Jorn in Scandinavia 1930-1953

Guy Atkins
with the help of Troels Andersen

Jorn in Scandinavia
1930-1953

A study of Asger Jorn’s artistic development from 1930 to 1953 and a catalogue of his oil paintings from that period

Borgens Forlag • Copenhagen

Preface by the artist

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

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

I would like to express my thanks to Troels Andersen, the Danish art historian, and to my old friend the photographer Johannes Jensen, for their contribution towards the compiling of this detailed and meticulous record of my work.

The idea of undertaking the huge task of searching for these early and missing pictures came from Guy Atkins, who carried the job through on his own initiative from start to finish. It goes without saying that such devotion to a task which concerns me so closely has made a deep impression on me. Although the book deals only with my early paintings it has already begun to influence the way in which I now see my work as a whole.

Biographical Notes

1914-1938

1914 Born in Vejrum, Denmark. Asger Jorn’s name at birth was Asger Oluf Jørgensen.

1929 The family settled in Silkeborg, a small town in the centre of Jutland. 1930-5 Took a teacher training course and taught for a short time in local schools. Began to paint small landscapes and portraits in 1930. Made contact with the ‘Linien’ group of artists in Copenhagen.

1936-7 Studied under Fernand Léger in Paris.

1937 Large-scale decoration for Le Corbusier’s ‘Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux’ at the International Exhibition in Paris.

1938 First one-man exhibition in Copenhagen.

1939-1945

Married Kirsten Lyngborg in 1939. Lived in Denmark throughout the war. Had two one-man exhibitions and took part in many mixed and group exhibitions in Copenhagen.

1941-4 Was a co-founder and leading contributor to helhesten magazine. Other artists in the ‘Helhesten’ group were Bille, Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, Carl-Henning Pedersen.

1944-5 Important minor works of the war period were the Didaska *water-colours and the *Occupations etchings (1939-45).

1945 Change of surname from Jørgensen to Jorn.

1946-1953

1946 Summer in Saxnäs in Swedish Lapland. Travelled to France in the autumn and to Holland during the early winter. Returned to Denmark at the end of the year.

1947 Tapestries with Pierre Wemaëre in Normandy.

1947-8 Stayed for about six months on the island of Djerba in Tunisia.

1948 One-man exhibition in Paris. At the beginning of November the COBRA group was founded by Jorn, Dotremont, Noiret, Appel, Constant, Corneille. The movement lasted from 1948 to 1951. ‘Word pictures’ with Christian Dotremont (1948-53).

1949 COBRA meeting at Bregnerød in Denmark. Large murals by Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Stephen Gilbert.

1949-50 Lived in Humlebæk on the coast of Zealand and in the Islev district of Copenhagen. Painted the historical pictures, the war visions, and the beginning of the aganak series of animal sketches.

1950-1 Lived in Suresnes on the outskirts of Paris at the ‘Maison des artistes danois’ for about six months.

1951 Married Matie van Domselaer.

1951-2 Spent seventeen months in the Silkeborg Sanatorium undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. Wrote two books while in the sanatorium. Worked on two cycles of paintings: The seasons and On the silent myth.

1953 Made large ceramics in Silkeborg and nearby. Left Denmark at the end of October and has not lived there, except for short periods, since then.

Spent the winter of 1953-4 in Switzerland, where he made twenty-three etchings which were later published as Schweizer Suite: 1953-54.

1954-1959

1954-5 Travelled to Albisola, Italy, in the spring of 1954 and made ceramics there together with Appel, Baj, Corneille, Fontana, Matta, and others. Dream pictures and frivolous pictures.

1956-8 Acquired an apartment and studio in Paris. Paintings of major importance, like Lettre à mon fils, date from this period. Jorn’s breakthrough to maturity as an artist was reflected in the growth of his international reputation. He had one-man exhibitions in Brussels, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, London, Munich, Paris, Rome, Turin. Published Pour la forme: Ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts and took a leading part in the ‘International Situationist’ movement.

1959 Made a ceramic wall of gigantic proportions in Albisola in the summer and had it transported to Aarhus in Denmark for reassembly in the autumn.

1960-1967

Usually spends some months of the year alternately in Paris and Albisola, but travels extensively in other parts of Europe.

1960-2 Continued the series of modifications (over-painted old landscapes, etc.) begun in 1959. Luxury paintings shown in London. A first one-man exhibition held in the USA.

1963-4 Made some important collages which were shown in Munich and Paris, the latter as Reforme de la publicité. A large group of Jorn’s paintings was exhibited in Visione Colore at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. His works were also shown in The fourth Guggenheim international award in New York; Painting and sculpture of a decade at the Tate Gallery in London; and Documenta III in Kassel.

1964 First major international retrospective exhibition, mainly of paintings, at the Kunsthalle in Basel. This later went to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Louisiana Foundation in Denmark. Published a book on the graffiti which he had discovered on church walls in Normandy.

1965 Short visit to Mexico and the USA. Brought out a volume of photographs and texts on early mediaeval sculpture in Sweden.

1966 Spent the summer in London preparing for a one-man exhibition of paintings.

1967 Made a series of lithographs at St Gallen in Switzerland. Exhibition of acrylics in New York. New paintings and drawings in Paris.

Introduction

The year 1953, which is the closing date for this catalogue of Asger Jorn’s paintings, marks the end of the first two decades of his career as an artist. His professional career may be said to have begun in a modest way in the autumn of 1933, when two of his paintings were included in an exhibition which was held in the public library of his home town, Silkeborg. A few paintings from before 1933 have survived and are listed in our catalogue, but a glance at the section of early paintings shows that Jorn’s production as a painter began to gain momentum only from 1933 onwards.

There is no way of knowing just how many pictures Jorn may have painted during the period before he left Denmark in 1953. The number could be as high as a thousand or more. This compares with the figure of 855 recorded in our catalogue, to which must be added some further entries in the appendix.

When the question of a catalogue was first discussed with Jorn in 1961, it soon became clear that the most important thing to do was to look for the paintings from the 1930’s and 1940’s. A few of these had gone into well-known Danish collections, but most of them had disappeared altogether, so that neither the artist nor Børge Birch, his Danish art dealer, knew where the vast majority of such paintings had gone.

Jorn himself has kept very few private records of the works he has produced. In 1964, three years after research on the catalogue had begun, he found a small notebook which he had kept up rather sporadically, but which contained some valuable lists of works dating from 1950 onwards. This book will be referred to as Studio Book in the text (see Bibl. 179). There was an earlier notebook of the same kind, but this has not yet been found. Apart from the Studio Book there is a list of thirty- nine picture titles relating to the year 1940, and some notes in the artist’s handwriting for a retrospective exhibition, planned for about 1960, which did not take place. These two sources have been utilized but they are not included in the bibliography.

Every effort has been made to locate all the paintings of our period, but some paintings, as the appendix shows, are known to be missing. No doubt there are others which have eluded our search. We appeal to readers who may be able to supply additions and corrections. A supplement to the catalogue will be published if sufficient new material becomes available.

The title Jorn in Scandinavia refers to the fact that until the autumn of 1953 Jorn lived in Denmark, although he made frequent journeys to other countries. As soon as the war was over he made a short trip to Norway, and in 1946 he visited Swedish Lapland for a longer stay. He also made several other journeys to Sweden between the end of the war and 1953.

After his journeys abroad, whether to Sweden, Tunisia, France, Belgium, or Holland, Jorn used to come back to Denmark with all the unsold pictures which he had painted while he was away. The great majority of these have remained to this day in Danish and - to a small extent - in Swedish ownership. The title Jorn in Scandinavia therefore also recalls the fact that Jorn’s paintings from 1930 to 1953 are mostly still to be found in Scandinavia. It follows that these earlier paintings are almost the only ones which are well known and appreciated in Scandinavia, whereas everywhere else Jorn’s reputation is based upon his later work.

When Jorn decided to leave Denmark in order to take up the challenge to become a ‘Danish European’, this step proved to be a most important turning point in his career. It was only when he reached Albisola, at the age of forty, that he began to discover and fulfil his mature talents as an artist.

Needless to say the transition was not so abrupt as to have come quite unheralded. We shall see, in the chapter on the Silent Myth series, that the earliest gropings towards a genuinely personal style go back to the time of COBRA. But the COBRA movement, ironically enough, probably affected Jorn as much by the manner in which it failed as by anything it achieved. When the last COBRA exhibition took place, in the autumn of 1951, Jorn was lying critically ill with tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Silkeborg. It was then, while still in the sanatorium, that he began to reassess and replan his future. From 1952 to 1953 he carried out a huge programme of work. This produced few if any masterpieces, but it gave him the strength and confidence to embark on the crucial next stage of his career.

At the end of October 1953 Jorn travelled to Switzerland, where he spent the winter. The most characteristic work from this period was a series of twenty-three etchings which were later published under the title Swiss Suite. While staying in Switzerland Jorn was in touch with various artists in Northern Italy who joined him, during the summer of 1954, in making ceramics in Albisola.

Since Jorn’s stay in Switzerland lasted throughout the winter of 1953-4 it has been impossible to find an exact point at which to end the catalogue. Some of the paintings cannot be dated more narrowly than by placing them somewhere between the autumn of 1953 and the spring or summer of 1954. Our policy has been to include pictures that are known to have been begun in Switzerland, regardless of whether they are dated 1953, 1953-4, 1954, or undated. But we have left out any pictures which are known or believed to have been begun in Italy.

It was not long after Jorn had arrived in Italy that Carlo Cardazzo, the Milan art dealer, began to buy and exhibit his paintings. By doing this, Cardazzo not only provided the financial support which Jorn needed for continuing to work in Italy, but he also opened the way for him to reach a wider European audience just at the moment when he was ready to do so.

The years 1954-5 can be regarded as exploratory and transitional. They are chiefly notable for the ceramics which Jorn made in the company of artists like Appel, Baj, Corneille, Dangelo, Fontana, Matta, and Scanavino. Jorn was already an experienced ceramist by the time he came to Albisola. For several weeks before leaving Denmark in 1953 he had been busy making large and often intricate and unusual vases, figures, and dishes, at a workshop in Sorring near Silkeborg. A representative selection of these ceramics can be seen in the Silkeborg Museum (see Figs.13 and 14). But it was only after arriving in Albisola in May 1954 that he suddenly gained an entirely fresh insight into the artistic possibilities of the ceramic medium. He discovered that he could improvise the strangest and uncanniest objects directly by hand, without preliminary sketches or any mechanical intervention. This led him to a more tactile and impromptu manner of painting. His feeling for colour, too, developed rapidly when he began to use the brilliant and luminous range of glazes in the Mazzotti factory where all the ceramics were fired. It is curious to recall that only a few months earlier Jorn had described himself, in a tape-recorded statement, as ‘not really a colourist’.

There is of course no way of knowing how much of Jorn’s phenomenal artistic development during the middle ‘fifties should be attributed to any single cause. During the transitional phase from 1954 to 1955 he made two series of paintings in small format called dream pictures and frivolous pictures. In the best of these the ceramic influence is obvious: even occasionally down to the skilful embellishment of the surface with sand and tinsel. Although these are minor works they have a warm and glowing freshness. In this they reflect a new zest for life and a feeling of spiritual rejuvenation which Jorn experienced - like so many other writers and artists before him - on his first journey to Italy. The sense of liberation and adventure is reflected also in the ‘interplanetary’ titles given to some of the pictures from 1954, as compared, for example, with the claustrophobic themes and titles of the eight war visions from four years before.

Whatever may have been the exact balance of influences that helped to draw out the latent powers of Jorn’s genius, there can be no doubt that the visit to Italy played a decisive part. It was in Italy and soon afterwards in France that he absorbed from his environment some of the essentially Latin qualities that gave to his painting a new persuasiveness and brilliance.

From 1956 onwards the extent of the breakthrough which he had achieved became fully apparent. During the period from 1956 to 1959 (until work on the Aarhus ceramic mural brought everything else to a halt) he produced an almost unbroken run of paintings of the highest quality, including masterpieces like Guillaume Apollinaire (1956), Lettre à mon fils (1956-7), La décadence de Venise (1956-7), Le timide orgueilleux (1957), Alcools (1957), Attention Danger (1957), They never come back (1958), to name only a few.

It is not surprising that by 1958 the list of Jorn’s art dealers extended beyond Italy to France, Germany, and Britain. The galleries in these countries now began to find it worthwhile to keep photographs and records of the Jorn paintings which passed through their hands, and to publish detailed catalogues for the one-man exhibitions. By this time, too, Jorn had got into the habit of giving titles, dates, and signatures to most of his paintings - which he had often neglected to do before. With the help of such records it should not be too difficult, at some future date, to compile a catalogue of Jorn’s paintings from 1954 onwards.

Chapter 1: From naturalism to the influence of Paris (1930-1939)

Jorn’s earliest paintings from 1930 to 1934 were mostly small landscapes, portraits, and figure studies. Nearly all of these still belong to the original owners in various parts of Jutland, especially in and around Silkeborg. Jorn has spoken about this period in his tape-recorded statement from 1953:

‘The first impression which I got of the real art of painting was from a painter in Silkeborg called Kaalund-Jørgensen. I was then 16-17 years old. It was partly his own paintings and partly an exhibition which went from one town to another in the provinces which made a very deep impression on me. There was Scharff and there was Søndergaard and there were some lovely paintings by Ejstrup, and there were some of Axel Bentzen’s best paintings. It suddenly gave me an impression of quite a new world of art. And I began to paint. And then I tried to become abstract. There was no abstract art in this exhibition, but the people from ‘Linien’ published a magazine and I saw what they did in this magazine, and it was exciting. And then of course I had read books on art in the Silkeborg library.’

Jorn’s earliest abstract paintings date from 1935 (e.g. Cat.38, 40, 41), a year before his first visit to Paris in the autumn of 1936. Looking back on this period from seventeen years later he has this to say about why he chose to study in Paris:

‘It was really just as easy for me to go to Paris as to Copenhagen. Both are, as it were, equidistant from Silkeborg, and Paris is after all artistically more important than Copenhagen.

‘I would have gone to Kandinsky’s school, but unfortunately he had no school. I knew his pictures from reproductions, because I had read the Bauhaus books which were coming out at the time. So Fernand Léger was the most modern artist in Paris who had a school. And there I got in.’

Jorn spent ten months in Paris during his first stay and returned to Silkeborg in August 1937. He has on several occasions discussed the pros and cons of the training he received at the ‘Académie Contemporaine’ of Fernand Léger. In the statement of 1953 he says:

‘I allowed myself to be completely guided by Léger’s academy and the strict discipline we learnt there. I made a deliberate effort to submit to it as far as I possibly could. But afterwards it took me ten years to break free from this influence. And even then something has always remained - a certain ‘structure’ which in a way I am glad to have. The French are more confident and serious when composing a picture than the people at the Academy in Copenhagen. This is the most important thing I got from going to Léger. Confidence in handling the picture plane is what I owe to him and to the French tradition in general. They taught one to work in a much more serious way. Yet at the same time there was freedom and independence. This is something a Dane cannot understand: that it is possible to be disciplined and independent at the same time. Our ideas of freedom are quite different. Ours is a spontaneous freedom, and that is why it is so difficult to switch over from a French to a Danish state of mind when one is first groping along and trying to discover oneself. Because somehow a man loses his own personality when he comes under the French discipline.’

There is a sketchbook from the Léger period in the museum in Silkeborg. This shows that while Jorn was working on larger compositions in oil and other media, he was at the same time making exact and painstaking sketches of common everyday objects like safety pins, a pair of pliers, etc.

‘I also drew hands and ears, as well as fountain pens, plants and everything I could lay hold of. I wanted to get to know every detail, every shape, and to be able to reproduce them as clearly as possible - in a perfectly cold, sober and unemotional way.’

In order to counteract the stultifying effect of the apprenticeship he had undergone in Paris, Jorn began to try out a number of different experiments from 1938 onwards. He discovered that he could turn an abstract composition into a bird merely by inserting a small circle as an eye. Doing the same thing in a more frivolous manner he sketched a ‘vacant-eyed’ cat called ‘Graks’ and two amphibious creatures on the same sheet as the outline of a straightforward ‘abstract’ composition (Fig.20).

If Jorn’s sense of humour acted as a liberating force, so did his firsthand study in Paris of works by the major surrealists:

‘I accepted the idea of rationalization by following the Dada-Surrealist language of Arp-Miro-Ernst, in order to finish up in automatic writing and spontaneous painting.’

A loosening of the Léger discipline is evident also in the ‘flottage’ experiments (Fig.24) and the drawings done with a photographic sprayer (Fig.21).

Jorn was back in Paris during the early summer of 1939, when he made some jewelry in copper and silver (Fig.25) and painted the Portrait of Genia (Fig. 16). At about the same time he illustrated and translated into Danish a book of home-made folktales by Genia Katz Rajchmann which appeared in 1939.

By the time war broke out Jorn was back in Denmark. He remained there throughout the war. These years of restricted movement gave him the opportunity to absorb the experiences he had gained abroad, and enabled him to take a leading part in the turmoil of activity which made Copenhagen during the ‘forties one of the liveliest centres of modern art in Europe.

Chapter 2: Small things (1940-1941)

In 1937 Jorn took a studio at 65 Bredgade, Copenhagen, in the same house as Ejler Bille. The two men were good friends, but it was not until 1940 that their paths as artists converged. Bille, who also studied in Paris before the war, had by 1940 developed a style which was unmistakably his own. His pictures from this period were made up of a dense conglomeration of small patches of colour which were placed alongside each other until they filled most of the canvas. This casual way of painting impressed Jorn, all the more so because it was completely opposed to all that he had learnt under Léger about the ‘discipline’ of abstract composition.

The blue picture (Cat. 162, see Fig.29), which Jorn discusses below at some length, is one of several all-over paintings from this period in which the influence of Ejler Bille is strong - so much so that in two standard art books from the 1940’s the picture is wrongly attributed to Ejler Bille. Jorn’s own comment on The blue picture runs as follows:

‘The picture is not composed according to a principle. All the little forms are heaped across the picture. The composition came by itself. I just began to paint from the edge, putting down one shape after another and so on until the whole picture was filled. It was Bille, I believe, who started this over here. I was tremendously surprised to find that one could make a picture in this way, by going from one form to the next and getting along without paying any attention to the picture as a unified whole. Perhaps it looks a bit cubist here and there, but it is exactly the opposite of the cubist method of composition. I only used this technique for a short time and then I didn’t need it any more. It was derived from my immediate impression of Danish art at the time, not really Kandinsky, although his pictures were at the back of my mind, but Bille and Richard Mortensen and the others. I chose the colours to express directly what I had in mind, but the French school also influenced my choice of colours. I don’t really feel that I’m a colourist, unlike Egill Jacobsen. Of course it’s all a matter of where one places the emphasis.’

The best known painting of this kind is called Smaating (Small things), Fig. 132, but there are several other pictures from 1940-1, besides Small things and The blue picture, where Jorn has applied Ejler Bille’s formula for producing random compositions. The aim was, as Jorn says, ‘to disengage myself from the schooling I got in France’.

In The blue picture the pattern consists of small coloured pieces which are neatly slotted alongside and into each other as in a jigsaw puzzle, with the joins clearly visible. At the bottom left there is a solid area which fans out diagonally across the canvas and then breaks up into a multi-coloured patchwork of islands, like an archipelago on a blue lake. This picture, by the time it was finished, looked more harmonious and well balanced than Jorn had wanted it to be. ‘I tried to do the picture as chancily as I possibly could. It does not look very chancy, but you must remember that I had a severe discipline behind me.’

Unlike The blue picture the surface of Small things has no blank spaces on it, but is cluttered almost from end to end with festive litter, like the floor of a room after a children’s party. Most of the bits are unrecognizable, but just above the centre there is a domino mask with eyes like peep-holes directed straight at the spectator. From now until 1947 the mask, with its infinite powers of metamorphosis and suggestion, becomes a favourite device of Jorn’s.

The importance of the smaating pictures of 1940-1 is of course more historical than intrinsic. They were painted at the beginning of Jorn’s search for a personal style and during an eclectic phase which lasted from 1938 to 1943.

While Jorn was staying at Refsnæs near Kalundborg during the summer of 1940, he made a series of deliberate experiments which were designed - like all his serious work at this time - to bring about a greater spontaneity of invention and an easier, more natural rhythm of composition.

‘I drew on transparent paper and then I laid several drawings on top of each other, so that they were linked and I could see them all at the same time. Each of the drawings was an abstract form, as clear and rich as possible. I simply tried systematically to vary some primary forms. I made a sort of ABC. I did this to find my way to the various form possibilities. It was very systematic work I did, more systematic than what I do now. But the forms were different from each other and broke into each other. And then I was inspired by the chance effects which the over-layers gave of their own accord . . ‘

This account of experiments with superimposed drawings comes in the context of Jorn’s detailed description of The blue picture, but it seems in fact to apply to another type of painting from Refsnæs. The key picture in this other style is Cat.174, for which there are three related studies (Cat.171, 172, 173). The series consists of variations on rounded forms: ovals, cones, circles, crescents. These are woven into harmonious and rhythmical patterns, with the masses evenly distributed and balanced out. There are no figurative references, except where the arabesques occasionally of their own accord give rise to identifiable features, like the human profile in Cat.172 or a prominent pair of eyes in Cat.173. At about this time Jorn painted on a barrel and used some of his favourite motifs there (Fig.30).

The Refsnæs paintings stand out as a first example of a deliberately contrived curvilinear style which Jorn put aside as soon as he had mastered its principles. Some years later, in 1946, he briefly reverted to something similar, but already at a much higher level of imaginative power.

Chapter 3: Didaska (1944-1945)

From the middle ‘forties onwards there were periods which usually lasted from one to two years, when Jorn concentrated upon the development of a particular theme to which he gave a name, like Didaska, Le droit de l’aigle, Aganaks, On the silent myth, etc. Sometimes he worked on more than one of these projects at the same time.

The first of these themes to be given a name was Didaska. Unlike later themes the Didaska drawings and paintings are the lyrical expression of a purely personal and intimate experience. The title ‘Didaska’ is made up of ‘Dida’ and ‘Aska’.

The most typical Didaska paintings are two-figure compositions. The heads of the two figures tend to be disproportionately large and the two personages themselves are either in close proximity or actually woven into a single pattern. Some Didaskas have a flowing lyrical rhythm, but there is also a more jaggedly birdlike version of the same theme. These staccato bird-figures sometimes occur alone. Only a few Didaska paintings are titled, but there are altogether at least ten paintings from 1944-5, and a few from 1946, in the Didaska style.

This style is rather easier to recognize than to define. The most obvious common factor is that the Didaska paintings and drawings are in small format. Their mood is delicate and fragile. The colouring tends to be warm and soft, which also applies particularly to the drawings. The Royal Museum in Copenhagen owns twenty-five Didaska watercolours which were bought as a set and most of them were exhibited at the museum in 1961.

The compositions in these drawings consist of single figures and twosomes, but there is also an oblong three-tier frieze of many interlaced running and dancing figures (Fig.34). Lawrence Alloway has discussed the prevalence in COBRA iconography of ‘the one, the couple, and the many’. The COBRA movement began in 1948 but long before this the Danish artists, including Jorn, were developing a common inventory of forms.

The three-tier drawing is interesting in the Didaska context, because it provides an analogy with two oil paintings from 1944 which might not otherwise be considered as related to the Didaska series. The paintings are called Sorcery (Cat.350) and The troll and the birds (Fig. 138). The first is the smaller of the two and has the gay rhythm of a carnival scene. The troll and the birds, on the other hand, is like a large and brightly coloured mosaic in which multitudes of small creatures and faces peer out and leer at the spectator.

Although the noisy crowded scenes in these larger pictures seem very different from the small and intimate Didaska idylls, there are some points of similarity. The troll and the birds is painted in the same warm, occasionally rather cloying colours as the Didaska paintings (the watercolours are better able to sustain the delicacy of mood) and it is possible to regard the cluster of gnomes, beasts, and toy figures in the big picture as an extravagant kind of Didaska anthology. At the same time, because of its kaleidoscopic all-overness, The troll and the birds *harks back to the *smaating pictures of 1940-1. *The troll and the birds, *according to Jørgen Nash who had this picture in his house until 1962, was painted during the optimistic summer of 1944 when it was felt that the war in Europe was beginning to draw to its close.

Chapter 4: Saxnäs (1946)

Jorn’s major paintings from 1946 were in two closely related styles. The culmination of the first style was the big Saxnäs picture (Cat.473; reprod. in colour, Fig.35), which was painted entirely in Lapland. It is one of Jorn’s rare masterpieces in an almost entirely non-figurative manner. The strong and confidently flowing lines of this painting and its deep and resonant colours owe something to the Didaska experience of the year before. If we want to look further back than this, we can see the beginnings of this style in the curvilinear motifs from Refsnæs in 1940. Although it is easy to trace the antecedents of the big Saxnäs *painting, it would be hard to define what it is that gives this picture its powerful and enigmatic presence. *Saxnäs is one of the peak achievements of Jorn’s early career as an artist.

The second type of painting from this period also has some connexion with the experiments from 1940, if only because on each occasion Jorn adopted a ‘scientific’ approach to a problem of art. The Refsnæs experiments had been synthetic: several drawings were superimposed to create a new and complex design. Now the process was reversed: Jorn started with a complex drawing and derived or ‘abstracted’ a number of smaller drawings from it. He also, at about the same time, made two ‘key’ paintings in oil, from which he derived several other paintings. Let us now see what the experiment with drawings was all about.

It was probably in 1946 that Jorn wrote an article, not published until a year or two later, in which he set out to discover whether so-called ‘abstract’ art contains any clear and meaningful symbols. The view that such symbols exist was stated in a book by V. Bjerke-Petersen published in 1933 under the title Symbols in abstract art. This book made a considerable impression on Danish artists of Jorn’s generation. Later the psychoanalyst Sigurd Næsgaard, who stood close to the ‘Helhesten’ circle, made a study of symbols in abstract art from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Jorn had for some time been interested in psychoanalysis. He had undergone long periods of analysis with the psychoanalyst Søren Westergaard, but he had never studied psychoanalytical theories about art at first hand. In 1946 the chance came to discuss this subject with Sigurd Næsgaard. The reason was that Vilhelm Serber had asked Jorn to write an article for a book which he was planning to bring out under the title Interessant Nutids-Kunst (Interesting contemporary art). The book was to contain essays on modern art by various Danish artists and writers. Jorn agreed to contribute a paper on the interpretation of automatic drawings, while Næsgaard - probably at Jorn’s suggestion - was asked to write on the relationship between psychoanalysis and art. It was in connexion with these articles that Jorn visited Næsgaard.

Like most Danish intellectuals Næsgaard owned a private collection of modern paintings. With the help of these paintings he was able to explain his theory to Jorn by using the examples on his walls as illustrations. According to Næsgaard’s theory every abstract painting contains a hidden image which the trained observer can discover and interpret in terms of the artist’s psychology. If there are other hidden symbols they merely support the main theme. Næsgaard pointed out some of these central motifs and explained their meaning to Jorn. Since Næsgaard intended to write an article on this subject Jorn helped him by making some sketches. In these sketches the central motifs of certain paintings were reproduced as directed by Næsgaard. Two of the sketches were published by Næsgaard in his article, alongside the photographs of the original paintings from which the details had been taken.

The most striking thing about the two sketches published by Næsgaard is the extraordinary crudity of outlook which they reveal. They are like a juvenile parody of Freud’s theory of sexual symbolism. The first of the sketches shows a copulating couple, the other is a rather unconvincing illustration of what the author explains to be ‘mouth fetishism’. Another thing which strikes one about these illustrations is the difference in quality between the two paintings which Næsgaard had chosen as his examples. One of the paintings is easily recognizable as being by Else Alfelt, whereas the other is by what looks like a very bad amateur painter. This lack of discrimination, the fact that Næsgaard saw nothing wrong in reducing two works of quite different artistic quality to the same lowest common denominator, can hardly have failed to make a bad impression on Jorn. He certainly found ways, from then on, for combating this kind of art criticism. The paper he wrote for Serber was a first but tentative step in that direction.

The publication of Interessant Nutids-Kunst was delayed for some time. It came out eventually (probably in 1948) in a small edition of 350 numbered copies, privately printed and undated. It had the format and layout of an art magazine rather than a book. Owing to careless editing the text unfortunately contained a disastrous number of errors and omissions, but in spite of its garbled presentation Jorn’s article is important for anyone who wants to understand what lay behind a whole group of related paintings and drawings which he made around the time of the journey to Saxnäs. We shall therefore have to take a closer look at the experiment which formed the basis for Jorn’s article.

The purpose of the experiment was to find out whether it is possible to speak of a single central image or motif in a complex linear drawing.

Jorn took one of his own automatic drawings as the basis for his investigation. It was a pen drawing which consisted of an elaborate network of lines, like a highly complicated doodle (Fig.37). Confronted by this labyrinth of lines Jorn tried systematically to disentangle it by removing, item by item, the ‘inessential’ parts. He compared this process with the way in which a sculptor carves out an image from a block by removing successive layers of inert material. Jorn soon found out, much to his frustration, that all the lines in the drawing were inextricably bound together. This meant that for him there was no such thing as an ‘essential’ and an ‘inessential’ part of the pattern.

He then decided to find out whether other artists would react to the problem in the same way. He took a proof print of the drawing to a meeting at which a number of Danish artists were present. He put a layer of tracing paper over his drawing and then asked the various artists in turn to pick out the most important motif. Everyone, as might be expected, produced quite a different result, as we can see from the three examples reproduced on p.(75) of Jorn’s article.

Not long afterwards Jorn took the proof print with him on his travels to Sweden and France. Whenever he met a willing and suitable person he put him through the test. In this way he collected tracings from Atlan, Dominguez, Wilfredo Lam, Matta, René Renne, Claude Serbanne, Vilato, Nils Wedel. All the sketches continued to look quite different, which seemed to indicate that there is no such thing as a single significant image in a complex drawing.

Jorn did not state this conclusion outright in his article. It was probably not until some years later that he began to realize the full implication of these linear experiments. What he was later able to deduce from them was this: If no two spectators can agree on what are the significant images in a given picture, then there can be no such thing as an objective analysis of the symbolical content of a work of art. This means that artistic symbols are open to a multiplicity of different possible interpretations. Jorn elaborated this theme in his book La roue de la fortune: Méthodologie des cultes (written in about 1951 but not published until 1957).

Jorn’s preoccupation with the analysis of patterns may seem to us like an intellectual parlour game, but it was more than that. For Jorn these problems presented a real challenge. His preoccupation is not only reflected in his paintings from the Saxnäs period, but it also explains his keen interest in topology a few years later.

The paintings which belong to this series are divided into two groups. The first consists of Magic (Cat.475) and its three derivations (Cat.476, 477, 478). The second group is slightly later and contains Cat.479 and its derivations Cat.512 and 513. The two key paintings, Magic and the untitled Cat.479, have a rather similar structure. This makes it difficult to decide which of them may have served as the model in any given case. Moreover it is impossible to tell whether a painting like, say, Summer night (reprod. in colour, Fig.36) is based upon one of the two key paintings or upon the drawing reproduced in Fig.38.Whatever the answer may be, this is one of those cases where the byproduct is artistically superior to any of its possible models: Summer night is one of Jorn’s most delicate and beautiful paintings from the middle ‘forties.

During the period which we are discussing, Jorn’s paintings and drawings were part of an inseparable activity. This integrated phase was at its height during the stay in Saxnäs and lasted altogether from the spring of 1946 until the spring of 1947.

In the autumn of 1947 Jorn was invited to speak at an international artists’ conference in Brussels. He decided to speak not merely for himself but on behalf of what he called the ‘Danish Experimental Group’.A group of this name has never officially existed, but Jorn was probably referring to a number of different groupings which contained the same nucleus of Danish artists, i.e. the ‘Helhesten’ circle (1941-4), the signatories of the ‘New Realist’ manifesto, and the artists included in the Gothenburg exhibition of 1947. Whatever may have been in Jorn’s mind when he spoke of the ‘Danish Experimental Group’ the name caught on. A few months after his speech the Dutch formed a group which they called the ‘Experimental Group of Holland’. It consisted of Karel Appel, Eugène Brands, Corneille, Constant, and others.

When the COBRA group was founded towards the end of 1948 the term ‘experiment’ or ‘experimentation’ soon became part of its essential vocabulary. By this time the idea of experimental art had been accepted, even if never clearly defined, by the artists of the three COBRA countries.

It seems that no other artist of the COBRA group, with the exception of Alechinsky later on, was interested in the intellectual problems which occupied Jorn, and which we have described in this chapter. Jorn stood alone in practising this kind of experimental art and in concerning himself with problems of symbolism and psychology. It was some years later that he drew a distinction between two types of experiment: a ‘scientific’ experiment which is repeatable and an ‘artistic’ experiment which is unique.

Although the term ‘experimental’ has been bandied about in art literature until its meaning has been worn down to almost nothing, it is nevertheless true that Jorn’s art today is experimental in the sense that he never works to a premeditated formula. Since the 1950’s he has increasingly chosen to gamble on the outcome of what he paints. This has resulted (on the debit side) in an unevenness of quality which one critic has deplored. But as a positive asset it is precisely Jorn’s unpredictable and Protean inventiveness that is the source of his artistic individuality and strength.

Chapter 5: Tunisian paintings (1947-1948)

Jorn lived with his family on the island of Djerba in Tunisia during the winter of 1947-8 and returned to Europe in the spring. It is not known how many pictures he brought back from Djerba. Galerie Breteau in Paris exhibited a group of Tunisian paintings in November 1948. The catalogue contained a text by Claude Serbanne and René Renne, but no list of pictures.

The only direct evidence concerning Jorn’s output in Tunisia is a snapshot which was taken in 1948 by the architect Marinus Andersen in Copenhagen, when Jorn brought some of the Tunisian paintings to his office to show him. The snapshot, which is not sharp enough to reproduce here, shows eleven paintings of which nine have been identified. Jorn probably brought back from Djerba at least another twenty paintings which are not on the snapshot. Some of these latter are inscribed ‘Djerba’ or have Tunisian titles or have been identified by the artist as belonging to the Djerba period. On the other hand there are some paintings with Djerba features which were almost certainly painted slightly before or after the journey. Such overlapping is not surprising in a painter of Jorn’s versatility. He habitually worked on several different projects and in more than one manner at the same time, trying out a variety of new ideas. This has given rise to some curious ‘anticipations’, like the very Arab-looking head (Cat.502) dated 1946, a year before Tunisia; and the occurrence in three pre-Tunisian landscapes (Cat.527, 528, 529) of flat Djerba-style trees. Such trees were probably evolved from the tapestry designs on which Jorn and Wemaëre collaborated shortly before Jorn’s journey to Tunisia (Figs.42, 43 and 45). A plan of theirs to set up a tapestry studio in Tunisia fell through.

Jorn has described one of his typical Tunisian pictures, entitled Djerba, as follows:

‘Djerba [Fig. 155] was painted in Tunisia in 1947. Djerba is an island in Tunisia. It represents a sort of tree, a tree of life, which is a typical Arab motif. And then there is a dromedary with a man on top, who at the same time acts as a sun. So it is a sun god riding an animal, with the Mediterranean at the back. Not that I want to attach a deeper symbolical meaning to it. It is merely that I got an impression of the motifs for painting which they use in Tunisia. And then the impression of nature. The beach and the Mediterranean, you see, lie behind; and then the birds up in the trees. It is something I have seen myself.

‘The dromedary had to have such long legs to prevent it from lying down in the water. I had to raise it up above the water level. I had to spread the things over the surface so as to fill the whole space. It is no use putting everything at the bottom and then having an empty space at the top, so I might just as well move some of it up. I work on the principle that the picture surface dictates the proportions and that the perspective does not have to be according to the way I actually see things. For example, the way I distribute objects over the surface is more like the way a designer of a radio set draws a model of the set on a piece of paper. Such a drawing does not look like a radio at all. When we look inside a radio we see a tangle of wires and valves and suchlike. But when we look at a diagram the whole thing becomes clear, and we can see how the electric current flows through the set. In the same way I laid out this picture so that one thing does not overlap or hide the other.’

The tree of life, which also occurs in some of the other paintings, has a flat closed-in shape like a pointed spade or paddle. The branches are simplified down to curved lines, with ribs which radiate outwards from a central stem or shaft. These trees are diagrammatic and they are apt to be distributed over the canvas as a decorative motif. Another type of tree represents the hand of Fatima, the fingers pointing upwards, as in Les deux poissons et la main de Fatima (Cat.575).

Apart from the landscapes there are two characteristic styles of figure composition from Djerba. The first type depicts a pair of semi-human beasts who stare at each other with hieratic fixity (Cat.560, 561). The bodies are a vertical network of adjacent lines, which makes them appear as if they were made out of thick wire.

The second type consists of a stylised Arab face topped by a headdress and seen frontally in close-up (Cat.568); this too is made up of linear patterns. Such patterns reach an extreme intricacy in Automolok *(Fig.44), where the central figure looks as if made from a thick mesh of twine. One of the finest and most sensitive of Jorn’s line paintings from this period is *Birds of Paradise (Fig.41).

The Djerba style has other minor attributes which it would take too long to describe here. The general features of this style are individual and exotic enough to give the work from Tunisia a recognizable distinction. Seen in relation to the COBRA period, there is a similarity between the linear style of a picture like Tunisian dream (Fig. 156) painted just after the return from Tunisia, and the big COBRA mural at Bregnerød (Figs.96 and 97), which has only survived in photographs. Then again, one can recognize the grimacing beasts from Djerba as the forerunners of the eagles and other symbolical animals from the war visions series of 1949-50.

Chapter 6: Word pictures with Christian Dotremont (1948-1953)

Jorn first met Christian Dotremont in October 1947, when he went to Brussels before his journey to Tunisia. The next year they met again and together they produced their first word pictures.

In this collaboration between artist and poet it was obvious that Jorn would do most of the painting and Dotremont inscribe the texts, but the roles could be temporarily reversed and intermingled. A painting like Je lève, tu lèves (Cat.588) shows that in the best of these collaborations, which went on intermittently from 1948 to 1953, the texts and images were completely fused and blended, like the words and melody of a song.

Not enough of these paintings have survived to show more than a few variations which Jorn and Dotremont practised within this genre. It is clear from one of the larger paintings (Cat.584) that the text was sometimes treated merely as an ornamental caption which ran along the top and bottom of the picture. Then there is *Tous ne m'aurez pas vivant *(Fig. 179), where the motto is written across the front, while on the back there is a fanciful dedication of considerable length and eloquence (Fig.52).

During the winter of 1951-2 Dotremont spent three months in the Silkeborg Sanatorium where, like Jorn, he underwent treatment for tuberculosis. While they were both in the sanatorium they worked together on a series of ink drawings which were published nine years later in a slim volume called La chevelure des choses.

The hospital sketches are in the second half of the book under the title Les imbaciles à la porte (Fig.50). One of the cartoons is set out in perpendicular columns, showing tiers of hospital beds and their occupants (Fig.51). The caption across the picture is SING-SING. SENG-SENG. SANG-SANG, which is a typical example of the black humour and polyglot punning in these drawings.

All the drawings in this book are remarkable for the way that the words and images wander over and into each other and become inextricable, and for the rough and smudgy self-assurance of the brush and pen strokes.

Word pictures belong to a genre that has a well defined history.Jorn himself made some delightful and intriguing pen drawings with long texts in Danish while he was in Djerba in 1948. His earliest venture in this direction was the lithographic text of The jade flute, Fig. 12,and in 1944 the curious Dida drawing, Fig.33.

So far only six of the ‘tableau-texte’ paintings which Jorn made with Dotremont have been found. This is certainly far below the total which they produced during the five years of their collaboration. A group of these word pictures (Dotremont estimates between five and ten) disappeared after they had been exhibited at Galerie Jean Bard in Paris in 1948. There is no way of knowing what happened to these or any other of the missing works.

Chapter 7: Le droit de l’aigle (1949-1950)

The earliest Le droit de l'aigle painting is dated 1949 and belongs to the war visions series. This group of eight paintings was exhibited in Copenhagen in June 1950, shortly before the outbreak of war in Korea. The full list of titles reads as follows:

WAR VISIONS

1 The golden swine (Cat.645)

2 Master and servant (Cat.655)

3 The lion's share (Cat.648), later renamed The eagle's share (‘Le droit de l’aigle’)

4 The pact of the predators (Cat.650)

5 The burning city (Cat.653)

6 The scavengers (Cat.654)

7 The bereaved (Cat.651)

8 The progenitors (Cat.652)

These visions arose out of a premonition of war, but they also had a personal basis. During the winter of 1949-50 Jorn was already suffering from the first symptoms of tuberculosis. At the time he did not know that there was a medical reason for the listlessness and depression which overcame him. He recalled this helpless sense of weariness and frustration when he made his tape-recorded statement for kunst three years later. There he refers, for instance, to the ‘feverish glow’ of the painting called The burning city which he describes as reflecting his own fevered condition.

The personal and historical pessimism which underlies images like Le droit de l'aigle was described by Jorn twelve years afterwards in a letter to Werner Haftmann in connexion with an exhibition called Zeugnisse der Angst in der modemen Kunst.

The recurrent motif of the Eagle is very explicit and easy to recognize. At its most typical it consists of a two-headed eagle which, like its heraldic counterpart, turns its two profiles to left and right. The jaws of the eagle are fitted with rows of teeth which are bared in a snarling grimace. The lower part of the body is either shaped into a monstrous head or, in some versions, the rump or underbelly releases a horde of troops like a troop-carrying aircraft or juggernaut.

Variations of the Eagle motif occur in many drawings and prints from 1949-50. These mostly express a violent intensity, but occasionally Jorn’s sense of humour gets the upper hand, as in the drawing in Fig.55, done with a matchstick dipped in indian ink. This sketch is a brilliant parody, made possible by the fact that Jorn had practised the motif so often that it had become automatic and could be made to serve quite opposite moods. A related water-colour drawing (Fig.58) gives a close-up of the bustling crowd.

After 1950 there are only a few examples of this theme, and all belong to the years immediately following. The Silkeborg Museum owns the Eagle painting dated 1951, from the fragmentary second series of war visions (cf. p.63, footnote 1). And there is an etching from 1953 called Le droit de l'aigle.

The theme was then abandoned, except that it sometimes occurs again in a purely compositional form, even in quite recent paintings.But the symbolism, which gave the Eagle theme its meaning, was too narrow and didactic to survive beyond the immediate situation of the cold war period.

Chapter 8: Historical pictures (1949-1950)

The Historical Pictures are a miscellaneous group of six pictures which Jorn painted from 1949 to 1950 at about the same time as the War Visions. The group was not planned deliberately but seems to have grown up casually, one subject leading to another.

The qualities which the Historical Pictures have in common with each other, such as the dramatic violence of the gestures and facial expressions of the main figures and the glutinously murky texture of the paint, are also characteristic of other pictures from this period. There are, in fact, no very strong reasons for putting the Historical Pictures under a separate heading, except that they are a curiosity: they reflect Jorn’s interest in the drama of history, even the kind of tongue-in-cheek history made when a Foreign ambassador presents a jet fighter to the nation as a gift. The titles, by their lack of cohesion, show that the historical associations were haphazard, and this is confirmed by what Jorn himself has said (quoted below) about the Nelson picture.

Five of the six Historical Pictures were exhibited for the first time, alongside twenty-five others, including two War Visions and some Aganaks, at Galerie Birch in Copenhagen in 1950. The sixth Historical Picture, Churchill's entry into Copenhagen (Cat.656), was not shown publicly until two years later. It may have been too large for the 1950 exhibition or perhaps it was not completed quite as early as the others. The remaining five titles, as shown in Birch’s catalogue were:

1 The spirit of "48 (Cat.660)

2 Retreat 1864, later renamed The retreat at Dybbøl, 1864 (Cat.65 7) 3 The order is given for the destruction of Copenhagen with incendiary bombs in 1807, later renamed Nelson orders the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 (Cat.658)

4 *Foreign ambassador presents a jet fighter to the nation as a gift *(Cat.659)

5 The fall of Hiroshima (this painting has not been identified)

Jorn has described how he painted and then found the title for the Nelson picture which is the most vigorous and best resolved painting of this group (Fig. 164):

‘The picture with Nelson who orders the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 was painted in 1949. It was painted under the whole tense international atmosphere of war at the time. But when I gave the picture this title it was not because it was an illustration of that scene, but only because the idea struck me when I saw the picture after it had been painted. Then I noticed the outstretched hand and it looked as if it were ordering other people to do something, and then I thought of Nelson, and so the picture got that name. The picture is not painted to a title, but the title is made for the picture.

‘I had merely begun to paint something without thinking what it represented. The man in the middle was at first an abstract form ; then I saw that it looked like a man, and in the same way with the other figures. The left figure was in the beginning a vase, but then it became a sort of animal with a beak. Then I felt that there was a special tension in the picture, something aggressive.

‘This is one side of the explanation, but then there is also this. One cannot help expressing one’s own inner feelings. I was ill at the time and I must have been fighting against my own illness. The picture therefore also became the expression of an inner struggle.’

The editor of the magazine in which this statement appeared added a footnote to say that 1807 was two years after Nelson’s death, but Jorn had already defended this historical lapse when he replied to a letter signed ‘Amalie Nelson’ in a Danish newspaper some months earlier.In his letter to the newspaper Jorn managed to increase the confusion by making Nelson give the order ‘England expects…’ during his posthumous attack on Copenhagen.

Although Jorn was using historical titles mainly as an afterthought, and partly as a private joke, one feels that in several of the historical and other anecdotal pictures the title must have occurred to him at some stage just before the picture was completed, i.e. in time to make the action harmonize with the title. Even so, it is significant that he was now beginning to bring an element of genuine improvisation into his figure paintings, just as he had been striving to do with his more abstract compositions from the time of the small things onwards.

Chapter 9: Aganaks (1950-1951)

Most of Jorn’s aganak paintings and drawings were made in Denmark in 1950 or in Suresnes, near Paris, during the winter of 1950-1.

The most static and monumental (and therefore untypical) Aganak painting is The golden swine (Cat.645), which was No.l in the War Visions series. The golden swine depicts an elongated hog, standing in profile, balancing on its nose a dollar sign enclosed in a circle. The pig’s teeth are bared in a twisted grin. Jorn has explained in a conversation with Guy Atkins that this symbol of the golden swine, like all symbols in art, has many different origins, meanings, and associations. He mentioned in particular: (i) the silhouette of the typical American car of 1950, with a dollar grin spread across its bonnet; (ii) the fable of the pig and the pancake: when the two travellers came to a river the pancake accepted a lift on the pig’s snout and got eaten; (iii) the circular sun symbol; (iv) Jorgen Nash’s Cantata of the sun swine, for which Jorn made a pen drawing (Fig.66).

The name ‘Aganak’ is no doubt partly ideophonic. It suggests emaciation, brittleness or toughness of skin, and a jerky movement or gait. ‘Aganaks are ribby, scaly, leathery or bristly low-slung creatures.’They belong to an imaginary genus which includes, regardless of size, a good many of the tough-skinned and encrusted species, from beetles and scorpions to crabs and crocodiles.

The scenes involving Aganaks are extremely varied and lively. A collection of pen drawings in the Silkeborg Museum shows some of the escapades and antics of these creatures, and some of the metamorphoses they undergo. On land they disport themselves as pigs, tortoises, alligators, or beetles; and one sees them going in for a good deal of promiscuous tomfoolery - jostling against each other and tumbling about. In the air they zoom around in groups of twos and threes as dragonflies, birds, flying beetles, or aircraft (Fig.69). There is also a bristly warrior chief of the Aganaks holding a spear in his claw (Fig.65).

Some of the Aganak sketches were intended as illustrations for a group of Jorgen Nash’s poems under the title The sky dragon and the sun swine, which formed the second part of his Songs of rage. But unfortunately this book had to be published without Jorn’s drawings, because there was no Danish publisher who was willing to go to the expense of printing the illustrations with the text.

In 1950 Jorn had an exhibition at Galerie Birch, with no less than twenty-eight Aganak titles (paintings and drawings) listed in the catalogue. Most of the titles have become detached, because they were not inscribed on the pictures, but even without titles there are many paintings from 1950-1 in which Aganaks can be recognized quite easily. They turn up singly (Cat.641, 642, 666) or in pairs (Cat.635, 636, 637) or as minor figures in a more elaborate composition (Cat.638, 643). The two sombre figures of Suicide's counsellor (Fig.67) are, in spite of their human pathos and solemnity, clearly of Aganak origin.

The Aganak phase lasted slightly more than a year. During that year Jorn was busy perfecting the morphology of the species, which he made his own with as much poetic energy and conviction as Christian Morgenstern or Edward Lear in their invention of new zoomorphic hybrids. Once the anatomy of the creatures had been fully worked out Jorn stored the image away for later use. In some of the paintings from the middle ‘fifties onwards Aganaks are among the more amiable monsters whom he is able to conjure up from memory.

Chapter 10: The Seasons (1948-1953)

During the winter of 1951-2 Jorn was working at the same time on two large projects: The seasons and On the silent myth. The first of these cycles was to have consisted of twelve paintings, one for each month of the year; but in the end there was a heavy preponderance of some months over others, with gaps in several places, as the table on p.79 shows.

The painting for May and the study for September preceded the other Season pictures by a year or two. The work on this series was begun in earnest while Jorn was in the Silkeborg Sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis. He entered the sanatorium in May 1951. Towards the end of that year he was declared to be out of danger and he was allowed to begin painting. Appropriately he chose The wheel of life as his opening theme.

There is a continuity of style between Nos.II and III of the January paintings and the solitary May painting which was begun in 1948, but Jorn modified the style somewhat by a thickening of the paint surface and a greater use of symbolical forms and colours. Even so, there is a clear affinity between the January and May paintings in their neat all- over patterning of small faces, done with a draughtsmanlike precision and an evenness of texture reminiscent of tapestries.

Jorn has described the January theme in his statement from 1953. The motif of the wheel, as seen in these January pictures, depicts the various phases of human life from birth to death as a pageant rotating in an anti-clockwise direction.

‘The wheel of life was the first picture which I painted after my recovery. I was given a studio in the mortuary at the sanatorium. The corpses came in at one end and I came in at the other, so we competed for who would win. That was how I painted the wheel of life. It is an old motif which can be found in churches. Down below can be seen the earth with children growing out of it. At the top they fall in love: there are two lovers and a pregnant woman. Then they fall down on the other side and die. The dead go back into the earth and so life seems to grow forth out of death.

‘The result is a circular composition. It may look confused but in fact it is very strictly composed. I have put two large circles of the spectrum into the picture. These rightly contain all the colours, because I was depicting the whole of life. But the two circles are juxtaposed in such a way that there is tension between the colours, and this gives the picture its colour composition…’

The wheel is a symbol which has many different shades of meaning in European folklore. At its most general it symbolizes the whole cycle of birth and death, but it also stands for human destiny as ruled by fortune and chance. Then again the wheel represents the circle of the Zodiac, both as a guide to the planets and the seasons, and as a calendar for the successive tasks of the farmer’s year.

Jorn, as a collector of folklore, was aware of these and other more recondite meanings. But for him at this moment the Wheel of Life was a metaphor for his own recovery from illness and his renewed stake in the fortunes and hazards of life.

There is no way of knowing whether the fifteen Season pictures in our table include everything of importance that has survived from this cycle, or whether more pictures are likely to turn up. The internal numbering of the January paintings shows that one of these (No.IIa) remains untraced. But apart from this gap there is no evidence, nor does Jorn remember, that any major picture is missing.

These paintings have never been exhibited as a group: in fact this is the first time that the data about them and a complete set of photographs have been assembled.

The series consists of ten full-scale works and five studies. The photographs show that when there is more than one painting for a given month we are dealing with successive versions of the same composition, not with different or alternative compositions.

The various successive renderings of the same theme follow one another chronologically, but not necessarily in an ascending order of merit. On the contrary, at this period of Jorn’s career a mere sketch is

The Seasons: 1948-1953

likely to be just as good if not better than a more highly ‘perfected’ version. The January sequence, for instance, begins with a loosely improvised oil sketch which has great freshness and charm (Fig. 169). This is followed by two set-pieces which are much more detailed and tightly controlled (Cat.797 and 807). The last of these only survives in the photograph, because the original was so badly damaged by fire that it cannot be restored. Jorn has referred to this picture, in conversation with the author, as ‘the fourth, final and best resolved, but also already rather tired’ January painting.

For April there are two fairly similar pictures (Cat.741 and 773). It would be interesting to compare their qualities if they could be seen side by side.

The June group contains one anomaly, the untitled No.IX which the artist considers to be ‘probably exploratory for a June painting’, but it does not resemble any of the other Season pictures very closely.

The two principal June paintings (Figs.71 and 73) are identical in size; although the latter remained unfinished the artist has signed and dated it, to show that he did not wish to improve upon it.

While Jorn was still in the sanatorium and working on the Seasons, he was busy collecting material for a literary study of folklore which came out some years later. This work was published in 1957 with the French subtitle Les cornes d'or et la roue de la fortune: Méthodologie des cultes. The text was printed in Danish and French, with hundreds of illustrations. The book provides a commentary on the symbolism and folkloric background of the Season pictures.

Chapter 11: From COBRA to the Silent Myth (1948-1953)

The Silent Myth cycle belongs to a shorter but more intense and vital evolution than The seasons. Its origins go back only a couple of years to the time of the COBRA movement, but its effects reach across to the mature works of the middle ‘fifties.

The two big panels On the silent myth (Opus 2 and 7) were the largest paintings which Jorn had made until then. There can be little doubt that the stimulus to create on this larger and more adventurous scale can be attributed, at least partly, to COBRA. Big plans were in the air at the time, and when the international COBRA exhibition was held at the end of 1949 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, both Appel and Constant painted large compositions for the occasion.

A few weeks before this, during the late summer of 1949, a group of COBRA artists had met at Bregnerød, near Copenhagen, where they decorated a communal living room from floor to ceiling with figurative and abstract designs. Here Jorn painted a big mural which was unfortunately obliterated a few years later. Judging from the photographs (Figs.96 and 97) it depicted a bold and impressive pageant of beasts and men, grouped like a pyramid, piled high like a wagon-load of refugees or a carnival float. The dramatically linear style is reminiscent of a cartoon or line drawing rather than a painting.

In discussing the Silent Myth cycle it is necessary to keep moving forwards and backwards in time within the four-year span from 1949 to 1953. This was one of the most highly formative periods of Jorn’s career, not only artistically but also morally and psychologically. This period determined, to a great extent, what kind of artist he was to become. It was in 1949 that Jorn gave up experimenting with styles and began, gradually and with great difficulty, to develop the rudiments of a style of his own. The historical pictures and war visions stand at the beginning of this struggle for individual self-expression.

When considering these events it is necessary, for once, to take biographical factors into account: particularly the hardships which Jorn underwent during the years 1949 to 1951 and the seventeen months of illness, from May 1951 to October 1952, when he was in the sanatorium in Silkeborg.

Jorn spent the two years from 1949 to 1951 in extreme poverty, living at first in Humlebæk and Islev (Copenhagen) and then at the ‘Maison des artistes danois’ in Suresnes, on the outskirts of Paris. He was unaware, for most of this time, that he was already suffering from tuberculosis, although during the later stages of his stay in Paris he deliberately disregarded the symptoms, because - to quote his own words - ‘to become reconciled to illness is the hardest thing to ask of anyone who comes from one of the Nordic countries. Over there healthiness is the great and (to-day I have the courage to say it) sick dream.’

During the stay at Suresnes Jorn’s physical deterioration was hastened by undernourishment. His mother has given the following description of the state he was in when he returned home from Paris in the spring of 1951: ‘I have never seen anything like it. He could hardly walk. Tuberculosis and scurvy. He was all skin and bones because he had been starving. The children had to eat first so he lived on cigarettes and coffee.’

The misery and squalor of life at Islev and Suresnes, together with the pessimism that overcame Jorn during the time when international tension was mounting towards the climax in Korea, caused him for the first time in his life to express his emotions with unrestrained and unguarded violence. A sense of horror and disgust breaks through in pictures like Le droit de l'aigle (Fig. 162) and *The pact of the predators *(Cat.650).

Until this moment Jorn’s art had always preserved - from as long ago as his pre-war period of study in Paris - some elements of formalism, anonymity, and tastefulness. Now these restraints were abruptly torn aside to make way for the black and daemonic visions which crowded up from the subconscious levels of the mind. The pathos and denunciatory violence of the dark spectres which recur in these paintings is made all the more dramatic by the fact that they are thrust into the foreground of the picture plane, where they block out any possible source of light. This applies to all the ‘group’ paintings and makes some of them, like The pact of the predators and the big Churchill picture, nearly illegible.

As works of art most of the black pictures from 1949 to 1951 must be counted as failures, but for Jorn himself the question of the difference between success and failure ceased, from now on, to be based entirely on aesthetic considerations. ‘I discovered’, he wrote, ‘that a failure can sometimes be more valuable artistically than a success. It all depends on what has gone wrong and what has gone right, how much was put into it, and how much has been achieved in spite of everything.’ There are in fact some paintings from the period of the Silent Myth cycle that can be called sublime failures, for example Spanish drama (Fig. 115), but it is doubtful whether any of the earlier pictures (i.e. those from Islev or Suresnes) would qualify for this description.

The aesthetic nihilism of the dark paintings from Islev and Suresnes - their repellant texture and grotesque symbolism - makes it impossible to consider them outside the context of the personal crisis of which they are a direct expression. The origins of this crisis lay in a complex mixture of physical and mental stresses, which eventually altered Jorn’s whole attitude to the relationship of art to life. He began, from 1949 onwards, to allow his inner vision and mood to dictate what he would paint, without any regard for conventional standards of aesthetic decorum. His ‘expressionism’ dates from this period. But such was the ingrained habit of many years of a more objective approach, that the transition to a completely free and personal style took several more years to accomplish. The final breakthrough did not come until 1956, by which time he had again undergone those Southern and Latin influences (in Albisola and Paris) which he had rejected in the early ‘fifties.

According to the classical formula of artistic development an artist should have to struggle to overcome the subjectivity of his adolescence and youth in order to reach the objectivity of a mature style. For Jorn the road to maturity lay in the opposite direction. He had to reject and turn away from the disciplined styles which, one after another, he had invented and perfected during the ‘forties, because these styles could only lead him to a false maturity. At the end of the ‘forties he gave up looking for an external solution to the problem of style and began to turn the search inwards upon himself. It was through the ‘black’ pictures that he now at last began to discover his true language as an artist.

If one tries to assess whether the Dutch and Belgian painters of the COBRA group had any influence on the Danish artists of Jorn’s generation, the first thing that stands out is that in matters of iconography the flow of ideas was all the other way. What is now regarded as the typically ‘COBRA’ inventory of forms: strange birds, beasts, wizards, masks, a general mêlée of zoomorphic and human shapes - such motifs had figured in the painting of Egill Jacobsen and others since the late ‘thirties. In the work of Carl-Henning Pedersen and Jorn this imagery, at its best, carried other-worldly overtones of mystery, fairytale, dream, and magic. One has only to think of masterpieces of the pre-COBRA period like Pedersen’s The blue bird of 1941, or Jorn’s untitled picture of 1947 from the Jaguer collection (Fig.54).

It was predictable that such solemn and poetic visions could not be transported out of their natural Danish setting into the more mundane atmosphere of Holland or Belgium without becoming completely altered. The more powerful artists in those countries - like Appel, Constant, and Alechinsky - were able to translate the COBRA formula into a personal idiom, but they were followed by others who merely plagiarized the COBRA manner during the 1950’s and produced a flood of derivative and mediocre COBRA-type art. It is largely because of them that the movement has not yet received the critical attention that it deserves.

If Jorn, like the other Danish artists, owed nothing to the COBRA movement for the content of his paintings, he derived a great deal of stimulus from the general bustle of COBRA activity in which, during the first year, he took a leading part: the meetings, journeys, collective enterprises (like the Bregnerød project), and publications, as well as the controversies and ‘battles’ that developed, COBRA was nothing if not gregarious and assertive, yet below the surface there was an undercurrent of creative originality and seriousness. These qualities have ensured for the movement a lasting place in the history of post-war art.

Years after the COBRA movement had ended Jorn paid the following tribute to Christian Dotremont who was the secretary-general and chief publicist of the group:

‘It was Christian Dotremont who gave us our big shock (that was his chief function in COBRA), but in such a way that we, the painters, did not realize what was happening at the time. In everything that he said and did Dotremont never failed to impress us with the necessity for “experimentation”. And there was always something young and lively about this. Only now do I clearly see the importance of this personal force which kept the COBRA movement firmly opposed to any kind of aestheticism or formalism (not only classical formalism, but abstraction - whether hot or cold). Unconsciously we arrived at a unity of form and expression within an atmosphere of continual research and experiment. This gave us our new starting point.’

The liberating ideas of Dotremont and the influence of Constant, whom Jorn admired both as an artist and friend, must be taken into account when considering the Silent Myth cycle. But psychologically this series of paintings can best be understood (like *The wheel of life) *from within the context of Jorn’s illness and recovery in the Silkeborg Sanatorium in 1951-2.

For about six months, from May to November 1951, Jorn was confined to bed with pulmonary tuberculosis. Much of this time he spent in reading, writing, and sketching. During those months, while his life hung in the balance, he wrote his book, Held og Hasard. The book was ostensibly a treatise on aesthetics, a subject as far removed as possible from the clinical reality of life in hospital, but Jorn’s approach to aesthetics was not at all escapist. The spirit of the book is as selfquestioning, ironical, and obscure, as any of the dark paintings which we have been discussing.

During the autumn of 1951 Jorn’s illness was approaching its climax, at just about the same time as the final COBRA exhibition was being held in Liège. This event, because of its finality, took on a symbolical importance for Jorn. It seems as if the COBRA movement, which had begun with such high hopes and idealism, had ended in complete failure. All that remained now was to hold a post-mortem - and then to start out again alone. Jorn wrote to Constant: ‘I see that COBRA went from bad to worse. All the same I think we were onto something there… I ask myself, Who won ? We ? The surrealists ? Or the careerists ?’ Later in the same letter he added: ‘Perhaps it’s no longer possible to fight for art in a common cause. Perhaps everything that can be done has been done already…’

Towards the end of 1951 the doctors declared Jorn to be out of danger, and he was allowed to begin painting. With characteristic determination he at once threw himself into an almost impossibly strenuous programme of work which he had planned during the months of enforced rest. He seems to have designed this programme deliberately to test his strength to the limit. The two projects, The seasons and On the silent myth, were to occupy him for the next two years.

The poetic title On the silent myth is connected with Jorn’s belief that ‘the relation between visual art and the narration of myths must be silent, not illustrative.’ Although Jorn acknowledged his indebtedness to literature (especially the prose works of Johannes V. Jensen, Thøger Larsen’s studies of the Edda, and the poetry of the Kalevala), the paintings are not related to particular episodes in these books.

The two big compositions (Figs.83 and 176) have an epic quality, but their impressive aura of legend and their sense of high purpose do not make up for a lack of warmth and spontaneity. The aim which Jorn had set himself, to create an anonymous tableau vivant of legendary heroes and monsters, was inherently still beyond his artistic powers, and at this moment the effort was also beyond his physical strength after such a prolonged illness. It was only some years later in Albisola, with the big ceramic mural, that he achieved a complete success in the difficult field of monumental art.

Although this earlier attempt turned out to be a failure it represented what Jorn called ‘a settlement with my past life’. This settlement with the past can be interpreted as referring not only to the whole idea of the Silent Myth project, but in particular to the techniques which Jorn used. This was the last time that he tried to apply an idealized pictorial language towards expressing an abstract ‘theme’. It was also the last time that he used the whole cumbersome procedure of traditional easel painting for preparing a major work. In this respect the studio photographs which were taken at various stages of Opus 2 are most revealing. In one of these (Fig.80) the artist is seen stooping down awkwardly while he chalks in the outlines of the figures on the blank surface. The panel is propped against the wall in the ‘easel’ position, as near upright as possible.

In another photograph (Fig.85) the almost finished composition has been hung above a whole cluster of preparatory studies. These vary in

On the Silent Myth: 1951-1953

importance from small rough sketches in ink to detailed studies in oil. Nothing could show more clearly the conscientiousness of Jorn’s approach to the set-piece composition at this period. And it would be impossible to imagine a greater contrast than between this step-by-step construction of the picture, as if it were a house, and the spontaneity and creative violence of Jorn’s later manner. When he left Denmark in 1953 he gave up making ‘studies’ and began to work directly within the medium. The images appeared of their own accord during the act of painting and were never again deliberately imposed upon the surface. Instead of using an easel Jorn now mostly works on canvases that are laid flat on the floor or table: his only purpose in having an easel is to look at a finished picture or to add some last touches.

It remains to say a few words about the table which is printed here. This table includes the whole Silent Myth cycle as far as it is known. These paintings, like The seasons, have never been exhibited as a group, nor have the photographs and general information concerning them been brought together before.

Our table shows that for Opus 1 there were two preliminary studies, but there is no evidence to show whether Opus 1 itself was ever carried out or not. The two studies for this work were listed as Study 1 for Opus 1 and Study 2 for Opus 1 in the catalogue of the ‘Spiralen’ exhibition of 1952 (Bibl.93, Nos.58 and 59). The catalogue gave no indication of size, date, or medium. Since nothing is known of Opus 1 itself, it is possible that the two studies may have become amalgamated with the studies for Opus 2.

Opus 2 is one of the two large paintings on hardboard which Jorn gave to the Silkeborg Library (Fig.83). The related studies in oil are numbered from 1 to 4 in our table, but No.2 exists only by inference, since there would otherwise be a gap in the sequence of numbers. There is no logical reason why the unnumbered study (Fig. 173) should not be put as No.2, except that it is painted in a much freer style than any of the other studies. This suggests that it was painted later, perhaps even after the main work itself.

Opus 3 and 4 (a and b) are prints (Figs.79, 75, 77).

Opus 5 is a splendidly carefree composition which represents the highest point of achievement in the whole series (Fig.86).

Opus 6 used to be known as Mortal fear and had not previously been identified as belonging to the Silent Myth series. The study for this work is called Despair.

Opus 7 is the second of the big paintings which hang in the Silkeborg Library (Fig. 176). The large figure on the right is a portrait of a cousin of the artist, called Mads. As a young man Mads was the victim of a train accident, which left him a physical and mental wreck, yet he possesses flashes of an odd wisdom which Jorn admires. While Jorn was recovering from tuberculosis in Silkeborg he had begun to understand the importance that illness can have in shaping a man’s creative destiny. He wrote about this in Held og Hasard and he used the figure of Mads to symbolize the same thought. There is a separate portrait study called Mads (Cat.795) and an untitled etching of the same subject (Fig.84).

Apart from the studies shown in the table, the Silkeborg Museum owns an interesting sketchbook called *Élaboration d'un mythe muet, *containing pen and wash drawings (Figs.76 and 78).

The overall pattern of the Silent Myth series is curiously disjointed: at once grandiose and fragmentary, symmetrical and disorderly. The project looks as if it had scarcely been planned at all, but had grown as it went along. This would account for the three prints amongst the paintings and the general inconsistency of numbering. Obviously Jorn was not interested in numbering these works systematically, as is borne out by one of the entries in the Studio Book. There we find three studies listed in the same sequence as one of the major works, which might also help to explain why Opus 1 and the two studies for it have not been identified.

If we try to sum up the importance of the Silent Myth series for Jorn’s artistic development, we see that this group of works stands at the culmination of a quite exceptionally prolonged and arduous selfimposed apprenticeship. The apprenticeship began with the journey to Paris in 1936 and lasted until Jorn moved to Albisola in 1954.

Chapter 12: Murals

Between his first stay in Paris in 1936 and the time of the COBRA movement twelve years later, Jorn painted several murals, made two cement reliefs, and various movable decorations on doors and panels at the houses of friends. There is also a barrel, c.70 cm high and 44 cm in diameter, which Jorn decorated all round with compositions that are typical of his style from just after the beginning of the war (Fig.30). The murals will be discussed in some detail later in this chapter under their various headings.

Jorn usually worked alone, but in 1938 he and Wemaëre collaborated on a mural at Wemaëre’s house in Versailles. Some years later, in 1944, a group of ‘Høst’ artists, with Jorn as instigator, painted a set of murals at a nursery school in Copenhagen. Many of the murals are still there and in fairly good condition (Fig.95).

Another joint project took place at the end of the summer of 1949, when some COBRA artists and their friends met at Bregnerød near Copenhagen. There they decorated the big living room of a week-end house from the floor upwards and across the rafters and ceiling; even the doors were covered with pictures. Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, and Stephen Gilbert each painted large murals which have since been obliterated.

Apart from these collective efforts, Jorn painted several murals in private houses; and once when he was in Sweden he persuaded the architects Thore and Erik Ahlsén to place a brightly coloured design on the façade of a community centre near Stockholm.

Ever since the 1930’s Jorn had been intrigued by the idea of using art within an architectural setting to form a co-ordinated environment. His many murals are evidence of this interest. The two large-scale painting projects, The seasons and On the silent myth, also aspired towards recognition as murals, in spite of being done on canvas or hardboard. But in 1952 Jorn had to face the sobering fact that nobody in Denmark was prepared to offer him a mural commission. This was one of the frustrating factors which caused him to leave Denmark the following year.

Les moissons

In 1937 Jorn, working under Le Corbusier, made a decoration of 50 sq. m. for the ‘Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux’ at the International Exhibition in Paris. The picture was an enlargement of a drawing called Les moissons by a child of 12. The work is reproduced in Le Corbusier’s monograph on the pavilion Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis… S.V.P.

In the entrance hall of the pavilion, which was nothing more than a huge marquee, Jorn had another enlargement, Les encombrements de la Place de l'Opéra, dessin d'enfant (5 m. by 2 m.). A note on p.29 of Le Corbusier’s book says that ‘children [are] to-day the masters of mural painting’. The pavilion was intended to serve as a ‘Museum of Popular Education’ containing ‘a simple collection of urbanistic studies’ (p.13).

During the same period as this task, Jorn, Wemaëre, and a young Russian artist named Grekoff painted a very large Léger canvas called Le transport des forces, commissioned for the ‘Grand Palais de la Découverte’ in Paris. After they had done their work Léger inspected the finished picture and signed it. When Léger had left, the three young artists discreetly added their own signatures on a hidden corner of the canvas. The picture has survived, but owing to careless storage it is now in a bent and mutilated condition.

Sur la route

In May 1938, during Jorn’s second visit to Paris, he and Wemaëre painted a large mural which can still be seen in the attic of Wemaëre’s house in Versailles (Figs.88 and 89). The left part was painted by Jorn and is based on a preliminary study Sur la route (Cat.85), which belongs to the Silkeborg Museum. This museum also owns Wemaëre’s preliminary study for the right section of the mural. One end of the wall remained blank until Jorn had the idea of completing the composition by fixing a large chain, like an anchor chain, to the wall.

After the war Jorn and Wemaëre collaborated for many years in designing and weaving tapestries. Their collaboration culminated in Le long voyage, a giant tapestry measuring 1 m. 70 cm by 14m., which now hangs in the Senior State School in Aarhus.

A country house in Tibirke

The shortage and high cost of canvas and other materials during the war may have been responsible for some of the paintings which Jorn made on shutters, doors, and walls. But one must also bear in mind that mural painting belongs to a widespread Danish tradition, especially where public buildings are concerned.

Mr Marinus Andersen owns six large shutters (c.145 cm by 85 cm) made of insulating board, which he used as blackout shutters for the windows of his office during the war. These Jorn turned into paintings when he visited Mr Andersen on various occasions during the winter of 1941 (see Cat.229-234).

In 1944 Jorn made a whole series of decorations at the country cottage of Mrs Elna Fonnesbech Sandberg in Tibirke near Copenhagen. He painted fourteen door panels (Cat.322-335), and in the kitchen some black and white murals which have since been obliterated (Fig.93). He also made a cement relief outside the house (Fig.92). The black and white mural and several other Jorn murals are reproduced in an article by Troels Andersen describing ‘early mural improvisations by Danish “abstract” artists’.

The door panels from the house in Tibirke have been photographed and recorded in our catalogue just as if they were ordinary paintings. The reason is that the doors have already been taken down and the panels are quite likely to come on the market one day as individual pictures. This has already happened with two cupboard doors from another house (Cat.309 and 310). An ingenious dealer some years ago turned these panels into ‘canvases’ by gluing canvas to the backs and sides and adding false stretchers.

A nursery school in Copenhagen

In December 1944 Jorn and other members of the ‘Høst’ group painted some murals in a nursery school at Hjortøgade in Copenhagen. Those who took part were Else Alfelt, Ejler Bille, Heerup, Jorn, Carl- Henning Pedersen, Agnete Therkildsen, Erik Thommesen, Richard Winther. Some sections were added later by Egill Jacobsen, Constant, and Corneille.

Several of these decorations have been distempered over, but Jorn’s friezes and those by Carl-Henning Pedersen are still intact, as well as some areas painted by the others. The work was done during the Christmas holidays and Jorn chose topical subjects which he depicted in warm, gay pastel shades: he painted a walking Christmas tree and other seasonal and childlike motifs (Fig.95).

The murals at the nursery school were not commissioned but were done as a gift from the artists, just as some years later the decorations at Bregnerød were also done on a voluntary basis.

The week-end house at Bregnerød

In August and September 1949 some members of the COBRA group and their friends met at the ‘Frederiksholmshytte’ near Bregnerød, which lies about 13 miles north-west of Copenhagen in wooded country. The house was built in 1936 as a place where students of architecture from Copenhagen could spend their week-ends (see Fig.99). In the late summer of 1949 this house was put at the disposal of the COBRA artists, who offered to decorate the place from floor to ceiling in their own style and free of charge.

Christian Dotremont records that the Bregnerød meetings began on 19 August with a dinner for 19 people: 8 men, 6 women, 5 children, 2 writers, 4 painters, 1 architect, 1 student of radio electricity; 6 nationalities; 12,500 km of travel; 525 years.

The four painters were Pierre Alechinsky, Stephen Gilbert, Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen. Although they did most of the work, many of the others took a hand in decorating various corners, doors, and roof panels.

Photographs of the three largest murals were reproduced the following year in an architectural journal to accompany an article by Jorn under the title The experiment, in which he says: ‘Everything literally grew out of the walls through the direct confrontation of artist and wall. No attempt was made to distinguish between architecture and wall. We tried to cover everything that could be painted over.’

Jorn made several detail studies in oil for his large mural (Cat.617- 625), but in spite of these preparations he carried out the task in a fresh and vigorous manner. Dotremont described the mural as follows: ‘Asger Jorn made a huge fresco, extremely colourful, which I find perfect in being spontaneous and deliberate, like Asger himself; it both affirms and denies the wall.’

Most of the decorations at Bregnerød were destroyed some time during the ‘fifties, when the building was taken over by a branch of the Boys’ Brigade. The new occupants whitewashed the walls and repainted the doors, leaving only the figures and texts on the ceiling as a reminder of the COBRA visit.

Erik Nyholm’s house at Funder

Tn the same year as the Bregnerød meeting, three of the foreign artists of the COBRA movement, Appel, Corneille, and Constant, stayed at the house of the ceramist Erik Nyholm at Funder near Silkeborg. There they found a picture by Richard Mortensen which they ‘modified’ by painting over it (Fig.98). The picture is signed only by Appel, Constant, and Corneille, but Jorn and Nyholm had started them off. The two latter also painted some figures on the kitchen wall at Funder under the caption Nombreux sont les poissons dans l'océan - Nombreuses les femmes qu'on peut aimer.

Wall paintings like this were carried out on the spur of the moment and did not long survive the exuberant mood that gave rise to them.

Chapter 13: Danish art life in the ‘forties

Our bibliography of exhibitions shows that, especially during the ‘forties, Jorn took part in many different group shows in Denmark. The entries in our catalogue contain many references to these Danish exhibitions. It is very difficult for anyone who has not been brought up in Denmark to distinguish between the various groups and to know how they fit in with the other innumerable art organizations that are scattered throughout Denmark. The system is complicated enough to need more than a mere glossary and this chapter therefore goes into more detail than might otherwise seem necessary.

The two main driving forces behind the busy art scene in Denmark are, first, the associations of Danish artists, whose job it is to organize group exhibitions for their members; and, secondly, the art societies which exist all over the country to serve the interests of the art-viewing and art-buying public. Both types of organization have always been extremely active and they remained so even in the period of the German occupation during the last war.

It is now generally recognized that the artists of the war years were by far the most talented generation of painters and sculptors that Denmark has ever produced. The war situation drew these men closer together. They could no longer travel abroad and so they had to rely entirely upon each other for mental stimulus and companionship.

The magazine helhesten, which ran from 1941 to 1944, provided a forum for the more talented younger artists. Nearly all of them contributed articles or illustrations to this magazine. In 1941 they exhibited as a group in a large marquee at Bellevue near Copenhagen (Fig. 183) and in 1943 they held a fund-raising exhibition in aid of helhesten at the Pustervig Gallery in Copenhagen. An excellent account of this most active period has been written by the former editor of helhesten. The text is published in English and here is what he says about the associations of Danish artists:

‘An important fact to realize from the start is that Danish artists begin working professionally very early on, by which I mean that they have no other profession and as a rule become members of an exhibition group that arranges annual exhibitions in premises hired for the purpose by the group itself and from which sales are made. But these groups or associations are neither stable in themselves nor of stable composition: a constant process of filtering and circulation takes place towards the largest and most influential of them.’

The groups mentioned below held their annual exhibitions at one or other of the large exhibition halls in Copenhagen. The best known of these are ‘Charlottenborg’ and ‘Den Frie’. From 1937 to 1953 Jorn belonged to a number of groups whose names, followed by the dates when he exhibited with them, were: ‘Linien’ (1937); ‘Polygonen’ (193 8-9); ‘Corner og Høst’ (1942); ‘Høst’-meaning ‘Harvest’ - (1943-5 and 1948); ‘Spiralen’ (1949-53). But this is by no means a complete list of the groups which existed in Copenhagen during the ‘forties: others were called ‘Decembristerne’, ‘Koloristerne’, ‘Skandinaverne’, ‘Bølleblomsten’, ‘Billedkunst’.

There was of course a recognized gradation of importance between these groups. In 1947 the ‘Federation of Younger Artists’ Associations’ held an exhibition in Fredericia. For this exhibition, paintings were chosen from among eighty-six artists, representing six different groups. It is interesting to notice that all the artists in this show who later became famous were at this time members of ‘Høst’.

The more serious and ambitious groups had a literary as well as an artistic side. The ‘Linien’ group, for example, published a periodical of the same name which ran for twelve issues, followed by two special numbers. ‘Høst’ and ‘Spiralen’ printed poetry, essays and criticism in their annual exhibition catalogues. Writers and musicians were sometimes invited to join a group, and ‘Høst’ organized a number of concerts to coincide with its shows. This holding of concerts in conjunction with art exhibitions has long been a tradition in Denmark, but ‘Høst’ - in keeping with its reputation for being up-to-date - included serious jazz music and works by twentieth-century composers in its concert programmes.

Before and after the war there were several important occasions when paintings by leading artists from Western Europe were introduced into Denmark through one of the large group shows in Copenhagen. V. Bjerke-Petersen set the general pattern when he arranged an impressive display of modern European art under the heading Cubism- Surrealism in 1935. Two years later, when Jorn exhibited with ‘Linien’, the list of foreign artists - chosen by Ejler Bille and Richard Mortensen- consisted of Kandinsky, Klee, Max Ernst, Tanguy, S. H. Taeuber-Arp, Mondrian, Hans Arp, Theo v. Doesburg, Mirô, John Ferren. In 1948 the ‘Høst’ group invited as its guest artists the members of the ‘Dutch Experimental Group’, including Karel Appel, Corneille, and Constant. This occasion can be regarded as a prelude to the international COBRA exhibitions which followed from 1949 to 1951 in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and Liège.

The ‘Linien’ and ‘Høst’ groups attracted the best of the younger Danish artists, some of whom belonged to the two groups in turn. Both groups aimed at raising the quality of their annual exhibitions by including, as we saw, a selection of works by foreign artists.

At the lower end of the scale there were groups of the kind one finds in other countries. Some were on the lookout for new talent, others preferred established artists. But all these groups have one thing in common: their main purpose is to serve the artists rather than the public.

The public in Denmark has its own elaborate network of ‘art societies’ and ‘art circles’ to cover the whole country. Seen from a geographical point of view, the art societies (kunstforeninger) and art circles (kunstkredse) are mostly located in the provinces, whereas the groups or associations of Danish artists (grupper, sammenslutninger), whose members come from far and wide, are chiefly based on the capital. They radiate outwards from there.

The provincial art societies undertake to organize exhibitions in the provincial capitals, as well as in many of the smaller towns throughout Denmark. By joining a local art society, the ordinary man who is interested in art can keep in touch with current trends. If he wants to have pictures at home without going to the expense of buying them, he can join an art circle. These art circles act as co-operative purchasing agencies, who buy works of art out of the joint subscriptions of their members. These works are circulated among members and they remain common property until, one by one, they pass into individual ownership by ballot or auction.

Some art societies are of course more enterprising than others and the pattern of activity varies from place to place. The following quotation refers to some typical meetings organized by these societies: ‘. . . there exist, spread out over the country, more than 100 art societies whose membership is based on general interest in art. The various forms of artistic expression are discussed at the meetings held by such societies, lantern lectures and film[s] are arranged and now and again short exhibitions are organised, sometimes just for a single evening, when the artist in question may have been asked to come along and talk about his work. In addition there are a number of travelling exhibitions that visit schools and large firms.’

Enough has been said to show that a great deal of time and energy is spent in Denmark on the mere interchange of works of art between one place and another. Pictures are circulated and shared like books. The art societies are non-profitmaking organizations, but there are also plenty of professional and semi-professional art dealers in Denmark. The number of private art galleries in Copenhagen was not unduly large in the ‘forties, but their number has greatly increased since 1960.

In Copenhagen to-day there are, in addition to the recognized dealers, a great many people from different walks of life who run an art business from their homes. They do this either as a main occupation or as a sideline. Moreover the distinction between art-collecting and art-dealing is seldom very clear, as we shall see in the chapter on private collections in Denmark.

Chapter 14: Jorn’s one-man exhibitions and art dealers in Denmark

Among the Danish art dealers of our period there were several who stood out for the unselfish support they gave to the artists in whom they believed. Frederik Dam was one of these. He organized Jorn’s first one- man exhibition in 1938, soon after Jorn had returned from studying with Léger in Paris. Many years later Jorn paid tribute to Frederik Dam’s generosity and the warmth of his encouragement during those early years.

Frederik Dam was for a long time in charge of the ‘Joint Council of Art Societies outside Copenhagen’. This organization arranged travelling exhibitions which toured the provinces, especially during the offseason winter months. Frederik Dam himself transported, hung, and then repacked the pictures after each halt. The discomforts and hardships of these winter journeys would have discouraged any lesser man.

During the war there were two small galleries in Copenhagen which aligned themselves with the new generation of artists. They were Pustervig and Macholm. Pustervig took its name from the street where it had its premises in a small basement, with access to the gallery through a trap door. Jorn had a one-man exhibition there in 1942. These exhibitions at Pustervig merited a prestige out of all proportion to the modest size of the gallery. One of the collectors who bought paintings from Pustervig was Max Worzner, a prosperous tradesman from Viborg, who in this way built up a fine collection of Danish art from the ‘forties.

In the autumn of 1944 Thorkild Hansen, the founder and proprietor of Pustervig, moved into bigger premises at Tokanten. The gallery was combined with a restaurant whose entrance was in an adjoining street. The two parts of Tokanten, the gallery and the restaurant, satisfied an equal demand among the artists, who took it in turn to decorate the menu cards. The emblem on the gallery’s catalogues was designed by Jorn (Fig. 186).

Tokanten opened with a mixed exhibition, including four paintings by Jorn, in October 1944. At the end of the same year Thorkild Hansen showed a selection of seventy-nine works, including a large group of paintings by Jorn, from the collection of Mrs Elna Fonnesbech Sandberg.

A small and very personal gallery which sprang up towards the end of the war was Macholms Kunsthandel, where Jorn had a one-man exhibition in 1945.

Since 1948 Jorn’s sole dealer in Denmark has been Børge Birch. Birchs Kunsthandel (later Galerie Birch) was at first in Bredgade, but after closing down for four years during the ‘fifties it reopened in 1960 in Admiralgade. Jorn had one-man exhibitions with Birch in 1948 (no catalogue), 1949, 1950, probably in 1951 (no catalogue), 1953, and several times since then. The gallery’s records and files from our period were destroyed in a fire which broke out in Bredgade, but the catalogues from 1949, 1950, 1953 are in existence and contain useful information.

Apart from these private galleries, Jorn had an important one-man exhibition under the auspices of the Art Society of Copenhagen in 1953. This was a retrospective exhibition which consisted of twenty-four paintings from 1939 to 1953. Jorn not only selected the paintings himself but also supervised the entries in the catalogue. The titles and dates therefore have a special authenticity, and the choice of paintings gives us an insight into what Jorn considered to be his best work.

Chapter 15: Exhibitions and dealers outside Denmark

During the period with which we are concerned Jorn took part in many mixed exhibitions outside Scandinavia, especially in France, Belgium, and Holland; but his only one-man exhibition abroad in all this time was at Galerie Breteau in Paris in 1948.

Although Jorn’s reputation stood high with other artists, he was almost unknown to art dealers and collectors outside Denmark until Carlo Cardazzo, at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, began to buy and exhibit his paintings from 1954-5 onwards. After that it took three or four more years before Jorn’s reputation in Europe became firmly established.

The following notes refer chiefly to Jorn’s foreign exhibitions from 1936 to 1953, arranged under countries. For further details from after 1953 the reader is referred to the selection of exhibitions in Virtus Schade’s monograph on Jorn.

France

Before the war Jorn exhibited two paintings with the ‘Indépendants’ in Paris in 1937. During the same year, as we saw in chapter 12, he made some decorations for Le Corbusier’s ‘Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux’ at the International Exhibition in Paris. In 1938 he and Pierre Wemaëre were included in the ‘Troisième Salon Mural’ on the Place de l’Opéra, in a show called Les grands maîtres et les jeunes devant le mur. The masters were Matisse, Picasso, Delaunay, Gleizes, but apart from these names we know nothing about the exhibition.

After the war it was not until 1948 that Jorn’s paintings were again seen in Paris. In that year he became an active member of the ‘Surindépendants’, with whom he showed from 1948 to 1952, and again in 1956. It was in 1948, too, that his paintings from Tunisia formed a one-man exhibition at Galerie Breteau. This was followed by a mixed exhibition at Galerie Jean Bard. A handbill states that the opening of this exhibition was held on 7 November 1948, at the ‘Maison des Lettres’, Université de Paris. The names of the other participants were Max Bucaille (papiers collés), Appel, Atlan, Constant, Corneille, Richard Mortensen, René Passeron, Jozef Istler.

Jorn was back in Denmark by the end of 1948 and he did not return to France until the autumn of 1950. He spent the winter of 1950-1 at the hostel for Danish artists (‘Maison des artistes danois’) in Suresnes on the outskirts of Paris. Some works by Danish artists, including several by Jorn, were shown during the summer of 1951 at the ‘Cercle Volney’; while earlier that year Michel Ragon had organized a COBRA exhibition in a bookshop on the Boulevard St Michel. Another exhibition under the same auspices, called Cinq peintres de COBRA, for which Jorn designed the poster (Fig.194), took place at Galerie Pierre in April 1951, shortly before Jorn left Paris to go into the sanatorium in Silkeborg.

There was an interval of two years before Jorn’s paintings reappeared in Paris. At the end of 1953 the Musée Galliéra put on a selection of Peintures, gravures danoises, which included five of Jorn’s most powerful paintings from the years 1950-3. From 1955 to 1966 Jorn’s regular dealer in Paris was R. A. Augustinci at the Galerie Rive Gauche. In 1967 Jorn transferred to Galerie Jeanne Bucher.

Italy

In Italy Jorn has been with the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan and the affiliated Galleria d’Arte ‘Cavallino’ in Venice since shortly after he reached Albisola in 1954, but the biggest exhibitions of his work have taken place in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

Belgium and Holland

Between March 1949 and October 1951 three large international COBRA exhibitions took place in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Liège. The first, under the title La fin et les moyens, was held at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels in March 1949. A second and more successful exhibition (which got off to a good start with a scandal in the first week) took place later the same year at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The third and last major COBRA exhibition was held in the autumn of 1951 at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Liège. There Jorn was represented by four paintings, including Le radeau de la Méduse which disappeared a few years later in Rome.

Two private galleries, one in Amsterdam (van Lier), the other in Brussels (Apollo), showed a selection of COBRA works in 1949 and 1950. A rather more ambitious exhibition, which had been organized to take place in a small town in Belgium in 1950, was banned a few days before it was due to open.

It is a curious reflection of the Danish indifference to the COBRA movement that no COBRA exhibition was held in Denmark before the 1960’s.

Scandinavia

There is not much that need be said about exhibitions in Sweden. Most of these were of a routine nature. After the war it soon became customary once more to send touring exhibitions of modern Danish art to various towns in Sweden, especially Stockholm and Gothenburg. Group exhibitions such as ‘Høst’ and ‘Spiralen’ went on tour in this way.

More enterprising events were the mixed exhibitions of modern Danish art organized by Jorn and Lars Rostrup Boyesen in Gothenburg in 1947; and the following year by the Icelandic artist Svavar Gud- nason together with Carl-Henning Pedersen in Reykjavik.

Norway was the last of the three major Scandinavian countries to take an interest in the Danish movement and to hold a Jorn one-man exhibition. In 1965 Børge Birch put together a large and representative collection of 130 works by Jorn in various media (paintings, watercolours, collages, graphics), which were shown in Bergen and then in Trondhjem and Oslo.

Germany, England, USA

In Germany and England Jorn was almost unknown until 1958, when he had an exhibition of recent work at Galerie van de Loo in Munich and a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Other one-man exhibitions during that same year took place in Paris, Rome, Hamburg, and Düsseldorf; so that 1958 can be seen to have been the year in which Jorn became recognized in Europe as a major artist. Four more years elapsed before his first one-man exhibition in the USA.

Chapter 16: Public collections in Denmark

The museums in Denmark, with the notable exception of Silkeborg, do not possess many paintings by Jorn. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts (‘Statens Museum’) in Copenhagen owns two paintings, bought in 1953 and 1966; and three others which were presented by Mrs Elise Johansen from her private collection. The Department of Prints at the Royal Museum has a good collection of Jorn’s lithographs, etchings, and drawings, especially from the period with which we are concerned.

Fyns Stiftsmuseum in Odense was bequeathed four Jorn paintings from the J. W. Larsen collection in 1962, as well as an ‘Abstract Composition of 1935’ attributed to Richard Mortensen, but which Troels Andersen identified, during a visit to the museum in 1964, as a Jorn painting of 1940 (Cat. 174). This museum now also owns Feligrams (Fig.60), which it recently received through the New Carlsberg Foundation.

The Louisiana Foundation in Humlebæk is a privately owned museum of modern art which is open to the public. The collection is not entirely static, since pictures can be sold from it, but for some time the Louisiana has owned a few good examples of Jorn’s work.

The public collections in the provinces of Denmark - apart from Silkeborg - possess between them only a handful of works by Denmark’s best known living artist. Silkeborg Museum has been fortunate enough to become the repository not only for scores of Jorn’s paintings representing every period of his development, but it also owns a collection of his ceramics and tapestries, as well as a large number of folders of his drawings and prints.

The library of the Silkeborg Museum contains photographs, exhibition catalogues and a great deal of special literature relating to Jorn and the other artists in the museum’s permanent collection. In addition the museum has produced fully illustrated catalogues of the various one- man exhibitions which have been held there since 1959. In recent years Silkeborg has become the best documented centre in Scandinavia for the study of certain contemporary artists. For example the museum owns the entire graphic œuvre of Jean Dubuffet and a very large collection of the drawings of Henri Michaux, as well as the hundreds of miscellaneous works by Jorn to which we have already referred.

Chapter 17: Private collections in Denmark

During the period with which we are concerned there were several private collections in Denmark which contained a large group of paintings by Jorn. We shall refer only to the most important of these. The contents of the others can be found with the help of the index.

The biggest Jorn collection of the ‘forties was that of Mrs Elna Fonnesbech Sandberg, the author of a book of anecdotes about the artists whom she had met. The Sandberg collection contained works by Bille, Heerup, Robert and Egill Jacobsen, Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen and others. A selection of seventy-nine items from this collection was exhibited at Tokanten in Copenhagen in 1944. Six years later, during April 1950, there was a ‘sale’ exhibition of about a hundred paintings, but no printed catalogue, at Jugelsalen in Aarhus. Mr and Mrs Kresten- sen acquired the Jorn paintings that were on offer in Aarhus, as well as many of the works by other artists. Most of what remained of Mrs Sandberg’s Jorn collection was sold privately in 1952 and went into the Krestensen and Boldsen collections.

The Krestensen collection has since then remained almost intact. It is to-day the largest private collection in Europe of Jorn’s paintings, although it is made up almost entirely of early works.

Another large private collection was that of the late F. C. Boldsen in Copenhagen. Most of the pictures of this important Danish collection were sold by auction after the owner’s death, in 1954 and 1955. The Boldsen collection was never catalogued or exhibited as a whole, but some of the Jorn pictures have been on display and photographed at various times. Although there is no way of knowing the exact contents of the original collection, the ‘provenance’ entries in our catalogue are some guide to the Jorn holdings. What remains of this collection to-day is owned by the heirs of the Boldsen estate. The present owners did not, unfortunately, allow their collection to be visited and photographed. We therefore had to rely entirely on published material, photographic archives, etc., for our information.

The finest private collection of Jorn’s prints and drawings belongs to Robert Dahlmann Olsen, the former editor of helhesten, who also has a number of representative oil paintings by Jorn.

A large collection of early Jorn paintings is owned by Mrs Kirsten Lyngborg, formerly Mrs Kirsten Jorn, in Copenhagen. Outside the capital there are notable private collections in Aarhus (Dr Hans Kjærholm); Herning (Aage Damgaard); Holstebro (Frode Folkvang); Silkeborg (Johannes Jensen and Einer Madsen); Vejle (Mrs Inger Wørzner).

Apart from the bigger collectors in Denmark, there are countless people who cannot be called collectors in the ordinary sense but who nevertheless own a few oil paintings by living artists. In Copenhagen alone there were well over a hundred addresses at which paintings by Jorn were found. The situation was similar in the provinces. In Jutland there were Jorn pictures scattered far and wide throughout the province. The majority of owners naturally lived in or near centres like Aarhus, Aalborg, Esbjerg, Herning, Silkeborg, and Randers. But others lived in more remote places like Vorgod, Sdr. Felding, Ranum, Vejen, Vinderup, Thisted, Slette Strand, Sindal.

The Danes are probably the most avid art collectors in the world, although they tend to confine themselves to Danish art and to include only those foreigners (mostly of minor importance) whose works happen to have been exhibited locally. As a result there is not a single private collection in Denmark that is properly representative of any aspect of modern art as a whole, yet almost everyone owns pictures of some kind. The Rector of Aarhus University spoke about this in the preface to the catalogue of an exhibition of modern Danish art a few years ago:

‘In most countries’, he wrote, ‘it is only the “collectors” who have original works of art in their homes. It may be a sign of their special love of art or it may be the desire on the part of the rich to display their wealth. The middle classes are satisfied with or actually prefer reproductions of old masters or copies of famous sentimental scenes. The man in the street is not usually concerned with art at all. But things are very different in Denmark. In a normal Danish home, whether that of labourer or peasant, craftsman or smallholder, up to the level of professor or company director, everyone has paintings on his walls.’

The writer goes on to regret that these paintings are often of rather inferior quality. But this is surely inevitable when there is such a nationwide demand for original works. What is more surprising to the outsider is that in a typical Danish collection he is liable to find one or two really fine pictures hanging alongside others which are in such poor taste that they cancel out the good ones. The owner, in a case like this, seems to be unaware that there is any conflict of standards: in fact he may be planning to sell the good pictures and keep the others. Owing to this undiscriminating attitude towards modern art, pictures change hands more quickly and unpredictably in Denmark than in any other country. By way of exception there are some collectors, as already mentioned, who have a more consistent policy.

The sharp rise in the prices of Jorn’s paintings at the beginning of the ‘sixties brought many of his pictures onto the market for the first time.

This trade was at its most active from 1961 to 1962, just after work on the catalogue had begun. Some pictures changed hands so fast at that time that it was impossible to keep track of them. During the autumn of 1961, for example, a small painting from a private collection in Odense was sold to a well-known art dealer in Copenhagen. We measured the picture in his gallery, but before we had time to have it photographed he told us that he had sold it to a foreign buyer and that he believed it had gone to Venezuela. Letters to the address in Venezuela which he gave us remained unanswered. Nothing more was heard of the picture for several years. In 1966, as the result of an advertisement in the press, it was discovered again. It now belonged to a gentleman in France who had bought it from a small private gallery in Barcelona. So the picture could at last be photographed, five years after it had first come on the market.

For information about possible owners we had to rely partly on library research (reference books, exhibition and auction catalogues, newspapers and periodical files, photographic archives, etc.) and partly on the goodwill of people whom we happened to meet during the course of our work. Sometimes one collector would pass us on to another or tell us about a private gallery where a picture had just come in for sale. Our regular photographers - Johannes Jensen in Silkeborg, Claus Koefoed in Copenhagen, Poul Pedersen in Aarhus - kept a close watch for us. The press also co-operated as much as possible, and from the beginning of 1966 we published a number of advertisements which brought a good response.

Some art dealers were helpful, others stood in fear of giving away ‘trade secrets’. But even with the most willing co-operation from dealers it was often impossible to trace a picture once it had left a gallery. The reason is that the smaller art dealers in Denmark, as elsewhere, do not as a rule keep photographs or detailed descriptions of the pictures that pass through their hands. Yet without photographs there is usually no way of distinguishing between Jorn’s early paintings, since many of them are neither titled nor dated. These factors explain why, in spite of our efforts, some paintings have gone astray, and also why our ‘provenance’ entries are far less complete than we would wish.

Chapter 18: Collections outside Denmark

The early Jorn paintings in private collections outside Denmark have mostly been in those countries and with the same owners for many years. This applies, for example, to the paintings which are stored with Mrs van Domselaer in Holland; those belonging to Pierre Wemaëre in Versailles; Mrs Genia Richez and Miss Hélène Zylberberg in Paris; Pierre Alechinsky in Bougival, France; Nils Wedel in Orust, Sweden; Jon Streep in New York.

The Streep collection includes a group of small paintings from 1951-2 which Erik Nyholm brought to Philadelphia in 1952 to sell on Jorn’s behalf. A slightly larger painting called Au revoir Paris, which Erik Nyholm brought over at the same time, has since disappeared in the United States (Fig.6).

From about 1960 onwards a few of Jorn’s earlier paintings have begun to be sold out of Danish collections to Continental art dealers, especially in France, Italy, and Switzerland. Dr Paolo Marinotti in Milan is one of the few private collectors outside Denmark who has for some years made a point of buying representative early paintings by Jorn.

Apart from the Gemeente Museum in The Hague there is no public collection outside Scandinavia which owns a Jorn painting from the period of this catalogue.

Chapter 19: Titles

Between half and two-thirds of the paintings from 1930 to 1953 are untitled, either because they were never given titles or because the original titles were not inscribed on the pictures and have therefore been lost. This has resulted in the invention, over the years, of a large number of spurious titles. These were weeded out by the artist when he checked through the list of titles in our catalogue. The reader who wishes to refer to these earlier titles will find cross-references from our catalogue entries to parts I-III of the bibliography, where the titles from exhibitions and auctions are cited.

There is a discernible evolution in Jorn’s manner of titling his paintings, just as there is in the style of the paintings themselves. At the Dam and Fønns exhibition of 1938 the titles were as formal as the pictures themselves: Figures in a vertical plane, Figures in yellow space, *etc. The period from 1939 to 1943 was, as we saw in the earlier chapters, experimental and eclectic. For his titles Jorn often chose (until the middle ‘forties) imaginary names with a peculiar brand of ironical grandiloquence: *Akada, Feligrams, Gaganda, Gilmalaya, Gof Lublu, Gof Titio, Gofs-Kali, Gofs-Lygybri, Gofs Pops, Guganaga, Gurkalit, Guvno, Hassamin, Hyprimut, Landscape in Finkidong, Losko, Lupiti, Nuknik, Nunina, Plunk-Trompe, Pulidorf Composition, Solodelo, Syttakromba, Tadaska, Tolitikuja, Trinititus.

During the two years of travel from 1946 to 1948 titles are few and far between, but those that exist are mostly either place-names or have place-name associations, like Saxnäs, Sirène de Nice, Araba, Gulf of Gabes, Djerba, Tunisian dream.

The Jorn-Dotremont word pictures, of which not many have survived, carried titles which were either woven into or boldly imprinted upon the paintings, sometimes as an integral part of the composition.

For a group of small but characterful pictures painted in Bergen (North Holland) in 1952, Jorn invented humorous titles - no longer confined to Danish - which anticipate his later manner of titling: Happy Lincoln, Le monstre fidèle, Die heisse und die kalte Jungfrau. But these are exceptions, because during the early ‘fifties Jorn’s titles are otherwise free from irony and reflect his preoccupations, tensions, or anxieties: The bereaved, The burning city, The pact of the predators, Return to the detested town, Suicide's counsellor, Hateful togetherness, The wheel of life, On the silent myth.

By the time Jorn left Denmark in 1953 he already spoke French and German, to which he added Italian when he settled in Albisola, and English after his first visit to London in 1956. In French, German, and English he has, during the last decade, developed an extraordinary flair for coining apt and outrageous neologisms and puns: Frigidateur érotocable, Ainsi on s'ensor, Huckepack Depp, Wippernymphen, Soap show for Joe Soap, The White Hemming Whale.

The more serious titles have a haunting quality that makes them memorable, but Jorn’s titles do not usually provide anything more than a suggestion of mood or a private and therefore uninformative reference to the occasion or circumstances surrounding a particular painting.

In some of the non-Danish titles in our catalogue a few minor corrections of grammar or spelling have been made with the artist’s permission.

Chapter 20: Dates

Not very many of the paintings from before about 1950 were dated by Jorn at the time when he painted them, but he has recently sometimes added a signature and date to an earlier painting at the owner’s request. Even so, the majority of pictures from our period were undated at the time that they were found and photographed. It would have been very difficult to date some of them accurately without the help of the artist. During the summer of 1966 Jorn very kindly agreed to carry out the task of trying to put the whole collection of photographs into chronological order. It was interesting to see that, in spite of the many years which had elapsed since some of the pictures were painted, Jorn’s memory of most of them, even the smallest ones, was remarkably clear. It can therefore be assumed that the overall chronology is as accurate as it is possible to make it at the present time, but some adjustments may be necessary if new information should become available. Such information might be contained in private correspondence or collectors’ records. Unfortunately the records of Galerie Birch, as mentioned earlier, were destroyed by fire during the ‘fifties.

In one or two cases there was a discrepancy between the date that had recently been inscribed on a painting by the artist and the date which he attributed to the same painting when he saw the photograph of it within the context of all the other photographs. For example, the picture called Garden of Innocence (Cat.527) was dated 1946 by Jorn when the owner brought it to him for signature in 1962. Four years later, when arranging the photographs for this period, Jorn realized that the picture in fact belongs to a trilogy which he painted in 1947, not long before his journey to Tunisia. The other two paintings from the trilogy (Cat.528 and 529) are both inscribed 1947, so Garden of Innocence, I, has now been classified as 1946/7, with an explanatory note. Discrepancies like this were rare and always of rather minor importance.

The chronological sub-divisions in the catalogue are those which Jorn made of his own accord when he sorted the photographs. Sometimes he was able to separate the works from a particular year into several groups, according to the different places where he had been staying during the year. In other years (like 1943 and 1945) he found it impossible to do more than place all the works under one heading.

We have included, as far as possible, all the paintings that were begun during our period, even if they were not finished until later. This applies particularly to works begun in Switzerland during the winter of 1953-4 and taken from there to Italy.

Chapter 21: Materials

During the period with which we are concerned, Jorn generally used standard oil paints and he usually applied the colours by brush rather than directly from the tube or with a knife. He tended to work either from an easel or by pinning the unstretched canvas to a wall. The larger paintings on hardboard were stood upright, as seen in Fig.80.

It is sometimes difficult to know whether the medium Jorn used was entirely oil paint (including wartime substitutes and student colours) or whether house paint was used as well. Jorn did not begin to use synthetic paints with any frequency until well after 1953, but in some of the very dark pictures from around 1950 he sometimes intermixed varnish and lacquer.

Many of the paintings in this catalogue are owned by collectors who have never gone to the trouble of having their pictures varnished or, where necessary, remounted and restored. In quite a number of pictures the paint was found to be flaking off or cracking; in others the surface had been damaged either in transport or through bad storage.

Throughout the whole of our period Jorn painted on a great variety of surfaces, often using anything that came to hand. Amongst the solid materials we find board, hardboard, cardboard, plywood, insulite (builder’s partitioning); the flexible materials include paper (glued to cardboard, etc.), canvas, table or bed linen, patterned sail cloth, mattress ticking, lengths of wartime roller blind (holland) or other blackout material, and often hessian. The various non-canvas fabrics have been entered in the catalogue either as ‘cloth’, to cover the miscellaneous materials without further distinction, or as ‘hessian’. The latter was sometimes of the closely woven ‘burlap’ variety which has proved quite durable, but sometimes it was as coarse as sacking and has tended to tear and fray.

When Jorn left Denmark in 1953 he took with him a large rectangle of canvas which was painted grey on one side. This was a photographer’s backdrop which had been given to him by his friend Johannes Jensen in Silkeborg. A number of paintings on this grey-backed canvas have been found and are known to date from not before the late autumn of 1953.

Some of the transitional paintings, begun in Switzerland and completed in Italy, are on hardboard or insulite. When Jorn arrived in Albisola and soon afterwards came under the aegis of Cardazzo’s gallery in Milan, he had to conform to the international art market’s preference for paintings done on canvas. We therefore know that those on a hard surface were most likely brought over from Switzerland and should be included in our catalogue.

Chapter 22: Signatures

In spite of the large number of unsigned paintings from 1930 to 1953, there have been surprisingly few cases where the authenticity of a picture has been in question. Some of the earliest paintings, from 1930 to 1936, would have been almost impossible to attribute to Jorn on stylistic grounds, but there was nearly always some reliable information on the history and background of such paintings. Most of the earliest works, being almost unmarketable, either still belonged to the original owners or had passed through so few hands that their provenance left no room for doubt.

The signatures reproduced in this chapter are typical examples from different periods, but they do not provide by any means an exhaustive record. At one time or another Jorn signed himself by almost every possible combination of names and initials: A. Jørgensen, Asger Jørgensen, A. Jsen, Asger O.J., A.J., Asger J., Asger, Asger Jorn, A. Jorn, Jorn. The change of name from Jørgensen to Jorn took place in the summer of 1945, but quite a number of ‘Jorn’ signatures have been added in recent years to paintings from before 1945.

There are one or two cases where a doubtful or decidedly false signature has been added to a genuine Jorn painting by someone who wanted to facilitate the sale of the picture. But such cases are rare. The only false signature which has gained wide publicity is that reproduced on the cover of Virtus Schade’s book on Jorn (Bibl.398). This signature is the same as that which appeared on the cover of the catalogue for Jorn’s one-man exhibition in Norway in 1965. It was made by Jorn’s dealer Børge Birch and has very little resemblance to the real thing.

Chapter 23: Forgeries

In 1963 three so-called Jorn paintings which had been sold through the Danish art market were discovered to be fakes. Two dealers concerned with a whole series of fakes around this time were arrested and convicted, and the fakes were destroyed by the police. One of the false Jorns was called Shaggy animals grazing (‘Låddent dyr der æder græs’), painted in his manner of about 1950. The other two fakes were from later than our period. A few months after the arrest of the dealers, a Danish artist was found to have been implicated in art forgeries and he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.

In February 1964 politiken reproduced a genuine but unsigned painting by Jorn which had been ‘improved’ by overpainting and the addition of a forged signature. The date of the largely obliterated original picture was not given.

A forgery took place in Holland in 1964, when a crude copy of one of Jorn’s paintings appeared on the art market; and something similar is said to have occurred at about the same time in Milan, but we have no details of these incidents.

Apart from forgeries, four or five paintings have been reported to us at various times as being by Jorn, but which he himself has rejected on seeing the photographs. The most plausible of these is entitled The fair Helen (‘den skønne Helene’), 1944, 50x65 cm, which came to Denmark recently from the collection of the late David Thompson in Pittsburgh, USA.

Chapter 24: Photographs

The four earliest paintings, from before 1933, have not been reproduced but the descriptions and measurements will be sufficient to identify them. One of these pictures is already in the Silkeborg Museum and two of the others have been assigned to the museum by a legacy.

Apart from these omissions, practically all the paintings for which it was possible to obtain an adequate photograph have been reproduced in small format in Part II. Where no photograph was obtainable or if the photograph was of very poor quality, the entry has been relegated to the appendix. This also applies in cases where the information about a painting arrived too late for inclusion in the main catalogue.

Most of the photographs of the paintings were specially commissioned for this catalogue and no effort was spared to ensure that they should be of high quality. Where, as has sometimes happened, the quality is deficient, this may not be the fault of the photographer. Some of the paintings, as we have already said, were found to be in a very poor state of preservation; others had to be photographed in unfavourable conditions, particularly in outlying parts of Denmark. We regret these shortcomings and hope that they will be regarded with some leniency.

Apart from the pictures in small format and the miscellaneous illustrations in the text, we have included a section of black-and-white reproductions in large format Figs. 118-80. These are arranged chronologically and they are intended to illustrate the broad outline of Jorn’s artistic development.

Chapter 25: Literature and sources

Our selected bibliography contains a number of articles and prefaces by well known international art critics, e.g. Lawrence Alloway, Waldemar George, Werner Haftmann, Édouard Jaguer, Michel Ragon. But most of the literature comes from Danish sources and is not easily accessible to non-Danish readers.

The first monograph on Jorn was Christian Dotremont’s short essay in the COBRA ‘Free Artists’ series of 1950 (Bibl.255). In 1964 Asger Jorn *by Guy Atkins came out in Methuen’s ‘Art in Progress’ series (Bibl.362); and at the same time the Silkeborg Museum published the catalogue of the Jorn paintings in its collection, with texts in Danish and English (Bibl. 183). The following year Paolo Marinotti produced his illustrated monograph *Jorn a Venezia (Bibl.394) and Jens Jorgen Thorsen wrote on Jorn at some length in his Modernisme i dansk kunst (Bibl.399). Shortly afterwards Virtus Schade’s Asger Jorn was published in a Danish and English limited edition (Bibl.398). Gunnar Jespersen’s *De abstrakte, *Copenhagen 1967, came out after our book had gone into proof. It contains a great deal of valuable information on our period.

Some of Jorn’s own statements and interviews, particularly the tape- recorded statement of 1953, provide an insight into his thoughts and methods during the period with which we are concerned. A bibliography of Jorn’s own writings and a selection of interviews came out in 1964 (BibL363).

Our own documentary research included an examination of all the Danish exhibition and auction catalogues from the ‘thirties onwards. This led us to a number of paintings we might otherwise have missed, as well as providing a substantial amount of extra information about paintings that were already known. The library of the Royal Museum in Copenhagen owns a very fine collection of exhibition and auction catalogues relating to Danish art. We are grateful to Mr Lars Rostrup Boyesen for his permission to consult this material and for his personal help in all matters connected with our library research in Copenhagen. Mr Peder Nielsen, the curator and librarian of the Silkeborg Museum, also gave the greatest possible encouragement and assistance to our project.

The library of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam specializes in art literature of the twentieth century and owns some rare documents from the COBRA period, as well as a good collection of exhibition catalogues from Dutch and foreign exhibitions.

In other countries it is often very difficult to find such material. In Paris, for example, there is no public library that owns a set of ‘Surindépendants’ catalogues. Such documents can only be found by calling on private individuals. In this case Monsieur R. Mendès-France, who has for many years been the president of the ‘Surindépendants’, kindly allowed us to consult his complete set of catalogues.

The two largest firms of art auctioneers in Copenhagen, Arne Bruun Rasmussen and Kunsthallens Auktioner, were a valuable source of information to us. More than a hundred Jorn paintings have passed through the Copenhagen auction rooms since 1950. Owing to the generous co-operation of these two firms of auctioneers we were able to trace nearly all the Jorn paintings - however long ago the sale had taken place - from the sale room to the new owners.

Most Danish collectors do not keep any written records of the exhibitions in which their pictures have appeared nor any memorandum on provenance or date of purchase. There are, however, some notable exceptions among the private collectors we met: Mr Kresten Krestensen has up-to-date information about all the works in his collection;Mr Erling Koefoed and Mrs Elise Johansen have published catalogues of their collections; Mr Dahlmann Olsen possesses records going back to the time of helhesten and before: he has recently presented the helhesten archives to the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Other collectors, like Mr Marinus Andersen and Mr Frost Larsen, have kept correspondence and photographs from the beginning of their association with Jorn. But in most cases - and bearing in mind that there are more than two hundred owners of early Jorn paintings in Denmark - it was not possible to obtain reliable information on provenance.

We did not make a detailed first-hand study of Danish newspaper files. Here we relied mainly on the volumes of newspaper cuttings in the Silkeborg Museum and on a collection of earlier cuttings which Mr Richard Winther very kindly presented to us.