplined and refined. In our comparison of two ceramics made from a basic base form we have already noticed the stronger sense of expressive form which Jorn achieved in Albisola.

The ‘head’ of 1963 (Fig. 121) takes us still further onwards and closer to the sculptures of 1972. This head is thoroughly modelled in both contour and surface and the coloured glaze also plays an important role. Jorn emphasizes the form with the aid of coloured spots and splatters and endows it at the same time with an attractive painterly surface by contrasting the brittle, porous appearance of the clay with the shimmering glaze.

As we noticed at the start of this chapter there is as yet no definitive and comprehensive survey of Jorn’s ceramics. We can trace the development but we still do not have a precise idea of the number of works concerned. We know about fifty of those ceramics made in Albisola which are connected with the sculpture. This is a very small number for an eighteen-year period, especially if we remember that he made thirty-one bronze and marble sculptures and a number of large ceramic figures in 1972 alone.

From 1954 until the early 1960s Jorn lived and worked regularly and often in Albisola. Then his visits there grew very sporadic and brief. Only in the last two years of his life did he return for longer periods, although even these visits, in keeping with his legendary restlessness, only ever lasted for a few weeks at a time. I repeat these facts because they emphasize the peculiarity of Jorn’s involvement with sculpture. After the extended and frequently interrupted development of the three-dimensional work the climax of 1972 was like an eruption. Within the space of less than a year and with an amazing concentration of all his powers (already threatened by the illness that would end in his death) Jorn created twenty-three bronze and eight marble sculptures. These works make what had previously seemed to be something incidental to his major interests, something that he had merely played with aimlessly from time to time, a central pillar of his achievement. The barzelette or jests (which is how he is reported to have called his earlier three-dimensional works) are the playfully conceived but prophetic anticipations of the bronze and marble sculptures of 1972. In these works he drops the mask of the joker and becomes a serious sculptor for the first time. This is already apparent in his choice of the classic and ambitious sculptural materials of bronze and stone. What he said about the completed sculptures also reveals how vital and urgent it was for him to extend his imagery beyond the coloured surfaces of his paintings into the monochrome solidity of stone and bronze, as though this provided the final and irrefutable proof of the existence of the creatures of his imagination. He notices with pleasure that the pictorial metamorphosis has been successful. He has realized his aim. His images live as solid, rounded, tangible presences.

There is something of the age-old Promethean dream of creation about the wish to give a physical shape to the personal, internal world of the imagination. Those familiar with the kind of artist Jorn was - possessed by precisely such an elemental creative drive - should not be surprised that he wished to apply his creative powers to the making of tangible objects. Those who only know his paintings must be astonished to find this painter par excellence, for whom colour was the fundamental and essential means of expression, achieving the decisive step to sculpture.

Today, when technical rules are less rigid and the borders between the various media have broken down, it is no longer unusual to find a painter who also makes sculpture. In general, however, such sculptures must be regarded as incidental experiments which cannot be compared with the paintings. This is not so with Jorn. The intention and quality of his sculptures elevate him to the ranks of the so-called ‘paintersculptors’, artists who have contributed to the history of both media.

This singular breed of artist (Daumier is the first notable case) has regularly appeared in the history of art from the nineteenth century onwards. Since then painters have come to play an increasingly important role in the development of sculpture. Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso are only the most celebrated examples of such versatile talents. It is indeed curious to see how these painters achieved valid expression in their sculpture, considering that they were more or less isolated from contemporary developments in sculpture and independent of dominant sculptural theory.

Jorn’s works are also those of an independent painter-sculptor, distant from the mainstream of contemporary sculptural styles and ideas, and determined to find a way of realizing in three-dimensional imagery what he had first arrived at on the flat surface of the canvas.

In this respect the works he created in 1972 are the most ambitious and successful. In that year all his creative drive went into his sculpture. Twenty-three bronze and eight marble sculptures were executed between March and November and in them his imaginary world enters a new dimension - literally as well as metaphorically.

The seriousness and high purpose with which he approached his last sculptural work can be seen even in the way he set about the task. He began, as usual and quite naturally, in Salino’s pottery in Albisola. Salino, very familiar with Jorn’s improvisatory methods and with sculptural techniques in general, assisted him with the clay maquettes for the bronzes. For the next stages - the bronze casting and marble carving - Jorn chose the M. A. F. foundry in Milan and the Nicoli workshop in Carrara, both among the most professional places of their kind in Italy. There he found the necessary technical knowledge and equipment to help him in what were for him still new sculptural techniques, but he was able very quickly to realize his ideas on his own. The physical act of making sculpture, the involvement with the materials, were vital to his method. He never began with an absolutely clear conception of the end result but rather allowed his imagery spontaneously to arise during the process of creation, in improvisatory dialogue with his materials and with the images which suggested themselves to him as he went along.

Jorn’s diary indicates how brief and intense was the period in which these sculptures appeared. Although the entries are short and do not describe the working process completely, the following summary (which paraphrases the wording of the diary) gives the most important facts and enumerates the trips around Italy which he made in connection with the sculpture. The summary impressively illustrates the energy and purpose with which he applied himself to the task.

7. Mar 1972 Arrival in Albisola

9. Mar Three sculptures begun in Eliseo Salino’s Fabbrica di San Giorgio

15. Mar Five sculptures, none less than 60 cm high, completed

20. Apr With Eliseo Salino and Umberto Gambetta in Milan to prepare 5 sculptures for casting

23-27. Apr 20 sculptures in fired and unfired clay and majolica are listed between these dates. Of these, 8 carry a note that they are to be cast in bronze. Two more were cast, on the evidence of their titles

20. May From Albisola to Milan

21. May From Milan to Carrara

22. May From Carrara to Albisola via La Spezia

5-6. Jun In Turin

7. Jun From Turin to Colombes

28. Sep From Colombes to Milan

29. Sep From Milan to Albisola

21. Oct Arrival in Carrara; work begun in Carlo Nicoli’s workshop

23. Oct Moves into a house in Marina di Carrara, Viale Cristoforo Colombo 59

7. Nov From Carrara to Milan

9. Nov From Milan to Carrara

25-27. Nov Between these dates 6 marble sculptures are listed as having been photographed.

From the beginning of March to the beginning of June 1972, therefore, he remained without interruption in Albisola, with the exception of two brief visits to Milan, and to Milan and Carrara in connection with the bronze casting and the planned marble sculptures. In this period he made most or all of the clay maquettes for the twenty-three bronzes. At the beginning of June he left Albisola, returning for about three weeks at the end of September before leaving for Carrara on 21 October. The diary does not tell us (nor can anyone remember) whether Jorn was still occupied with preparations for the bronzes during this second period in Albisola. At any event most of this work was done in the spring and by the early summer some of the casts had been completed and were on show in the Galleria Arte Borgogna in Milan (Bibl.80).

In his diary entry for 23-27 April Jorn lists twenty sculptures which he had made in fired and unfired clay and majolica since his return to Albisola on 7 March. We know that a substantial number were intended to be cast in bronze. If we accept that they were, in fact, made between the given dates, then the intensity of working was astonishing. His speed of execution is also shown by an earlier diary entry which reveals that he made five sculptures, none smaller than 60 cm high between 9-15 March alone.

The appearance of the bronzes recalls in a much more developed fashion the look of those of his ceramics which rely on a multiplicity of contour, shape and internal form, and on the multiplicity of viewpoint resulting from it. In the bronzes Jorn arrived at an extreme freedom of sculptural manipulation. Not restricted by any formal or thematic logic, he was able to give his imagination free rein. He observed only those sculptural rules necessary to make his figures stand up. Otherwise he disregarded them completely and developed the sculptures entirely by means of improvised modelling. The progression of the forms within each piece always astonishes, can never be anticipated. But although they verge on the incoherent they are never mere shapes and always evoke an image. From one point of view at least and more often from two or three, the variety of internal forms is contained within a contour which suggests one of Jorn’s fantastic figures. Occasionally we encounter one of the hybrid creatures so typical of him, a being with a highly ambiguous physical presence (Figs. 133, 142). These images are amazingly complex in content as well as in form. As in a kind of three-dimensional kaleidoscope the smallest turn changes both the form and the expression. It is never possible to anticipate how a motif will develop or to imagine what lurks on the side of the sculpture hidden from view (Figs. 126,129). To look at these figures is to embark upon an adventure in perception during which our expectations continuously prove inadequate.

The marks and forms that make up the animated, complex surface of Jorn’s bronzes can, in themselves, be read as independent minor episodes within the bigger drama. Just as a variety of associations are called forth in his paintings by the many layers of freely manipulated paint, so too in the sculpture does a powerfully expressive ‘chaosmos’ arise from the many marks made by the energetic application of both hand and tool (Figs.126 and 138). Such effects are typical of Jorn. A multiplicity of incidents, each of which has the mysterious and ineffable quality of phantasmagoria, emerges and immediately flees whenever one tries to apply reason or verbal explanation.

This expressive gestural method results in unembellished surfaces which record the process of modelling and the spontaneity of the sculptural method. The surfaces were not buffed and polished when everything was finished, but were allowed to remain as marks having their own identity. Jorn’s approach to sculpture has points of resemblance with abstract expressionism, but the untreated surface is more than a contemporary stylistic fashion and has precedents in the three- dimensional works of certain painters, e.g. Daumier, Degas, Matisse. Of the latter we know that he regarded it as vitally important to retain the visible traces of the modelling process. For him these traits conveyed artistic feeling and expression with more immediacy than the theme itself.

The rough, throbbing surface treatment is, of course, also important in the sculpture of Rodin and Medardo Rosso, but this fact need not be gone into here, since in their case the feature is related to impressionism and irrelevant to Jorn.

In his last sculptures he was more fascinated than ever by the malleable quality of clay which records, as in a matrix, with perfect accuracy the various modelling actions. His elementary delight in the playful squeezing and shaping movements of the fingers can be seen in the many small figurines which he made at the same time as the large clay maquettes for the bronzes. They seem to have sprung from his finger tips as though by magic, produced by sleight of hand. And indeed most of them are precisely of a size that would enable them to be palmed. More than twenty such miniature sculptures are known, most of which have a coloured glaze. These imaginative, lively and bizarre figures seem like the actors in a Jorn version of the Commedia dell’arte. They make one want to play with them, setting them in groups as though in a theatrical tableau.

Six of these small figures can be identified as studies for the clay maquettes. But we cannot say whether Jorn worked towards all his large sculptures by making small models before the maquette stage, since some of the figurines have almost certainly been lost. It was characteristic of him that the creative process, fuelled by a feverish excitement, was always changing, constantly directed by the need to improvise. Although it is impossible to generalize we can gain interesting insights into the way at least some works progressed from the first idea to the final, large-scale completion.

We know of fifteen drawings that are related to the sculptures. They are not consecutively numbered, but drawings in groups of three have been given the same reference number, which suggests that they are connected. We can relate one of these groups of three to Second horizon (Figs.129-30) and another to Rotten trick (Figs.132-3). It is more than fortunate that we also possess the sketch models (bozzetti) *for each of these sculptures. The drawings, interestingly enough, show that they were made *after (not before) the clay models. What Jorn did was to emphasize the dominant lines of the figure in each drawing before proceeding to make the larger sculptures. But in the case of a drawing for Rotten trick, which is not illustrated here, Jorn experimented with an alternative image.

The drawings, then, did not precede the sculptures but occupy a position during their development; and this is proved by the fact that they only appear to interrelate when compared with each sculpture. In other words, each group of three drawings consists of three views of one and the same figure, even though, seen on their own, they do not seem to relate to each other at all. If they were in fact the first studies for a sculpture they would relate to each other in terms of a sequence, revealing the development of a formal idea.

Jorn drew his figurines from three viewpoints. He photographed them in the same way. We know of photographs of fourteen clay models that were taken under his supervision. With the exception of a few photographs of figures whose forms are not so complex as to necessitate more than one or two viewpoints, they all show the models from three sides. We choose to reproduce some photographs of the clay models here because in one case the surface structure (some of which inevitably gets lost when cast in bronze) can be seen in all its original variety, while in another - and this is more important - we can see the sculpture to a certain extent through Jorn’s own eyes. It is important that we should be able to do this when dealing with such intricate images, for it disciplines and directs our own personal response. The viewer’s response represents an unknown factor and poses a problem for every sculptor. We learn from the way Jorn arranged his figurines that he liked to place them so that they do not look directly at us. We also learn that he preferred to have them lit in a way which suppresses the energetic and dramatic play of forms. He did not wish to make too obvious that clarity and directness which a three-dimensional form can possess, nor did he wish to emphasize the pathos which his figures can express. These maquettes are, alas, known to us only through these photographs. It is obvious, from the fact that he coloured them, that Jorn wanted to keep the maquettes. But we can see from the photographs that he did not use his normal method of applying colour, instead he resorted to only a few accents - no doubt with the ultimate realization in bronze in view - to enhance the modelling or to emphasize a plane (Fig.138).

Even in the final bronze casts he did not entirely follow the classical rule of achromatism. He preferred to exploit to the full the chromatic potential of the patina and the polishing, with the result that the surface of one cast almost never looks like that of another from the same mould.

His attitude to marble was similar. He selected pieces of many different natural colourings for his sculptures: white and black Carrara, blue-green Bardiglio and a purple-red variety. He was very interested in choosing his stone. We learn this from a diary entry of late November 1972 which records six marble sculptures that had been photographed. He exactly describes the kind of marble employed, and adds the place of origin of two unusually coloured varieties.

Coloured marble in particular changes during the process of carving. The stone acquires lighter shades according to the angle at which the chisel is applied and the force with which it is hammered (Figs. 143, 145). The classic method of working marble entails the final removal of all surface marks by means of waxing and polishing. Jorn did not do this. He exploited the full range of textural possibilities and activated his surfaces by setting up an expressive tension between the given qualities of the marble and the marks left by his working of it. The natural veining and cracking, the rough chisel marks, the scraping of the claw chisel, the splendid artificiality of highly polished parts next to untouched areas all interact to create the special heterogeneous skin of Jorn’s sculptures (Fig.145).

A further aspect of his unconventional attitude to the working of marble is the strikingly large number of drill-holes in the sculptures. Singly, they suggest those eye forms so typical of his work. But they also appear in rows and groups (Figs.149,150,151) and can seem like a kind of magical penetration of the stone, as though they are wounding and ravishing the elemental substance of the material. Jorn’s treatment of the stone has something primitive about it, the borings something atavistic. They evoke some of those strange signs which he collected in his book about Norman graffiti.

The variety of stone employed and the highly articulated surfaces of Jorn’s sculptures can be explained only partly by his interest as a painter in the colouristic and decorative effects of the epidermis. There is both something more and something different at work in his sculpture. It is what he himself calls the ‘visionary method’ in his article on ‘automatic and spontaneous vision’ or, as Heerup has expressed it, the way in which the stone itself must ‘see and be seen’. Jorn had to sense the beginnings of an image in his chosen block of marble before he even laid a hand on it.

In Nicoli’s workshop in Carrara he proved to be a headstrong guest. He was but little interested in the traditional rules of sculpture and bored by any stone with regular qualities or veined in an obviously beautiful way. He preferred to choose his raw material from places high up in the Carrara quarries where he found those blocks - the greater part of the quarried marble - thought unsuitable for either industrial or artistic purposes. Here in these mighty fields of ruins where nature has been violated, he was likely to find precisely those suggestive rock formations which fascinated him and inspired him to make sculpture.

His imagination was always volatile, and sparked off by many different factors which could be both bizarre and banal. Thus he once reworked a discarded sculpture of a figure which he chanced upon in Nicoli’s workshop. No-one knew who had left the sculpture there or when (Fig.151). By means of a few holes and hammer blows he transformed the rather ordinary original into one of his own fantastic creatures with a by now familiar owlish visage. He changed the body into a grotesque and gigantic head, the roughly polished roundness of which contrasts sharply with the remaining parts. These are treated in only a rudimentary way and evoke a form in the process of birth, merely hinting at a profile with a visionary glance (on the left-hand side).

It has already been noted that Jorn had but little interest for conventional methods of working marble. He did not use the conventional method of making a model that could be ‘pointed’ to enable others to carve the block. On the contrary, he improvised while he worked. He allowed himself to be directed by effects which occurred spontaneously from moment to moment. This meant that he carved the marble mostly himself from start to finish, using an assistant only to prepare the stone during the various stages of work according to marks quickly drawn upon it. This shows the speed and expertise with which the complete novice came to master the complicated business of carving marble.

Jorn is reputed to have used a bronze figure as a model for some of his marble sculptures. This is most likely to have been the case with Organized benefactor (Fig. 143) which from one viewpoint at least seems to have clear affinities with Unexpected motherhood (Fig. 142). They share a similar trunk-like extension of the nose, an eccentric shifting of the body to the right and a lip-like opening on the opposite side. But the rest of the marble is quite unlike the bronze.

Perhaps the first impulse for Seduction (Fig. 139) also came from a bronze. The head, with its beak and sharp eyes looking to one side, faintly echoes the bird head of Rotten trick (Fig. 133). More notable than the similarity of details between these last two images however is a general affinity in which the form of the marble is reminiscent of the working of clay. We know that it is Jorn’s first marble sculpture and its surface is more varied than that of later works. It is almost restless.

Above all it is the turning movement of the figure - awkward but with a trace of suppleness - that betrays the thinking of a modeller rather than a carver.

We can only speculate about the order in which the remaining marbles were carved. Perhaps it is the same order as the list of six photographed sculptures which forms part of Jorn’s diary entry for 25-27 November. Here Number 1 is Seduction. Using a playful but profound association of words, Jorn refers to these marbles in his diary as ‘Idéenkmal’, an untranslatable synthesis of idée (idea, notion, concept) and Denkmal (monument, memorial).

With one exception the works listed in the diary had more carefully chosen and more poetic titles than they do today. But because Jorn described the exact kind of stone used for each piece we can easily identify them. He himself is reputed to have changed the titles - he also did this with some of the bronzes - and the new names are more general than the old. They are more banal, distanced from any possible allusion to content or from any lyrical interpretation of each figure. This, once again, reveals Jorn’s preference for playing with the ambiguity and allusiveness of the works themselves which he hid behind as bland a label as possible.

Number 2 on the list is Dear friends (Fig. 145). This enthroned, sphinx-like creature, whose surface strangely combines a primitive roughness and refined smoothness, does not move so obviously in a spiral as does the earlier figure, does not turn so powerfully about its own axis. But in the way its formal treatment echoes modelling processes it is more closely related to Seduction (Fig. 139) than to the three works which follow it on the list. These are Socialized taxpayer *(Fig.147), *Last tango (Fig.149) and Burning problem (Fig.150). All are full-blooded carvings, conceived entirely in terms of the block of stone and in no way reminiscent of modelled works. In Socialized taxpayer the formal modification has been reduced to a minimum. Jorn plays exclusively with the given characteristics of the purple stone, applies a few lines as marks to the surface structure which is already affected by the forces of nature. He thus unites within the single, imperfect block the beauty of nature with that of art.

In Last tango and Burning problem he masters the stone in a different and more assured way than before. He does not attempt to change the inherent balance of the stone block and he forms it less radically. He lets the irregular contour suggest faces, and he marks the surfaces with notchings and drill-holes which evoke forgotten symbolic forms. While Last tango with its pyramidal shape remains more in the area of the abstract and symbolic, possessing something of the magical power of an idol, Burning problem is an extraordinarily fresh and poetic image. The double visage is wonderful, and suggested only by a few minor cuts. Two creatures share three eyes and unite to form a new and complex presence. The unsophisticated expression of this ambiguous head contrasts with the elegantly carved and proud bird’s head which sits upon and overshadows it. At the same time some marks which look like the indecipherable cryptograms of a lost civilization are set into the rear of this complicated figure. The last of the six sculptures listed in the diary is Organized benefactor (Fig. 143) which has already been discussed.

The two largest marble sculptures, the reworked figure (Fig. 151) and the massive, three-headed fabulous beast (Fig.152) are Jorn’s last works. The latter is a rough, expressive creature which makes one think about Jorn’s interest in the magical number three and his fascination for three-headed images. Neither work appears among those listed as having been photographed and we know of no titles for them. Neither Jorn nor anyone else had them photographed at the time, and they were also left out of the numbered series in Mario de Micheli’s book, where the fabulous beast only appears in a studio photo of Jorn at work.

It is significant that Jorn’s artistic career came to an end with works in stone. He had an instinctive understanding of the nature of materials, an acute sense of the inherent character of whatever he laid his hand upon. He was therefore almost certainly aware of the implications of applying his last energies to the working of stone, which in the fullest sense of the word became the touchstone of his imagination and creativity. Jorn was deeply engaged by the essential character of stone, by its contrary double role in the history of mankind as both building material and weapon, the tool of both construction and destruction. He was, as was once said so tellingly in connection with the garden he made in Albisola, the victim of the age-old ‘mal de pierre’.

This passion was fulfilled artistically in the monumental finale of his œuvre. Jorn succeeded in bending even stone to his will, in endowing it with that ‘human content’ which for him was the purpose of all creativity. He managed to achieve complete spontaneity of expression even with the hammer and chisel and even with hard and unyielding stone. What he had achieved in his painting he now achieved in stone: that perpetuum mobile of forms and images which never come to rest either in a single clear contour or within a single clear configuration. Jorn’s sculptures, the ever-active mirror of their creator’s temperament, rather present the spectator with a wealth of stimulating images, which appear and then immediately lose themselves in the unclear and the mysterious, by fleeing to that area where, for Jorn, the work of art is to be found. ‘Ce qui mesure le caractère génial d’une œuvre d’art, c’est d’être perpétuellement énigmatique.’

(Translated from German by Frank Whitford)

Chapter 5 : Forgeries

Italy has continued to be at the centre of modern art forgeries, with Milan in the lead. In July 1975 it was reported in Milan that a criminal network of art forgers had been uncovered by the police. The ‘factory’ itself was manned by two painters - Luigi Aligi and Marco Chiappa - who produced the false canvases which were then ‘expertized’ and marketed by other members of the gang. The forgeries included works by Appel, Bacon, Max Ernst, Fontana, Jorn, Kandinsky, Lam, Magritte, Picasso, and Poliakoff.

Two years later it was the exposure of Marie… le Notre Dame as a fake (in The crucial years, Bibl.204, p.152) that led to a prosecution in Milan. In 1977 Signor Ettore La Gala from Treviso, who had been sold the fake, took legal action against Pietro Cardinale in Milan.

A similar hearing took place in 1978 before a court in Trieste, concerning four ‘abstract compositions’ falsely attributed to Jorn — they were in fact the work of a forger named Sebastiano Saja.

It would seem that Italian auctioneers such as Finarte in Milan and Rome do not go to much trouble to consult expert opinion on works of modern art offered for sale. This accounts for the many false Jorns put up for auction since the artist’s death, all of them being quite blatant forgeries. In mitigation it must be said that even apparently reputable Milanese art dealers and art specialists are sometimes involved in the illegal traffic.

A crude attempt to authenticate a false Jorn came to light in Milan very recently. A Milanese private collector wrote to the Asger Jorn Foundation reporting that he owned a Jorn painting from 1967 entitled Une nouvelle vague, II, acquired from Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris. He sent a black-and-white photograph and asked for a certificate of authentication. The photograph in question showed a murky daub (Fig.154) with an obviously false signature. The novel factor was the attribution to Jorn’s Paris dealer, since most traders in fakes had previously preferred to cite provenances that were either fictitious or difficult to disprove. The next stage, after receiving the photograph, was to ask for a photograph of the reverse side of the picture. This brought several more surprises. Although the inscription and signature were obviously false, the label looked genuine, even if the flamboyant signature (running over on to the canvas) tended to spoil the good effect (Fig.155). The photographs and correspondence from Milan were passed on to Galerie Jeanne Bucher. The reply to me from Jean-François Jaeger was dated 14 February 1979. After giving the history of the genuine painting Une nouvelle vague (Cat.1723), the letter went on to say:

There is obviously no connection between Une nouvelle vague of 1967 and the work shown in the photograph which you sent. The label is a photographic label from my gallery, and not a picture label. It is reasonable to assume that the label was detached from a publicity photo of the original painting. The figure II° has been added and is clearly from a different typewriter keyboard. The state of the label seems to indicate that it has been removed from its original mounting and re-glued on to the back of the picture… In any case we never put a label on a canvas. The stretcher, which bears no resemblance to those normally used by Jorn, carries no trace of the gallery’s reference number which features on all Asger’s works that have passed through the gallery.

Galerie Jeanne Bucher sent a strongly worded letter of protest to the Milanese collector, who replied evasively but undertook to remove the offending label!

Twice recently the auctioneers Sotheby Parke Bernet in London have been sent forgeries of Jorn’s work. On 18 September 1978 they received three postcard-sized drawings from Brussels to be included in a sale. The drawings seemed to be studies for Jorn paintings from the 1940s. The drawing reproduced here (Fig.156) closely resembles two rather similar oil paintings reproduced in *Jorn in Scandinavia, *Bibl.158, Cat.547 and 584, but the draftsmanship of the pen drawing immediately strikes one as being too precise and literal-minded to be mistaken for Jorn’s much freer, improvisatory style. Added to this is the curious fact that the drawing, which obviously purports to be a ‘preliminary’ study, has been dated a year later than the date quoted for the two paintings. The owner in Brussels, when asked for the provenance of the drawings, replied that they had been bought in London’s Bermondsey Market!

Shortly afterwards Sotheby’s were the victims of a more serious fraud. Their catalogue of Modern and contemporary art for 5 April 1979 reproduced (under Lot 500) a black-and-white photograph of True clown, 1958, 50x40 cm, ‘the property of a German private collector’. When the catalogue containing the photograph reached Otto van de Loo in Munich he at first thought that the painting (which had belonged to him since the year it was painted) must have been stolen from the basement in his house where it was kept. When he found that the picture was in situ he telephoned Sotheby’s to ask for an explanation. It was then that the swindle was discovered.

The sequence of events leading to the reproduction of the genuine *painting in the auction catalogue was as follows. Sotheby’s had received a letter from a German ‘private collector’ offering *True clown *for sale by auction. The writer did not enclose a photograph but merely referred to the entry in the œuvre catalogue *(The crucial years, *Bibl.204, Fig.129). To save time - since the painting itself had not yet reached London - Sotheby’s made a black-and-white photocopy of *True clown from the book and printed it alongside the description of Lot 500. The mistake was only discovered when the picture from Germany was unpacked and found to be a crude forgery. Lot 500 was then withdrawn from the sale and Sotheby’s photographed the fake for their records (Fig. 158).

Denmark, where Jorn’s reputation stands highest in Europe, has in recent years seen only one prosecution for Jorn forgeries. This occurred in October 1977, when a waiter received a suspended sentence of three months in Aarhus for attempting to trade six forgeries of Jorn paintings.

A misattribution has occurred twice in Stockholm, where Bukowski-Auktioner have attributed paintings by Ivan Joen to Asger Jorn (Kat.394, 1973, No.72 and Kat.412, 1979, No.43). The minor Swedish artist Ivan Joen was born in 1902. From 1937 he exhibited, amongst other places, in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm. His paintings included landscapes, portraits and stillifes. He signed himself Joen. Cf. Hahn-Lunderberg Svensk konstnärs lexikon, Allhelms förlag, Malmö, Vol. III, 1956, p.280.