Asger Jorn - Revised Supplement to the œuvre catalogue of his paintings from 1930 to 1973

Preface

The first supplement to the œuvre catalogue of Asger Jorn’s oil paintings appeared in 1986. It described one hundred paintings that had been discovered since the appearance of the third volume of the oeuvre catalogue Asger Jorn: the final years six years earlier. In addition, all entries from the appendixes of the preceding three volumes of the catalogue were included.

It was announced in that book that records of paintings not included in the catalogue and its supplement should in future be sent to Silkeborg Museum of Art. Thanks to the cooperation of a number of European and American institutions and private persons we have in the past twenty years been able to identify a further 123 oil paintings. In view of the growing number of untenable attributions, all precautions have been taken to secure reliable information about the provenance and history of the paintings included in the present edition. In some cases a technical investigation has also taken place.

Over the years we have received additional information about some of the paintings registered in the three volumes of the catalogue, providing titles for previously untitled works, corrections of dates and measurements. The new information gained is summarised in the section Dis-authentications, omissions, additions and corrections.

In recent years very few authentic paintings have emerged. We have therefore now decided to publish the revised supplement, and to consider the registration of Asger Jorn’s oil paintings - spanning a period of 45 years of research - concluded. From now on Silkeborg Museum of Art will only confirm whether or not a particular work is registered.

T.A.

An interview with Pola Gauguin

Pola Gauguin (1883-1961), painter and art critic, son of Paul Gauguin. In his youth he studied architecture and exhibited as a painter before concentrating on art criticism.

Lived from 1910-1949 in Norway. He is the author of several books, including a biography of Edvard Munch (1933), two books on Munch’s graphic work (1945-46) and a book on his father (1937). The interview with Asger Jorn appeared in Dagbladet, Oslo, August 29, 1945, under the heading ‘Norwegian art in the eyes of an abstract painter’.

Dagbladet has had a visit from a young Danish artist called Asger Jorn who belongs to a very radical tendency in Danish art - the experimental painting. He has come to Norway in search of like-minded Norwegian artists to invite down to Copenhagen to exhibit in the autumn. The group, which was then called The Scandinavians, had an exhibition in Copenhagen in 1938 in which Sigurd Winge, amongst others, took part.

Danish artists have a tendency to gather in small groups of five, ten or twenty young artists who feel more or less the same about art and then they compete with other groups. We have nothing comparable in our art life.

The group Mr Jorn represents are neither Symbolists nor Surrealists, they are adherents of the abstract. Picasso, Kandinsky and Joan Miró are their prophets. Within this group Jorn has a prominent place. He writes articles in art periodicals and now, as mentioned, he has come to look at Norwegian art and offer invitations to a Copenhagen exhibition.

‘What do you mean by the experimental painting?’ we ask Mr Jorn, who is dressed in a plum-coloured shirt and bright red scarf and makes a strong contrast to his companion Sigurd Winge, who has no external artistic attributes - that is a thing of the past here.

‘Our way is a markedly abstract colouristic painting,’ he says. ‘The pictorial idiom has gone through a renewal in Denmark that has not happened in either Norway or Sweden. One could say that in Sweden it came in quietly because the country was not at war. In Denmark the opposite occurred.’

‘But didn’t the Germans regard you as decadent artists?’

‘Yes, they probably did, but they had neither the time or the forces to interfere in Danish cultural life.’

‘But what about the Danish public?’

‘There was a tendency in certain circles to attack us, but, on the other hand, there were large circles that would probably not have defended us, but nevertheless did not work against us for national and cultural reasons. So to that extent we had more fertile ground than we would have had in normal times.’

‘You perhaps also made sales - and to high prices as here?’

‘No, we have not noticed any big prices, not us young artists at any rate. There is probably more art sold in Norway than in Denmark.’

‘And what impression do you have of Norwegian art today?’

‘I have seen a lot of the frescos you have here. But in them Norwegian art has failed the element of colour. And the painters use allegories, telling great narratives in the paintings. Frescos did not ought to be picture books that one colours in. The painters use literary instead of painterly effects. For most part in such a pompous style. The public have reacted healthily by chalking on the door, ‘it is futile to fly without feathers’. The intimacy has gone, it is as if the artists had no life in them. Munch is a lovely painter and the exhibition shows that he was not a genius but a human being. One must not set him on a pedestal and make him inhuman. That exhibition has influenced me to have a more human vision in art than before. A myth must not be formed around Edvard Munch, not a myth that one worships and is afraid of. He belonged to a particular epoch and other things lie before us. But the colouristic attitude in Munch and Karsten, in the Swede Isakson and the Dane Weie, is the precondition for a new pictorial idiom.’

‘What will that idiom consist of?’

‘Well, when an artist sits and sketches a picture, a figure often comes out that is a kind of symbol, not a naturalistic symbol as in the frescos but a spontaneous figure, a mask concept that becomes an expression of something human, that is thus an unconscious symbol exactly as all our actions are symbolic, as even our clothes are symbolic.’

‘But what about the public? Don’t you wish to reach them?’

‘We do not consider the public, that does not consider us, apart from making demands. But, on the other hand, when it does nothing in return, then we do not need to consider them. We work as we feel best and if people wish to be influenced by art, then they must seek it out.’

And the war and art?’

‘Now we understand what freedom means and I believe that Norwegian art will surely recover from the paralysis caused by the Nazi attacks and again bloom and find itself.’

‘Do you mean that it will become national?’

‘On the contrary. I believe that art will become more international than ever. It is said that we are influenced by French art, but Picasso, Kandinsky and Miró were respectively Spanish, Russian and Jewish even though they were gathered in Paris.’

And now you are going home to get the exhibition ready?’

‘No, I have first to go to Gothenburg, where we have invited Nils Wedel and Arne Sandberg.’

Öyvind Fahlstrôm on Jorn

Öyvind Fahlstrôm (1928-1976). Swedish artist and filmmaker.

During the 1950’s he occasionally wrote theatre and art criticism for Stockholm newspapers. In 1961 he settled in New York. From then on his paintings with moveable elements, events, happenings and films gained widespread recognition. The article appeared in Expressen, Stockholm, June 9, 1959, under the heading ‘Parisian modernist from Denmark wants to renew design art’.

Asger Jorn is one of those Scandinavians who are tired of being prophets in their homeland, in this case Denmark, as they have found that their preaching has a wider scope. Also amongst us, Jorn has long been ‘Jørgen Nash’s brother’, even though he has lately been well represented at Gothenburg Art Museum thanks to a recent donation of Danish modernists from a collector.

I went on the hunt for Jorn in the luxuriant undergrowth of the Parisian artistic jungle. When I finally caught up with him outside his gallery, he appeared, to say the least, confused. He gave the impression of a tramp who had just come from some forbidden sleeping place. His gaze was dazed, confused and withdrawn. Only the combined efforts of myself and his art dealer succeeded in agreeing a meeting.

In a way the impression tallied with the wild and naive fabulous world of his painting. But it did not tally with the image of the indefatigable theoretician, group organizer, periodical founder and propagandist for an ‘Imaginist Bauhaus’.

Asger Jorn’s feeling about his homeland is extremely cool. He once published an apocalyptic vision of the awful decline of Copenhagen. Neither does he have any yearning for his hometown’s verdant and pleasantly snug suburbs now that he lives in the dismal outskirts of Paris in a scabrous quarter where here and there a high-rise block with its sooty and peeling fire-wall sticks up without meaning.

After the visitor has been led in through the bathroom, kitchen and dining-room, he is placed before a richly varied collection of junk-shop paintings from the 19th century in gravy brown, odalisques, landscapes, affecting child portraits. However, they are standing on easels rather than hanging upon the walls, and on the dark canvases another world begins to spring out with colours in raw and jolly tones where the brush has moved like a wagon-wheel in clay. Monstrous forms embrace the odalisques or break out like beings unleashed from another dimension into the ruling Sleeping Beauty atmosphere of the landscapes without any intercession to fuse them together.

I am awakened from my consideration of the new Jorn style by the artist pushing me before a burgeoning table and wondering how anyone could not see the Union of Six European Nations as a new element in the struggle for political and economic hegemony between northern and southern Europe. As the possibilities for a pan-European whole appear to be becoming less, we run the risk of being sooner or later swallowed up to become either a Russian or an American colony. Its is also interesting how the north-south opposition has its roots not in the Reformation, without … indeed, when we think, for example, of the Roman Empire …

Four hours later, when I tottered home with my head and my notebook stuffed with art-theoretical, political, historical and cultural-philosophical viewpoints, mostly seen from on high, the distance between the system-building and social reforming Dr Jekyll and the monster-hatching Mr Hyde was not only incontestible but also as enigmatic and wonderful as ever.

It would be too much to go into Jorn’s theories, which can be studied in the books Luck and Chance and Pour la forme (Ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts), where with an erudite scope but variable clarity, he fearlessly takes on a series of art-theoretical and social questions.

On a more practical plane, one of Jorn’s principal ideas has long been the need for a Bauhaus of the imagination, that is to say, a design school where imaginative design and functional design actively collaborate without the latter becoming completely dominant, as has so often happened: int.al. in the new Bauhaus in Ulm which Jorn and his circle are eagerly attacking.

New vision
Jorn thinks this is precisely why free artists ought also to be drawn into design. He is mainly making propaganda for a new vision on the part of the authorities about both artistic and decorative experimentation, which must be regarded as investments of a similar type to basic scientific research, just as unsure in the short view and sure in the long term when it comes to achieving higher quality and new values.

However, in anticipation of a more clear-sighted approach from foundations and authorities, Jorn and other artists, Appel, Corneille, Matta amongst them, have tried to anticipate events and during a couple of summers in Alba in North Italy have collaborated on lectures, discussions and cooperative experiments with painting, ceramics and tapestries.

Jorn’s development as a painter has been a long (he is now 45 years old) but straight and clear one. Although he went to Léger at the end of the thirties, by the early war period he was into a mystical-magical creation in the spirit of Miró and Klee. Insight into artistic freedom, not just in vision but also brushstrokes, led Jorn into an exalted ‘abstract Surrealism’. The Danish style of the forties, which was also represented by Carl-Henning Pedersen and above all by the later concretist Richard Mortensen, is one of the most remarkable and overlooked breeding grounds for the ‘spontaneous’ currents of the fifties. Mortensen’s barbaric colour orgies and Jorn’s teeming world of magic are contemporaneous with or clearly anticipate such well-known models as Pollock and Appel.

Seen with the brush
An extension of this breeding ground took place in 1948 when Jorn and the Belgian Dotremont founded Cobra (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam), a circle of Scandinavian, Dutch, German and French artists who exhibited together, published books and issued the periodical Cobra for four years. C.O. Hultén and Anders Österlin also belonged to the group.

Since he settled in Paris, the inspiration of the vision and the hand has run side by side in Jorn’s painting. The vision of orgiastic self-destructive monsters occasionally led to banal and unambiguous ‘grandads’ because the vision is seen with the brush and the possibilities of the swarming material. On the other hand, the extreme tumult of the brushstrokes has never been uncoupled from the vision as interpreter and leader of the whole while the boundary between material effect, enigmatically insistent signs and elusive figures is all the time being dislocated.

An interview with Jacques Michel

Jacques Michel was the art critic of Le Monde. The interview with Jorn, prompted by his last exhibition at Galerie Jeanne Bucher, appeared in Le Monde des Arts, Januar 27, 1971 under the heading ‘The painter on himself: Jorn and ‘the savage state’.’

… With Jorn, as for Gauguin, it is necessary to iterate the essential questions, ‘Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’

Painting he has always considered with astonishment. Astonishment and passion. ‘Even today, basically, I know nothing. At any rate, anything that I can explain. Before the picture, I only know what I must do. How I must do it. The ‘why’ lies outside the domain of the intelligible …’

Jorn tells the story of Whistler, who taught the unknown ‘laws’ of composition at a Parisian academy:

‘He questioned his best student. Are you following me? You see how the picture is coming together? Yes. All the other students appear to have understood. Oh, well, said Whistler, I am the only one who does not know … For me too,’ says Jorn, ‘it is a little like that. Painting is primarily a battle which ends in a more or less acceptable picture. A sort of miracle …’

He works with the unknown. Sometimes his first gestures on the canvas are driven by a very precise idea.

‘I paint. Suddenly, I discover a colour that excites me. I begin to get interested in this and forget my idea. In the end, the picture is different from what I imagined. In the event, I allow myself to be guided by that which is produced on the canvas. It develops by itself. I react to it. Now and then, I find that it is taking too many liberties. I have to put it in its place. A perpetual battle. It is dreadful to paint in such a way …’

- One is never sure of anything?

‘Never. Always uncertainty. Tyrannized. I do not recommend anyone to do it. As far as I am concerned, I am unable to do otherwise. Perhaps I have too anarchic a mind to follow a design. Basically, when I am painting, I do not know exactly what I am doing …’

- But when you have an idea?

‘It is always vague. But I am very well aware that the result has little in accord with the idea. It is good to have ideas. Even if one does not follow them.’

- It comes together?

‘It comes together in spite of it all.’

- To what?

‘I don’t know. I only know that it comes together.’

- When you talk of the Structuralism of Chomsky, who interests you precisely because, you say, he has given words a mind, you are demonstrating very intellectual preoccupations. In painting, you are seeking a sort of savage state. This is an aesthetic choice you follow across the painting?

‘My approach is destructive and contrary to existing systems of analysis. In search of an intelligence of events that do not require formal instruction. Our education destroys mankind. Chomsky shows that children are capable of combining words in an intrinsic way. When one teaches them the rules, they fail. It is the same in the domain of images. Man is capable of structuring his sensory and visual impressions quite naturally. Gestalt psychology demonstrates this. This capacity has nothing to do with the capacity to speak. It has developed from sight, the capacity ‘to see’. The development of the ideas has a visual base. The word ‘idea’, which comes from eidos, shape, explains this.
*I reject systems of rationalization and am interested in them at the same time …’

- To reassure yourself that you are right to reject them?

‘To find the weakness. It reassures me to know that I am capable of reasoning. So I do not fall into a sort of folly. That is the danger. To go to the limits of spiritual possibility, to see if one can break the mechanism. This is perhaps the reason why artists do not often venture into these domains. Rational systems establish equilibrium and safeguard relationships with the external world …’

- You are into a way of painting where it necessary to forget oneself?

‘Easily.’

- You talk of the spiritual, but one perceives a sensory world.

‘That is the problem. An education which separates these two domains leads to schizophrenia and split personality.
Our education, apparently in innocence, carries within itself germs destructive of the mind. Basically, one does not really know what mental illnesses are. The day one does, one will be able to account for the errors of our traditional education.’

- What are you putting upon the painting?

‘A moment when everything is starting to tremble, to vibrate in a fashion that I do not control at all … which arrives … but not always … When it does arrive, the painting is swiftly finished. A certain trance occurs.’

Nordic painters have a scale of colours which belongs exclusively to them. They launch with a full brush reds, yellows, blues, violent and crude greens, as if to convey the light of sentiments conceived at night. Jorn is one of those who takes these to a very high paroxysm. For him, their presence is there throughout the painting. He has more to add.

‘I believe that through the colour there is an immediate transmission of the content of the painting. Immediate and global. For me, the painting ought to adapt itself to the conditions of the colour. Not to the composition. As is the case with other painters. To the extent of the colour, which is able suddenly to destroy the design. The initial composition. That often happens.’

Picasso has criticized Jorn for putting in too much. ‘Yes, but you Spaniards work with black and white, like Goya. One cannot call them colours.’

‘No?’ says Picasso. ‘Is not bread and salt a meal in itself?’