Asger Jorn - Supplement - Paintings 1930-1973

Guy Atkins
with the help of Troels Andersen

Asger Jorn

Supplement
to the œuvre catalogue of his paintings
from 1930 to 1973

The Asger Jorn Foundation
in association with
Lund Humphries • London

Preface

This supplement to the œuvre catalogue of Asger Jorn’s paintings contains new descriptions of pictures that have come to light since the publication of Asger Jorn: the final years in 1980. In addition to these new discoveries, all the entries that were contained in the appendixes to the three volumes have also been included. Both groups of pictures are now integrated and placed in a single chronological order. This arrangement should make for ease of reference, provided that the key letter ‘S’ for ‘Supplement’ is always placed before the numeral.

Just before going to press three previously unknown paintings came to light. These have been included as addenda, bringing the total of new discoveries to exactly one hundred.

If any further Jorn paintings should emerge, the owners are asked to send details to the Silkeborg Museum of Art where all such records are kept.

Pierre Alechinsky

From the time of the cobra movement, when he was the youngest member of the inner group, Alechinsky kept in touch with Jorn and they became good friends.

When the new building of the Silkeborg Museum of Art was inaugurated in 1982, Troels Andersen, the director of the museum, invited Pierre Alechinsky to make the opening speech. Alechinsky spoke in French.

‘It’s in the bag!’, Jorn used to say in moments of triumph, grabbing hold of an imaginary bag and tying a firm knot in it.

Controversial as always, this museum is his posthumous scheme for a Utopia. The museum is a masterpiece of unselfish planning, a timefuse placed by Troels Andersen, its curator, at the entrance to Silkeborg.

Jorn never limited himself to his own achievements. Towards the end of the 1950s he had no sooner collected an anthology of his own work, than he began to choose, acquire and assemble the works of his fellow artists and rivals. Some were close contemporaries, others were more remote: be they regional, national or nomadic artists like himself. He was a voluntary exile, a wandering theorist, a pictorial showman.

If the late master of this building were still alive today, he would continue to thumb his nose at pedants, as when poking tongue-in-cheek fun at a leading structuralist [in La langue verte et la cuite - ed.]. At the same time, he himself rejected all personal honours and easy rewards. At private views like this he distinguished himself by his absence, having flitted off to Ireland or Normandy on a pressing assignment to chase after some convoluted scrolls.

Another absentee, Christian Dotremont, once wrote a humorous dedication in indian ink to a Danish damsel he fancied:

Dearest, when you read this
I shall be alive!

Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to discover a masterly collection put here for all to see. When you see it, Jorn will be alive.

Guy Atkins

This extract is taken, with minor changes, from a text published in ART MONTHLY (London) in 1983, on the occasion of the Jorn retrospective at the Barbican Centre.

One of the things that struck me about Jorn’s personality, when I met him in 1956, was his bizarre sense of humour, which expressed itself at that time in French. Later he learnt fluent but idiosyncratic English. He would sometimes coin an English word, such as the verb ‘grap’, meaning to grasp or grapple or come to grips with, as in the statement, ‘He don’t grap it’. And he used ‘abandooned’, certainly a more poignant and evocative word than ‘abandoned’. I have a letter from him which contains the following passage:

I just wrote an answer to a danisk woman critic Elsa Gress where I explained my whole genesis-story. She is a bluestocking dreaming about a new androgyne specie of human being. I called it NON PATRIARCAL PATRIOTISM some observations (studies) of the androgyne constitutions among louses, and their importance in our considerations about social human behaviour.

The development of a creation myth, based upon androgynous lice, remained one of Jorn’s unfulfilled projects.

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

During my first trip to Denmark in the summer of 1961, I wouldn’t have got far in my researches without the help of the art historian Troels Andersen. He is best known in Europe as a leading authority on Malevich, but he knew the Danish art scene inside out. Troels and I travelled far and wide into the most obscure corners of Jutland. Our collaboration has spanned more than two decades and covers the present ‘supplement’.

Jorn proved to have a needle-sharp memory when looking at photographs of his early work. After a while my flood of photos began to depress him. In his preface to the first volume, Jorn in Scandinavia, he wrote: 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 …

Jorn was a voracious reader and probably the most prolific artist-writer of modern times. In 1964, to commemorate his fiftieth birthday, I co-produced a bibliography of his writings. His articles and books amounted to an astonishing 193 titles, not counting interviews. Enough published material there to gain him tenure in any university which might be looking for a ‘professor of things in general’. His range of interests was staggeringly wide, even including economics. For his book on Value and the economy (in Danish), he grew a Karl Marxian spade-shaped beard, so that his portrait as an economist could be shown on the front cover of the book.

His philosophical theories varied from extreme prolixity to diagrammatical neatness. These schemas (I was told by an expert) resemble the involuted precision of diagrams produced by patients in mental hospitals! I once had the temerity to introduce Jorn to a professor of philosophy at Oxford. The meeting was not a success. Jorn happened to be in his most discursive and argumentative mood. My philosopher friend tried in vain to pin him down to the rules of logical discussion. Not a hope! The encounter suggested to me the dilemma suffered by a chess player who moves his pieces according to the rules, but finds himself up against a football player who jumps on the table and kicks the pieces around. I’m glad to say there was no actual quarrel, but neither was there a meeting of minds. Some time later Jorn fared better with the mediaevalist scholar, Arthur Hatto. With him he could discuss the migrations and feuds of tribes like the Goths and Visigoths during the Dark Ages, which was Jorn’s favourite period. A two-volume work of his on Theodoric the Goth was published posthumously.

Jorn died of lung cancer at the age of 59. His grave is in Gotland, the Swedish island where he collected much of his material on Theodoric.

Jean Dubuffet

In 1961, Jorn and Dubuffet made four double-sided records of musical ‘duets’, with titles like Broken Nose, Mosquito, Blood, consisting of cacophonous bursts of anti-music.

During the same year the Silkeborg museum held an exhibition of Dubuffet’s graphics. The catalogue listed more than 500 works from the museum’s collection.

One of the outside walls of the new Museum of Art in Silkeborg has a large ceramic relief, measuring 4.5x22.5 metres, based on a design by Dubuffet.

It was about 1957 that I first met Jorn. I was not at first aware of what an admirable man he was. This awareness came later and grew progressively. During our early relationship I suspected that his mind was confused and incoherent. I was quite wrong. He had the art of controlling disorder and mastering it. All his plans and enterprises were frightening in their multiplicity. There were, at one and the same time, photographic surveys of the Viking graffiti on the walls of Normandy churches; research into the great achievements of the Vandals; the establishment of the [modern art] collection of the Silkeborg museum; the construction of a film in Munich; the great ceramic works in Albisola; the situationist movement and its congress in London; the publications relating to all this - these were, to my surprise, all diligently pursued to their logical conclusion without seeming to overwhelm him. On the contrary, he was perfectly at ease driving all these chariots simultaneously, and making continual trips abroad, with casual as well as periodic and intensive sessions of painting. Turmoil was his element, he was a nimble fish in that water. Some of his enterprises which he happened to mention to me during our meetings struck me as nebulous, but they later made sense in the heat of action. He was skilled at producing sense out of original chaos. In all his activities the same principle applied as in his work: thought sprang out of action, not the other way round. So his paintings took shape out of a violent disorder and incoherence. He excelled at producing a meaning during the course of creation - being careful not to intervene too much, so as not to lose anything of the spontaneous vital flow. He liked to keep ‘meaning’ speculative. He was in love with the irrational; it was the irrational which, in all his works, he continually faced.

I recall this man who was so richly gifted, inspired by such goodness and generosity, so subtle, so inventive, so warmhearted, him I recall with deep emotion and affection.

[October 1981]

Werner Haftmann

The Trouvaille catalogue from which this short extract is taken was published by Galerie van de Loo, Munich, in 1983. The catalogue preface by Werner Haftmann is entitled Chance and magic (Zufall und Magie). The article describes the COBRA movement, traces the history of the newly discovered Jorn paintings, and discusses their individual merit. The reader is referred to this important article in its original German version, covering twenty pages.

An earlier article by Werner Haftmann (QUADRUM, XII, 1962) made a deep impression on Jorn, in particular the description of him as a ‘nocturnal’ being.

I’ve tried in vain to remember when I first met Asger Jorn and when we became friends … It must have been before 1959, otherwise I would not have insisted so strongly that he should be included in Documenta II. It may have been in 1957 in Albisola on the Ligurian Sea. At the time he was living in a peasant cottage, as I remember. Or, most likely, we met in Paris in the attic studio near his flat in the Rue du Tage in the 13th district. I have a clear picture of the studio with its wild and extravagant disorder. In spite of a certain vagueness, Asger himself stands before me as clearly as if he had just left my house. But I have never associated him with any one particular place. He was elflike, a king of the elves, an itinerant Odin who would turn up unexpectedly on a street in Paris or Venice or (always unannounced) in my house on the Tegernsee. On those occasions he was so vividly present as a person that all normal considerations of time and place, by which we ordinary people conduct our affairs, would be thrown overboard. Ordinary questions of place and date were pushed aside by this extra-ordinary man who brought something extraordinary into one’s normal existence. I’ve also tried hard to establish the time and place of our first meeting by tracing the chronology of his paintings, but I’ve failed.

I’ve now decided to write casually, without any proper rhyme or rhythm. This is because almost exactly ten years after his death Asger Jorn suddenly stands before me so vividly that I feel obliged to break off in the middle of a completely different and urgent schedule of work in order to commemorate him. The motive for this was a telephone call a few days ago from Otto van de Loo in Munich telling me that eight paintings by Asger Jorn from the 1950s, nearly all of them previously undiscovered, had come his way, as well as a batch of extremely interesting works by other members of the COBRA group: Appel, Constant, Alechinsky. He was planning to show these in April at an Art Fair in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. This was the venue, as I remember, where Paolo Marinotti put on his memorable show, Vitalità nell’Arte, in the autumn of 1959. There Jorn was shown for the first time in the company of young contemporary artists. I was also very struck by the fact that 1 May would be the tenth anniversary of Asger’s death.

I put my other work aside and gladly complied with van de Loo’s suggestion that I should introduce Jorn’s paintings.

Wilfredo Lam

Wilfredo Lam had a studio in Albisola. He was known there as ‘il pittore cubanese’ to distinguish him from ‘il pittore danese’ who lived a mile or two away.

In Asger Jorn: The Final Years Lou Lam gives an amusing account of the ‘Cuban interlude’ (p.16).

It’s autumn 1946 in a Paris still scarred by the drama of war. In the Palais de Luxembourg they’re arguing about the peace. The lettrists are creating a scandal. The existentialists are making their mark. We, the surrealists are organising the universal exhibition of surrealism; Oscar Dominguez is judged and expelled from the movement.

In this atmosphere of high tension my friend André Breton introduced me to Asger Jorn at the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He had taken me there for a discussion with a group of Belgian revolutionary surrealists.

Jorn was lean, long-haired, and carrying a big parcel. He came up to me to show me what was in the parcel. It was a review or book called The plumed serpent.

Jorn talked to me for hours about ‘the plumed serpent’ (which, according to some ethnographers, is the symbol of evolution) and other obscure subjects. Already at that time one sensed the imaginative mind of a great artist, an impression confirmed later by his art and life.

During that same cruel winter of hardship, Jorn came every day to my hotel room in the Rue Jacob, bringing crayons, ink and paper, so that work could go on. Later, here in Albisola, we often worked together, making ceramics and lithos.

And, later again, in Cuba during the cultural congress [in 1967 -ed.] he made it his job to enliven the revolutionary archives with his hundreds of metres of paintings expressing total freedom.

My dear Jorn, if all the birds in the sky fly freely, you are the Phoenix bird, ever alive, in Silkeborg or Liguria. You have firmly established your spirit and your personality upon earth.

[November 1981]

Conroy Maddox

Conroy Maddox, surrealist painter and author, has been associated with numerous surrealist groups in Europe and has exhibited internationally since 1938. His writings include The exhibitionist’s overcoat and a study of Dali.

His contribution here is a condensed account of Jorn’s stay in his house in Belsize Park, London.

Jorn stayed with me in the summer of 1966 when he came to London to work for his exhibition at Tooth’s Gallery and a show of acrylics at the Lefebre Gallery, New York.

Asger’s typical day began with a visit to the kitchen to make coffee. He would then shut himself in the studio to work with occasional breaks for more coffee until lunchtime, which we often had together, then paint until the evening.

I remember once commenting on the size of his paintings which, at that period anyway, were never very large. I said they were the ideal size, perhaps one should never paint a picture larger than one can get in a taxi. He agreed.

I criticised the way in which automatism had been taken over by the abstract expressionists. As early as 1933 the surrealists recognised that automatism no longer constituted an end in itself, but was to become the ideal limit of surrealist striving. What was recognised was that automatism was a means of forcing inspiration. The abstract expressionists only saw it as an end in itself. For the full extent of the discoveries initiated by automatism some contribution had to come from the artist himself, a conscious desire to interfere. I asked Asger at what point he felt the need to consciously control the work. His answer, which I no longer remember in detail, was that it was a matter of incorporating the problem of knowledge as well as the immediate one of expression and it was like two elements in the process of unification. I raised the question because watching him work I was aware just how close he was to the surrealists’ practice of automatism. His initial attack on the canvas was, I felt, exploratory. The paint, squeezed directly on to the canvas or brush, was then moved in an almost tentative way as though he was feeling his way into some image. As the painting progressed so did his confidence. The moment he discovered a new reality he seemed no longer content to work in an automatic way to bring about the full recognition of the imagery. I formed the impression that Jorn began by groping in the dark as it were and tried to define his attitude to creativity by quoting the answer a child gave to the question ‘What are you painting?’ ’I don’t know’, said the child, ’I haven’t finished yet’.

I am still of the belief that he used his initial brush-strokes as a form of free association. I do not suggest there was no discipline, since the primary object is always to make the unconscious effective in the real world and Jorn achieved this with great success.

I commented on his use of colour and he said, I think I sometimes apply colours without any narrative intention or seek to initiate any recognisable object: I use it more to hold the imagery together’.

Matta

After their first brief meeting in Léger’s studio, Jorn and Matta each contributed some decorations to Le Corbusier’s ‘Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux’ at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937.

Matta’s gift of graphics to the Museum of Art in Silkeborg, to which he refers below, was very large. Ursula Schmitt, in the Silkeborg catalogue of 1969, lists 179 works.

The text printed below is taken from a recent interview between Jørgen Ågerup and Matta. The interview was recorded in English and needed substantial editing, partly to reduce its length and partly to smooth out the English which is not the primary language of the two speakers on the tape.

The first time I saw Jorn was at Léger’s [in 1936 - ed.]. I was an architect and I don’t know anything about painting as such. I’m only interested in images.

I used to go and see Léger because I liked him. And there was this man there, very cheerful and nice, who didn’t speak much French at the time. He asked Léger, ‘Can I have some photographs of your work?’ Jorn started looking at a stack of photographs. While Léger and I were talking in a corner, he chose some pictures. Léger was furious and said, ‘You know they cost about £20?’ Jorn laughed. He had a very healthy laugh. He laughed at his own innocence. Léger gave him two or three photos and we all left.

In 1954 we spent some time together in Albisola. That was when I made a few ceramics. He pushed me into it. We took our ceramics to the railway station and put them on the track to see what would happen. The train stopped because they didn’t know what it was. There’s a photograph of that.

The funny thing is that twenty years later I became a ceramist. Now in Tarquinia I have started a group of people, workmen and peasants (not artists), to revive the Etruscans. Tarquinia was the Etruscan capital.

About 1957 I moved to the country and I didn’t see Jorn much after that. At one point we exchanged etchings. I gave him quite a number of things for the museum in Silkeborg. They held an exhibition of my work. And he never told me. Everyone was waiting for me to arrive for dinner. I didn’t know about it. I found out a couple of weeks later! So that’s typical of him, too.

We went to Cuba together [in 1967 - ed.]. They put me in the position of working for the cause. Jorn went aside completely, painting the walls of a former bank. He had more fun. We would all have been much better off doing something like that. We were much younger than our age. If we were 40 years old, we were really 18 - mentally.

Now Jorn and I would understand each other very well. Jorn is a fantastic loss.

Karl Schawelka

The author of the important article from which this short and rather freely translated extract is taken, gives Jorn his place in art history, comparing him with Arp, Ensor, Ernst, Klee, Pollock, Redon, Tanguy, Turner and Wols - and placing his ideas within the context of topological theory and the writings of Bachelard, Nietzsche and Worringer.

The text is from K. Schawelka Farbfolie und Liniengerüst - Bemerkungen zu Bildern von Asger Jorn - Texte zur Kunst 1957-1982, Galerie van de Loo, Munich, 1982, pp.202-14.

Jorn’s lines and figures do not as a rule reach out beyond the edge of the canvas. Around his figures there are areas of calm. Pollock’s ‘all-over field’ which one can imagine continuing indefinitely beyond the picture frame, is foreign to Jorn. With him every figure is composed, unmistakably and uniquely and usually deliberately, to fit the frame. He is far from indifferent to composition, in contrast to the doctrine of ‘informal’ art. Admittedly his figures can also exist without a boundary, as in his book illustrations which are placed against a limitless white space.

Jorn often juxtaposes two figures in a picture, placing them in a relationship of tension, with a big dominant figure top left, juxtaposed to a small aggressive figure, in contrasted colours, in the bottom right-hand corner (or using any of the other possible diagonal compositions). An example would be Le timide orgeuilleux of 1957 [in the Tate Gallery - ed.].

As for colour, he obviously doesn’t use a light thrown onto the images from outside, as in Van Gogh’s sun-drenched images. One might expect light to be contained within the images, radiating outwards … that’s to say that light would emanate from the surface. His light, however, is different. Haftmann speaks of a green-golden luminosity; I suggest the term ‘diaphanous’. That’s because the colours have a luminosity that strikes upwards from the figures below. So the light comes from a deeper level …

There is one characteristic of Jorn’s which, as already noted by his contemporaries, gives him ‘une place à part de la mêlée’ vis-à-vis the abstract expressionists. I mean the tangible content of his images. Looking at one of his pictures one soon recognises a bird, a crouching goblin, an occasional star cluster or landscape, but there are always eyes, faces, grimaces, mouths, beaks, even though they can be mystifying. Forms halfway between abstraction and concrete legibility have been familiar in modern art for a long time, so we have to ask ourselves by what special means Jorn creates this state of suspense and what is the nature of his personal iconography. His recognisable figures arise out of the painting process itself. They are not planned but discovered. The imagery that emerges is emotionally experienced. Within a wilderness of colours Jorn will suddenly see a face or a body, because in his mind’s eye he has brought together brush-strokes that are separated by a space, but to him they suddenly reveal a configuration that makes sense as an image. Legible features are then strengthened and developed. Sometimes this process becomes too obvious and has to be destroyed again. Jorn’s subject matter does not emerge from within the ebb and flow of the subconscious, but rather as a sequel. The process is more intellectual than has been supposed.

Ruskin in his famous chapter, ‘The nature of the gothic’ in Stones of Venice, uses terms like ‘savageness’, the noble living imperfection of form, ‘rudeness’ for the originality and true-to-nature quality of Nordic, barbaric man. He demands ‘changefulness or variety’, ‘organic form’, and even ‘grotesqueness’, and he praises ‘disturbed imagination’. Jorn’s aesthetic ideas show a striking affinity with this.