← Back to article

COBRA Bibliotek

THE COBRA LIBRARY

1st SERIES: THE FREE ARTISTS. EDITOR ASGER JORN

Permanent encyclopedia for experimental art. Editorship: COBRA, the international group of experimental artists.

EJNAR MUNKSGAARD PUBLISHERS

COPENHAGEN 1950

FIFTEEN ARTIST MONOGRAPHS

first series in the permanent encyclopedia of experimental art

  1. Pierre Alechinsky. Text by Luc Zangrie.

  2. Else Alfelt. Text by Edouard Jaguer.

  3. Karel Appel. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

  4. Atlan. Text by Michel Ragon.

  5. Ejler Bille. Text by Michel Ragon.

  6. Constant. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

  7. Corneille. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

  8. Jaques Doucet. Text by Jean Laude.

  9. Sonja Ferlov. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

  10. Stephen Gilbert. Text by Edouard Jaguer.

  11. Svavar Gudnason. Text by Edouard Jaguer.

  12. Henry Heerup. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

  13. Egill Jacobsen. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

  14. Asger Jorn. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

  15. Carl-Henning Pedersen. Text by Chr. Dotremont.

The present collection of small monographs has arisen from the desire to manifest a particular artistic tendency in our time through some of its most typical representatives, and through a series of unpretentious small booklets to provide the most comprehensive characterization of each individual artist. We have sought to find a form of information between artists and those interested in art, which, freed from commercial ostentation, could become a counterpart to the exchange of experiences that for long periods has been the strength of science, and in its domain has helped to promote international cooperation.

It is our hope that artists of other tendencies will take up the idea and thereby help to break down the unnatural frameworks and sects within which the isms have gradually encapsulated our time’s art. This dissolution of artistic frameworks is the basic program for the tendency represented here. We seek this goal, not by distancing ourselves from these special endeavors and cooking soup from the traditionalism of traditions, where the substance has lost its salt, but by striving toward a synthesis of the living in abstract form, as well as in naturalistic content, of the social community expressed through the liberated personality, of the liberated society, of the surrealist dream as well as the harsh concrete fact, fused in a romantic realism.

It is our conviction that we, through these synthetic endeavors and only through these and only if they are also taken up from other quarters, will reach an artistic change of quality, a metamorphosis, an immediate, true form of content, a universal art, freed from classicist dogmas and formalistic taboo rules, a human art.

We would like to thank Munksgaard Publishers as well as the Selandia Printing House and lithographer J. Chr. Sørensen for their great helpfulness in carrying out this experiment. Most especially we thank the cliché-establishment Heimburger & Wendt, whose generosity has made the publication of the library possible.

Asger Jorn.

1: PIERRE ALECHINSKY

TEXT LUC ZANGRIE

Belgian painter.

Born 1927 in Brussels.

When Pierre Alechinsky participates in the grand maneuvers, his blood merely makes a single revolution. His blood explodes into droplets.

I believe I met him at early dawn one day without night, and we never finished saying hello.

Every morning its culture: At dawn Alechinsky’s neighbors arm themselves with stilts to do gymnastics on a bed of absorbent cotton, where their arteries sweat drop by drop, but the rusty, immobile painter dissolves in laughter. The organs are merely held together by a thread. The toe dips into the stomach, which presses on the bladder, which pushes the heart, which lifts the head. The pulse meter still shows storm. Provisionally I therefore conclude that on one side there are the military and the gymnasts and on the other side the painters.

Yet Alechinsky loves the open air. He would see therein maternities growing like trees, space populated with beautiful erotic flowers with burdensome worries. Incessantly enriched by the eyes, the world is a zoological garden, where forms give each other a paw with the color string of laughter.

When the string breaks from too much laughter, the form flies away, and a balloon is born, white balloons, green and red weds freedom.

Since we are indeed in cosmos, let us then let the strangest phenomena that unfold pass in review. Let us first brush — it is precisely about brushing — a picture of the general situation.

An essential fact forces itself upon us: The black suns do not abolish the blue of the sky. To my great joy, Alechinsky annihilates the principle of identity. The cosmoses in panic make agreements, telephone, knit. The universe is finally threatened by painting, but from this viewpoint the painter finds a serious competitor in the strategist: One threatens, the other kills. Alechinsky describes with embarrassment the professional worries that the annals of military history cause him, from Waterloo to Bikini. If he hates the military (excuse my repetition), Alechinsky in return adores the scientists, whom he admires. To the physicist’s great surprise, the red cosmoses sink along their spider threads, while the zeppelin rises.

The cosmoses resist calculations, but not a secret appeal to the smile.

* * *

In great secrecy Alechinsky prepares the wool-bomb in a landscape he has japonized, I believe, to erase the traces. He leaves his laboratory at noon, serious, defiant, sparkling. He impatiently evaluates the storm outside, to see if it is possible to take a bath. This winter he has incessantly connected the idea of water with the image of ice: It rains on the pack ice. Alechinsky would gladly travel to the warm countries. Babylon attracts him and the thousand and one nights he still has to dream.

While he waits to cross the sea, he makes an aquarium. He adapts his thoughts to the sea’s format, filled with green and red waters, where the frogs lay golden eggs. Beautiful ships are moored at the bow. At the moment he is interested in the sea’s interior. He goes exploring in the underworld of things. He asks himself why things swim. The curiosity is so astounding that it makes the sea overflow its banks. When he has dived down, the waves are stripped of their natural modesty and transform into ears of grain, into anchor rings, and come to perform the dancing morality on the captain on the bridge of his own ship.

One night he carved out of a self-luminous pink buoy a large, tricolor snake in carnival confetti. Among the nightly celebrations there are certain seriously compromised ones. At Christmas there was on the illuminated streets of Brussels a pedestrian who melted together with the ice.

But spring is reborn in a Dutch landscape more alluring than Holland. A windmill becomes engaged to a flower, the clouds lull on the meadows, a tulip head has shot up above the other tulips. Of all of Holland’s yellow tulips Alechinsky composes a man who sleeps on old pleasant wooden meetings.

I believe I can discern in Alechinsky the sexual instinct with its wonderful scale of nuances, and a special instinct, which from the outside one can only attempt incompletely to define by means of the pink colors that completely express it. I declare on my word of honor that it is neither about a “pink period” nor a striving toward “life in rosy hues,” but about an irrepressible tendency toward the maintenance of life, which occupies their eyes like an army of liberation. Of this army Alechinsky has set up a meticulous inventory, where a thousand intoxicated generals supervise some starved yellow-ocher soldiers. This reversed colonization attempt brings the question of several of the obtained positions into play, about which I am however careful enough not to expatiate here. I force myself to return to my original subject, which is to show certain sides of my friend’s bad character.

He loves the countless beautiful women who are united in his. For those who understand how to look at watercolors in sunlight, she appears in filigree in these pointed celebrations, which I strive to describe dialectically. Alechinsky develops a Manichean metaphysics. Good and evil fight a violent battle: They spread shabbily from canvas to canvas, but I do not shudder most at the daily sight of this spectacle, for I know who distributes the ammunition, and how. His religion, founded on female deities, some hostile, most mild, is a panchromatic polytheism. Their dialogue (the sound picture in Alechinsky’s painting strikes us strongly) one day drowns out that of the museums.

At first he brings his goddesses into harmony on a given chord, which he plays for them on guitar: Alechinsky’s forms are beautiful and luminous like naked almonds. A secret council watches over their fate. He gives the floor to the good fairy, as well as to the evil one, and their arguments attack each other.

The fourteenth of July corresponds to the lead sea. At times, when the disagreement worsens, the dissolved audience — literally dissolved — seems to participate in the mad acrobat’s last moment, when with folded arms he defies the void.

Alechinsky’s magically astrophysical underwater environment becomes complicated by sorceries. To reach his goal he at times uses luminous projections.

The optical phantasmagoria have in our country been obscured, since the improvements that Robertson brought to the cinema a century before it was invented. Pierre Alechinsky gave himself on his part to privately exhibiting the released prisoners, spots and clouds. He finally imagined, I do not exaggerate, imprinting the dream on photographic paper by means of the slide projector, the transparent glass, where the dream inscribes itself.

Quite recently Louis Van Lint has revived the slide. This man, I repeat, represents a danger to humanity, to bourgeois society as well as to revolutionary society. I sacrifice his thoughts as burnt offering to the aesthetic canons.

2: ELSE ALFELT

TEXT EDOUARD JAGUER

Danish female painter. Born 1910.

To avoid any attack from that elegant “routine,” which is always ready in various forms to appropriate any victory that the painter (the poet or the sculptor) has achieved, with sickly growing appetite, the instigators of the Danish avant-garde movement avoid trusting in any whatsoever formula, distrust them all and show us the example of an offensive from all sides with a calculated and always changing strategy on all fronts.

In the battle from abstraction to free figure formation, each individual possesses his special armory. There is Bille, whose apparent abstractions at close range register the intimate current, the inner grain in the material. Erik Ortvad, who leads impressionism and cubism to their poetic Orient, there is Egill Jacobsen: his painting, kites that graze the grass, inflame all of childhood’s wantonness into a sparkling round dance, furthermore Carl-Henning Pedersen and Asger Jorn, who more, less or much, lead toward a valid synthesis of the various tendencies. Freddie’s and Mortensen’s position does not play into the present account.

On this disconnected ladder, erected in haste up one of the most theoretical walls, another painter climbs in the most perilous position, in the sign of bewilderment: that is Else Alfelt. Undoubtedly she abandons herself now and then, as if to amuse herself, to these exercises on slack line in painting, which have recently caused such a stir in France under the colors of Bazaine, Singier and Manessier. But the habit does not make the monk, and triangles and circles are not abstractions either, and if this work immediately presents a face less troubled than Bille’s or Jorn’s, we should not from that conclude that its originator abandons herself to her natural femininity and agrees to conceive her art as a higher variety of embroidery — that she by and large has decided to play Penelope on the corner of her palette, while her husband, Carl Henning Pedersen, stakes every hour of his life during the hunt for vampires in Zealand’s forests or mermaids by Elsinore’s coasts. It is not a cunning little lamb in the werewolf’s den.

It would be quite childish to dispute the chromatic feats and the successful decorative yield of among others a Bazaine. When we reproach him and his friends, it is first and foremost because of their sickly anxiety about breaking the enchantment of form and line. This painting constitutes a pleasant commentary on life, but it does not budge it a cock’s feather. They are talented acrobats who paralyzed harbor in their own net’s meshes!1) When Else Alfelt finds pleasure in these tendrils or these flower garlands, which have created their fame, and which could also lay the foundation for hers, she does not however devote all her attention to the drawing’s capricious windings. She only accepts her handicap because of her taste for the daring. Try to devote yourself to these forms, pointed like scissors with open blades. It is always with such forms that Manessier culminates in the religious wonders of “decayed cathedrals,” while Else Alfelt even with these means only dreams of methodically cultivating the most extensive plots of land in the infinite landscape’s natural space, which she one day has revealed. Neither do her colors emerge from some tested alchemies, they are even at times a bit lackluster according to my taste, but the essential thing is however that her scissors are not used for cutting out halos, that their blades close around a concrete world. Her nautical forms, her sails and her masts, which are covered with yellowish and greenish spots, like daisy hearts, swarming in the thicket — only in honor of doubt — are merely set pieces on the stage for a far more significant play: nothing resembling this diligent rivalry, which develops in this gloomy atmosphere of the areas where the soul sighs alone, without any connection whatsoever with the real. There are no lacunae, no footnotes, no parentheses or quotation marks in this writing.

It happens moreover frequently that all these branches, all this rigging is carried away, swept away by a sudden gust of wind. In their place appear stacks of streaks and stripes, and at the very top a bastard of star, flower, moon and sun, which dominates the storm. It is another division of the natural scenery that the painter attacks merely with interest for description. I maintain this word, for Else Alfelt leads description and not anecdote to a throbbing stage, which only André Masson has reached in certain of his latest works. On the other hand, the pioneering point of departure and the various stages in its transformation, the value of this painting consists in the regularity which the metronome or the whip, the pendulum or the gyroscope has managed to establish.

But who dares claim that the glow of the conflagration weakens its devastating power.

\1) These themes: the chain, the net and the lattice often return in Singier and Manessier; they are pleasant means of transport for the “routine”.

3: KAREL APPEL

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Dutch painter.

Born 1921 in Amsterdam.

Appel has no inferiority complexes, neither do his pictures. By that I do not however mean either that he or his pictures are conceited, not at all. But he asserts himself with a certain rawness that allows no doubt possible: he is at least certain that Appel exists, that Appel’s pictures exist, that Appel is alive, and that Appel’s pictures are made of paint. I do not know who would really contradict me. It is one of the points about which all people can agree.

Appel’s painting is a self-evident painting. But I do not agree with him when he lets our hand run over the picture’s uneven surfaces with their cunning grooves and natural superfluity to demonstrate their materialism: it is only the outer appearance of materialism in Appel and in his painting. There are painters who paste the same exterior on their pictures, but they are not materialists.

Appel’s painting is completely materialistic from surface to ground, from what they show with fanfare, and to what they show with refinement, to such a degree that surface and ground are one and the same thing. But do not say that Appel is brutal and that’s that. Do you say about the gentleman who has a fat belly: There we have a fat belly? Yes, you say it, but it is for fun’s sake. Appel is a poet whose spontaneity is of such a nature that it does not have time to lose its aggressivity and shocking strength between hand and canvas.

We are far from the candied art, from the aesthetic candy-making: Appel only delivers unsorted, and it is not candy-sweet.

There is this, that Appel is rich. Not richer than the others, in reality everyone is rich, but first of all he has all his riches at hand. He knows neither chests nor cans, moreover he is generous. We are also distant from this miserly art, which in so many painters only embraces the single picture at a time, just as one only places one candle in a candlestick.

He comes from the people, and he has not left it. He has not felt a need to depict the people’s misery. He has preferred to show the self-evident in the universe’s joys, in sensitivity’s joys (of which one cannot be separated from the other) for to that the people have just as much right as everyone else.

4: ATLAN

TEXT MICHEL RAGON

French painter. Born in Algiers 1920.

In contemporary painting Atlan appears as a pronounced loner. But since one must be able to refer to models, if one wants to have a place in art’s city, we can say that he at the same time reminds one of Chagall and Soutine. But Atlan has nothing in common with this world of fables and fairy tales from Chagall’s ghetto, and his humor is more voracious than Soutine’s.

To understand Atlan one must know that he is from Algiers. That explains to a large extent the approach in his drawing, his cactus forms and lizard teeth. Europe has not at all stamped him with its seal. He is above all African. His colors (the matte reds and ocher colors) are those from the painted masks. Like a blasphemer he has stood in relation to animals, defying Moses’ law, and his offspring are countless.

When I attribute to Atlan’s painting a quite special significance, it is because it seems to me to be a synthesis, a synthesis in the artistic plane of the three great movements that have dominated art in the last forty years: Expressionism, surrealism and abstraction, a synthesis of the most gripping forms and of life’s greatest depths in the plane of expression.

The architect, who according to his nature is abstract, stylizes the tree into temple columns. Atlan, the magician, creates a human metamorphosis of the tree and ourselves, in the same way as the black witches equip their mandrakes with five genital parts and twelve fingers. In that direction Atlan’s pictures are the opposite of abstractions. Among nature’s creative forces they also participate, in my opinion, in procreation’s emergence. As the African artist in his sculpture forms the spirit of fire and not the fire, so Atlan paints a fusion of both the mineral, the vegetable and the animal element. His powerful material effects are like the earth’s crust of the first times, where the living forms in the original humus still sought their canonical laws. It is the world of the seahorse and the pterodactyl, the starfish and the coral, the sponge and the sea urchin.

Atlan starts from abstract forms (all forms are in themselves abstract. A glass is just as abstract as a form by Arp. From the moment when the artistic work finds its utility function, it has become realistic), — and these dead forms he gives life, a violent, shaking and cruel life, issued from the depths of the unconscious. It is in this way that he manages to present this strange fauna, equally flora and fauna, for these cactuses are greedy, the mandrakes are eroticized and the flowers devour their bees.

Apollinaire said: “Since the customs officer Rousseau, strange flowers have grown on the quays of the Seine.”

I must confirm the same with Atlan. His fantastic world has become so familiar to me that I find it just as natural as the horse’s and the seagull’s. But if we were not accustomed to seeing horses and seagulls every day, there would undoubtedly be those who would say: “What strange monsters, those there!”

5: EJLER BILLE

TEXT MICHEL RAGON

Danish painter and sculptor.

Born 1910 in Odder.

Within the avant-garde of Danish painting, Ejler Bille is undoubtedly the one who knows French art best. After having lived for a long time in France in the Parisian Montparnasse of the pre-war period and surrealism, he returned to Copenhagen to publish an extensive work: “Picasso, surrealism, abstract art,” a title that indicates three stages, three developmental steps, which Ejler Bille was the first in his country to realize had to be traversed; that from these three experiments a new one had to emerge that would express his generation.

Already in 1935 he positioned himself in opposition to constructivism and surrealism, from which he had freed himself. As founder and editor of Limen until 1939, (at this time it was replaced by the new journal Helhesten), he maintained this line with fanatic strictness.

Bille: The agitator and art critic, the poet, the painter and the sculptor, what an astonishing person for us Frenchmen, who are a people of specialists. In Denmark this seems less remarkable. Most of the avant-garde’s painters are also poets, even archaeologists (isn’t that right, Asger Jorn?), generally musicians, and what do I know? A Dane, whether he is a worker or a bourgeois, would feel dishonored if he had not hung on the walls of his home some works by the artists he cares about.

It is undoubtedly Miro and Kandinsky, from his first period (the best), who have most strongly influenced Bille as a painter, and Arp, who for the sculptor Bille has been the master. But like his countrymen, Bille has above all nourished himself on Scandinavian folk art, which is so little known in France, and which, if one merely refers to the aggressive Viking art and the demonic frescoes of Danish medieval churches, is nevertheless some of the most beautiful and original that exists anywhere.

In general, Danish art bears the mark of the country that through the ages has preserved its sun cult. With that be said that the Danish painters love color and the material fullness that makes the picture ring. They paint what they do not have, the profusion of an unknown vegetation and the luster of demonic minerals. Art is often an expression of the burning demands of unfulfilled longings. In their snow-covered houses they hang the pictures’ green, red and yellow color patches on the walls. Their cozy buildings in the flat landscape sing with all their might with the painters’ passionate color strokes.

But Bille belongs among the more solitary; his colors are more intimate. Perhaps the light clouds on his Nordic sky are veiled as by a fine, gray fog, a memory of Paris.

6: CONSTANT

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Dutch painter. Born in Amsterdam 1920.

Constant (Nieuwenhuys) is the founder, the agitator, the spiritual axis and the working axis in the Dutch experimental group. He has refused to enclose his forces, his intelligence and his sensitivity in a room and cultivate them like mushrooms, which he would have had to eat alone.

He has a collective mind, as others have a difficult mind. He has not been afraid to set up a group of experimental writers and painters in the most radical sense in Amsterdam, where nothing similar existed, but where there were several priorities, above all the old abstractivist rags, which some still want to use as a banner. Constant is, if I may say so, a hard nail. He does not believe that one can reach anything by way of concessions’ airways. He stays on the ground.

And the experimental group in Holland is today one of the most living and fruitful in the world. It is determined, but it is not lonely; that is the only effective solution.

There exists moreover no effectiveness without prejudices. Constant is a creator. He looks at experimental painting as a participant therein. In participation already exists judgment. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing of this dilettantism that confuses and mixes all of life’s prejudices in a cocktail for the pleasure of the salons’ audience.

It is not about pleasing, and Constant avoids pleasing. I am his friend, so I know it.

He wants his painting to be true and not pleasant. He paints in such a way, without façon, that nothing slips out between his painting urge and the canvas. He says that it is the only formulation of good painting. Good painting for him is not only that which does not deceive, but even that which does not play. Its joy must have serious reasons.

His painting is sufficient proof that he is right. It rises above the aesthetic reflections of a bourgeoisified and Sunday-marked eye. It must be taken raw, without Christened civilization, without syphilized bourgeoisie. But it must nevertheless be taken warm, just as it is, with its vibrato and its dynamism. Constant drinks at the sources, and he prefers the people’s drawings on walls and ramparts to art’s masterpieces, the art that arises as a scream, to paintings that arise as doctrines. There is moreover no reason for praise, for he is merely naturally himself. He has a Negro heart, and I do not believe that the Americans would give him entry permission if they X-rayed him. He penetrates into the means as into a woman. He often speaks of the organic means, and I, who am a writer, see herein orgasm being born.

Constant has gone to the revelation of man’s most shameful sides, of reality. His paintings are naked.

7: CORNEILLE

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Dutch painter. Born 1922 in Belgium.

Constant has once said about his friend Corneille, that he was a child. That is correct. But there are several different kinds of children: The child who appears, and whom the whole family circle hails with great cries of joy, as Hugo says, the well-behaved child, then there is the terrible child, who smashes everything, even the paintings, the sulking child, the chattering child, the screaming child, the forward child, the serious child, the legitimate child, the love child and the mischievous child. Corneille is at times a terrible child, always a natural child and always a cunning child. You know, the child who, behind his childishness’s shield, speculates, calculates and observes. He has a way of looking at you that says much: nothing escapes him, but he escapes you. In a way the cunning child is not dialectical: he goes behind your screens to see what is going on, but it is not possible to see what is going on behind his shielding smile.

Should it be necessary to find yet another proof of the intimate relationship that exists between art and life, then Corneille’s presence would be enough to provide such. A cunning child in life, playing like a child, with childish behavior, but acquainted with the right addresses, capable like no one of finding a lovely girl, so he is also in painting a cunning child.

He paints like a child, but also like a mathematician. It is an infant, who still has his ears full of milk, or rather a child who lavishly plays chess, for at times it is the child who controls him, at times it is the mathematician, and now and then they blend, so one cannot separate them.

For example, Corneille makes children’s drawings, colors them, as a child does it. Here one finds everything one wants, except life’s seriousness and the universe’s majesty: here I see ducks and chickens playing in front of a farmyard, and the kitchen’s tiling overflows its banks all the way into the field, and there goes a little, spindly street straight through it all; it must lead to a dream-mill or a fantasy river. But watch out, the colors lie where they should, and the lines do not skip school.

He paints mathematical sections of the universe, a kind of walls that lack a base, and which only keep themselves upright by means of their infallible structure. Furthermore it can be the universe, seen from Sirius with its panes, which distance makes regular, with its holes and mountains, which have become hills. Corneille should study the problem surrounding the lines that can be observed on the planet Mars: the child will perceive them as canals (all the more so, as he is almost Dutch), but the mathematician would perceive some straight lines. Watch out for the rest, for in these strange geographical maps, which he paints, a child has also painted his, and a glance from this gray to this red is sufficient for one to rediscover the taste of earth.

When he succeeds completely in being himself with his simple poetry, at the same time peasant-like and moonstruck, and with this inclination for a certain strictness, then Corneille disappears, and it is merely an apparent paradox: it is normal that the individual disappears when it is realized. You enter his universe, but it is yours, it is the universe in its very harmony and contradictions, the indissoluble bouquet of lines, forms, colors, dreams and visions.

He has the honesty to call himself an experimental painter and not to sleep the dreamless sleep on his first laurels. He experiments, and for me his experiments are at least as interesting as his results. He fights against childishness and harshness, he rejects the flourishing paths of shirking just as well as the ideal autostradas of formalism, and he advances through the forest from clearing to clearing. I do not believe that the experimental painter is the one who makes paintings that one draws in a raffle: to win the grand prize and then withdraw to somewhere on the Riviera. I believe that Corneille is an experimental painter, because he is in the breach, in the fire, in life, which strikes and lets itself be struck.

8: JACQUES DOUCET

TEXT JEAN LAUDE

French painter.

Born 1924 in Paris.

Perhaps it is due to certain people’s entire misfortune that a merciless society has deprived them of their childhood: their sensitivity remains unexploited, untouched. Too weak to assert themselves in childhood, they have not found the opportunity to practice. Therefore modern man must continually choose between what he was and often continued to be, and the adult human being who knows the weight of his responsibilities. Here the difficulty intensifies: to betray oneself or the others. Art and poetry seem for a moment to be solutions, but individual, temporary ones. Those who practice it can find here a temporary reassurance: there remains to give their works validity, otherwise these mean nothing more, they themselves are dissolved, no longer exist. This is the most difficult, for among their well-wishers one party haggles with their production, while the other invokes the seriousness of the times and proclaims that the time for play is past.

Yet it goes the same way with sensitivity as with the popular sense: one cannot explain it from the outside. Even if one arranges sketches from wall drawings on a sheet, so they form a plastically valid whole, it is nevertheless not sufficient to make a painting. It becomes at most a decorative field, but this is not the painter’s intention, for he wants to captivate more deeply than by means of these forms.

If Doucet on a flat surface arranges lines and colors, as one otherwise generally sees on public walls and sidewalks, then he understands how to dispose these signs, which he sustains on the surface, he thinks with the hand that draws. He makes himself one with the child, to whom both the hand and the eye belong. “Genius is childhood, gifted with all means of expression,” remarks Baudelaire. This sentence is the main thing in the art and poetry that follows it. It provides an introduction to it, better than a comprehensive study.

Everywhere and at all times the wall inscription has been charged with an unusually liberating and bold energy. I will assume that Doucet in his cell, where the Nazis had locked him up, became aware of this relationship through direct experiment, and that this dirty magic, inscribed in the prison wall, has had a strong influence on his art: for a prisoner it is truly about making oneself known, for to make oneself known is to exist and to exist fully. Man gathers himself together in case he is hunted: his indissoluble unity seeks to assert itself, in order not to be annihilated. One paints, one writes always with front against death. An anxious being’s work is therefore not hopeless, it is an exit, it is a crack in the painful system that surrounds him. If it is unhappy, it nevertheless seeks toward happiness. Doucet, who for us revives “the green paradise of childlike loves” gives us trust in the days when man, by being able to fully and completely assume his childlike conditions, can finally become himself in his maturity.

It is even little said, for it does not tell us entirely to what degree Doucet is a poetic artist. Poetry is always met with distrust by painters, to the same degree as it pretends to consist in a literary mood rather than an artistic mood; but if it exists in Doucet’s painting, then it is no more original than the drawing or the watercolor, it is not the intention. Perhaps the consequences of a rhythm or a harmony, but above all of a dynamic sensitivity, it is internal, it is life. One gets a concept of this by looking at the following reproductions, they are sufficient to support my statements, they make them almost superfluous, but beforehand I had to present him.

9: SONJA FERLOV

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Danish sculptor.

It must be sad for the kind of people who deny sculpture’s right to invent and create, i.e. to be faithful to space and the spaces that live in space. It must be sad for the kind of people who have a non-Einsteinian and petty bourgeois conception of sculpture and not only lack the ability to see the relativity of space and time, but even the inner relativity of space. It must be sad for them, who perceive every sculpture as abstract that is not modeled on their own nose, but which moreover, however abstract it may be, could smash it, sad for them. Sonja Ferlov has, when I see her, on her knee, as well a child as one of these stone-ibises, one of these living scissors, which she hews out of the sea’s foam.

It is her child, as it is her ibis and her scissors, and it makes me recall the English anthropologist’s experiment of raising his newborn together with a macaque’s newborn. Sonja Ferlov should, paradoxically enough with a less experimental purpose, raise her newborn together with her newborn sculpture, for everything should be mixed together, instead of separating it, as one does in France, and sculpture has its abortions, its Caesarean sections, its umbilical cords, a sculpture has its crises of faith, its ears, its scarlet fever, and just name what is most automatic in sculpting and in love.

She has lived a long time in Paris, and Paris has long for her been Alberto Giacometti. Like Giacometti’s sculptures, hers also has strong, dramatic tensions behind the smooth, precise and perfect surfaces. And yet it is difficult to find this tension, to put one’s finger on it, for Sonja possesses nothing of this conception of sculpture, where it is about pumping as many indifferent forms into stone as possible. In a part of space she constructs some spatial parts. Stone and air are here reconciled.

What furthermore immediately strikes one upon a moment’s contemplation of Sonja Ferlov’s works — which for the rest are far from being numerous, she has destroyed many — is that they always or almost always have a kind of double character, as if she were afraid to leave a form or a work alone. See for example the living branches or the foreground figure on the following page: It expresses dialogue with less humor than precision. They stand moreover in contrast to later works, which are monologues of straight lines, which I find frightful, if I see them up close, for here the exits are blocked by the problem itself.

But are there really so many problems? Sonja Ferlov, with her child on her knee, with the drama’s clockwork, whose sound can be heard in what she makes, as one hears the sea in a conch shell, she works like the rest of us and with the rest of us against the dead, so we can have joy, and to rejoice herself. Let us therefore enjoy the eye’s joy after the hands’.

10: STEPHEN GILBERT

TEXT EDOUARD JAGUER

English painter. Born 1910.

“A little of our dry air is needed. . .”

Jacques Vaché.

Breaking the harmony of our time’s British art, a new and unexpected tone raises itself. In C minor.

Gilbert’s art truly contains a shattering message to all minds that are sensitive to the drama that encircles our time. It is as if it delineates the darkest and most heartrending peak. For what is involved here is an assault in painting far more violent than a Beckmann’s or a Kokoschka’s expressionism — even than Soutine’s, and in another direction than Fautrier.

First and foremost in opposition to everything literary — and Dali’s boat is lost in the fog forever — Gilbert forces painting out to the scream’s boundary. It goes without saying that he could not have adapted such a goal to an eloquent naturalism’s outdated means — even if it in 1949 is outfitted with a terminology sufficiently alluring to deceive several, and with a sickly urge to systematization to assign certain “realists’” “sacred visions” an official revolutionary label.

He uses the most fantastic means that exist at all, the most terribly real. To establish the execution’s calm his universe mobilizes an army of substitutes: bird-insects, jumping-jack-insects, devouring butterflies, death’s-head butterflies, sphinxes and harpies, always closer to man, that which “they” want to make him into, that which we cannot allow him to become.

And these phantoms from bloodbath and general perdition only emerge from nothingness to show us the immensity of our aberration, and the dream’s urgent necessity. If Gilbert prefers the colors of anxiety, it is because he does not feel the moment is right for painting “rosy,” for humming romances. Certain earth colors, burned or bloody, certain ocher colors, express best in his opinion these moods of devastating destruction and atmospheric annihilation. And it is likewise the clear consciousness of this climate that causes him to lead his forms directly toward a fourfold exodus from the canvas’s center toward the corners, toward the four cardinal points of horror. But it is not a crucifixion that is involved, and we find ourselves in opposition to the missal and the church window.

This work, which appears after “Guernica” and Matta’s testimony, the most visionary we have hitherto known, acquires a pronounced character of warning.

Their great graphic value is the result of the uninterrupted diminution in a cleverly evoked compositional imbalance. This painting deals a heavy and masterful blow against these suburban modelers who “create a whole volume” out of two surfaces that meet around a straight line!

Gilbert rejects the falseness of these pompous advocates of emptiness. One can undoubtedly, as we return to English art, not dispute this country’s painters their technical validity, their perfect “craftsmanship,” but to what degree is it not from Nash and Moore to Sutherland about that compromise and that bleating formalism, which Marxist criticism precisely disavows — and the surrealists? Gilbert does not run aground on this reef, although he, as well as they, understands how to establish a precise form, which is necessitated by the viewpoint he has chosen, by his problems, and he knows that the sources of his anxiety are not the same, for he knows anxiety — and paints from a full human logic.

For him precisely the Dionysian outpouring of color on the canvas, forced toward its uttermost entrenchment, assumes a precise psychological significance, a purely physical vehemence.

Against the “colorists’” bombast Gilbert takes his refuge in ellipsis. Against the babbling palettes’ parade numbers — he arms the scream, naked, strict. Irresistible. But we never become too many to in all areas seize eloquence “and wring its neck.”

11: SVAVAR GUDNASON

TEXT EDOUARD JAGUER

Icelandic painter.

Born 1909 in Hornafjordur.

Between each dawn and each evening the surf hews and hews its cliffs with the violent thunder of stony harlequins.

When I in 1947 wrote down these lines, which in connection with a purely lyrical text, for me only had a purely poetic meaning, I had no idea that they one day would come to serve as a message, as an echo that crosses Svavar Gudnason’s work (which precisely comes from the country where dawn reveals its most lingering essence). Immediately at the first meeting in August 1949 this relationship was however revealed: Once again the confusion and the supposed irrationality in a text was clarified, at the meeting with another irrationality. Confirming each other, their mysticism gave way to the real. These cliffs, with their immense expanses in inhospitable formations, obliterated me completely, and the jagged chains’ capricious hollows and reddening chasms, which align in a hundred boldly swung curves, this whole tumultuous feeling as of an avalanche, it was precisely this that had summoned me so strongly in these peculiar sentences’ flickering appearance.

But we must cross the threshold: Yet it will fall hard for the reader, who can only rely on the photographs, to understand the values in this violent art. In this universe, whose brilliance eggs on and burns the eye, one must ambush the color and touch grooves and roughness. One must wander around among this solemn realm’s cliffs, to be able to grasp its power.

At the heart of these compositions there always hammer certain original forms, spheres or prisms of volcanic nature, which seek to pull space together around themselves, to break through the wall, and from all sides other forms emerge, teeth and needles (but of slate and basalt) and counteract this rotation, to brake it and thereafter annihilate it. Does it happen by chance that certain distantly animal-like forms rise in the midst of this rocky chaos of displaced coils, one thinks, rather than of the Arctic Ocean’s monsters and prehistory’s coarsely fashioned colossi, of Leviathan, which is such an ingrained part of the very essence of the sea that it would be futile to describe its exact contours.

The actual power in this art is contained in these counter-movements, in this procedure of damping and propulsion, or of combustion and cooling, and in the color’s aggressiveness, which like lava streams flow from Gudnason’s abundant palette, a volcanic crater in constant eruption. (One can without much humor say that he carries fire to the first mill). He confirms in this way merely by the use of the paint material, this whole composite vehemence in the conflict between the elements, between man and its elements. Does he not use to realize such a goal this reinforced figurative method as an Egill Jacobsen — to mention an artist who touches him — a Miro or a Lam with predilection use, for the rest with completely valid motivations, then one must however beware of from that concluding that he maneuvers up alongside those who ride the pure abstractionism’s hobby horse. With the same dogged research zeal as Constant or Jorn, he merely traverses other regions.

The basic feature of his excavations designates, to adhere to the emotional areas, the lower layers in consciousness, which retain the imprint of the world’s first times, in corresponding degree one of the most captivating endeavors that exist.

The Icelandic “countrymenship” represents in itself a peculiarity, sufficiently remarkable for one and another. He could successfully flatter the exotic complexes in blockheads, with an urge to escape from everyday life, and limit himself to accepted descriptions of curiosities from the land of extremity. He prefers like Atlan, who controls the opposite pole of geographical barrenness, himself to let himself be imprinted by the scorched expanses’ deep nature stamp, where meager plant growths creep along the ground, where even the seasons’ cart only glides forward in large jolts.

It is physiologically he penetrates the convulsions in the earth’s crust, which Old Norse cosmology believed formed from the giant Ymir’s dismembered body, the giant with frost-cracked jaws. He even captures the slightest trembling, the most concealed pulsing, and it is by virtue of a quite simple analogy that we are driven to connect the phases in this earth ground’s epic with the human being’s anxious and passionate development, with its dynamic and static phases, its revolts and its secrets. This assigns his work an objective — or rather a social — meaning, and protects it against this threatening emptiness, which painters do not avoid merely by referring to this “inner model,” which one in recent times has displayed on fashion ships’ bows. The turbulent sea lets us foresee that new ships must soon be chartered. Already in the early dawn Gudnason keeps himself ready at the very end of the manning quay.

12: HENRY HEERUP

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Danish painter and sculptor.

Born 1905 in Copenhagen.

Heerup resembles a market athlete, not because he has any particularly square-cut figure. It is his strength, merely by a single glance, merely by the way of moving the foot forward, to be able to resemble what he is not, and which he nevertheless is: He is capable of being everything without however ceasing to be himself.

Moreover he resembles a diver, over whom the sea without touching him glides. But he has no diving suit. What happens is that he strides through life like the diver through the sea, who discovers a treasure, a fish, a shell and lets the sun see it.

He is perhaps a market diver, a sea athlete. Thus we wander in Heerup’s art from one pole to the other, from painting to sculpture: without having either the color’s or the line’s genius, but with genius he paints the most peculiar pictures I have ever seen, and his painting is pronounced jugglery, but jugglery from life’s immense circus, and if he goes to the sea’s bottom, I would say the earth’s, it is to bring up the drowned stones, and while he carries them up to the surface, where we are, he fixes them with a unique dexterity.

One day I walked into Heerup’s garden near Vanløse, and I asked myself what one could possibly compare the Hesperides’ or Semiramis’ garden to.

There was found here, not placed on the ground, but growing up from the ground, which has created them, a flora of stones, an encyclopedia of form, a large immobile anthill, majestic but cozy, a field with birds, beings and things, which gave me the impression of having come on a visit to the universe, as if I were dead.

For none of these stones were dead, none of these stones were stones. They represented nothing, not even stones, they were everything, including stones.

Just as Tom Thumb sowed small stones to be able to find the way back, Heerup has sown these large stones, which have become what they were, and which do not stop becoming, so that we can find our way back, which we constantly lose under our own threats, the way of reality.

He loves the stones, and he recreates them in his own image in his garden, not as a god, neither as Narcissus, he merely completes what the earth has begun. He breaks in when the earth has made the substance, the material ready. He is like a Candide who would leave his garden for nature’s sake — but who continued to treat it as a garden.

13: EGILL JACOBSEN

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Danish painter. Born 1911 in Copenhagen.

One day I discussed advertising with Egill Jacobsen, and we came to the same result: that advertising is valuable if it forms itself as the compressed expression of a strict analysis of the object — and when this has proven that it is a valuable thing.

Egill Jacobsen and his paintings, Egill Jacobsen and his intelligence, Egill Jacobsen and his psychology are valuable things. They are the subject of this text, where I will speak briefly not without making advertising, for that which fights the night, the night of painting, which masks the night of the Occident, must be brought into the light.

Egill is almost a kind of miracle. He paints some of the most striking pictures in Denmark (and thereby in Europe), and as an art theorist he is uncommonly penetrating, uncommonly subtle.

His theoretical and critical intelligence, which can be very hard, has however never driven him to make calculated art, and his sensitivity has never driven him to paint into the empty space, merely driven by the inner impulses’ rules.

He has the hand that thinks, and the head that revolts.

When he shows me one of his pictures and explains to me his intention with it, I have the feeling of stepping through a large and radiant gate — which claps one’s hands — into a universe where everything is order, calm and precision. Egill could have been satisfied with merely having painted this picture and let it attack us with its striking freedom, but he digs ruthlessly down into it, takes it apart, puts it together again, and his intention’s fine web emerges before our eye, without it bothering us. To such a degree does he remain faithful to what we ourselves have seen beforehand.

As advertising should rely on analysis, so Egill’s fantasy, this happy and healthy freedom of a child, which he takes from the universe, relies on a strict consciousness of what must be done, so that “life can change,” so that “the world can change.”

And possibly one can find traces of this conscience in the honesty or at least in the linear precision in his works: pointed masks, precise surfaces, round suns … I do not know, for Egill Jacobsen, who one night got it into his head that he wanted to invent colors and then proceeded to action, Egill, who is a psychologist of color, as Bachelard is a psychologist of form, Egill believes that painting is color before it is line. All in all he has proven this through countless experiments, the last of which concern the possibility of playing over a single color’s expressive richness, without the picture losing either its overall impression or its diversity, sunbeams, shadows.

Egill’s painting is in few words a great historical step toward unity: the unity of form and content, the unity of intelligence and sensitivity, the unity of all painting’s means, the unity of goal and means in painting.

Therefore his painting is revolutionary.

For the world in which we now find ourselves is only held up because of its deficiencies and contradictions.

14: ASGER JORN

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Danish painter.

Born 1914 in Vejrum.

It is said that Denmark is a butter factory. That is correct. But it is also a kind of Icaria for painters, an Icaria more remarkable than one can imagine it abroad, an Icaria that has millennia’s memory and millennia’s fantasy, but supposedly an Icaria that exports its butter to be able to keep its paintings. I am inclined to believe that Denmark has a kind of butter-tactics in the same way as Japan once had a toy-tactics.

It is also said that Asger Jorn is a strange painter. That is correct. From time to time Asger Jorn goes to the barber, goes to the universe, to Tunis, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Brussels and to friends who are not painters but friends, to the Bronze Age, to the kitchen, where he moreover paints the walls after having prepared a pronouncedly revolutionary meal.

Some years ago Asger Jorn got the desire to break some gates into the universe, which did not yield to brushstrokes but had to be broken in with head butts. He dived into the history of religions, cults, society, symbols and art, and far from drowning he on the contrary rescued a multitude of things up, which had been flooded or were about to be.

Picasso once told me: “I do not know when I paint, it is certainly the muses who paint while I sleep,” and Jorn, who does not perceive himself as a Picasso, but fundamentally as a Jorn, could say the same. In Denmark and in Sweden there are hundreds of his paintings in the most diverse homes, there are graphic works in the most diverse books, a house on which he has worked in cement, a kindergarten whose walls he has coated together with a group that does not exist, and with false Italian stones, — and what do I know, and what does he know: he counts neither his own nor others’ works.

What happens is that Jorn does not play comedy. There are people whom it puts out of composure. Jorn’s painting resembles himself. It is free: it goes from freedom to freedom, without one ever being able to catch it red-handed, neither in the direction of style nor of chaos (the two poles of bourgeois painting). It is ruthless: however little mathematical it may be, it nevertheless reflects, poses or solves painting’s problem, the question of the connection between painting and man (including the painter) with a strength that allows itself to be neither disturbed nor limited. It is living: Jorn paints with the same hand that he uses to shake hands with life, and his heart sits in his hand. It is direct: scorning the creator-aches, under which reality still sleeps, it goes from the dream of reality to the dream of content, and to the point where I (Jorn) and it (reality) kiss each other (on the mouth).

Aware of “painting’s misery” or rather its wealth’s fragility and the dangers that lurk for it (from frame to money, from thread to needle, from palette to desk) Jorn sees painting and lets us see it, not as a heaven of oblivion, a carpet for the eye, a swamp for shock’s screw-toads, but quietly, as the dangerous area for a human unity-experiment, which reaches from the simple seismograph to the organization of a common joy for all senses and in all directions.

There are not many painters who to the same degree as he refuses to be a painterist and avoids confusing painting’s natural necessity with mania’s cherry stems. But in that forest of forms and colors, visions, dreams and speculations, where Asger Jorn wanders forward, he does not lose sight for a moment of the wonderful tree in which bourgeois aesthetics shall be hanged by its neck. He works to get it hanged, and he works to get it replaced with something other than its own corpse. He believes that bourgeois aesthetics is joy’s great creator-ache, but he does more than that, he lifts it. Therefore it would have been wrong to speak of Asger Jorn’s painting in Montmartre jargon.

15: Carl-Henning Pedersen

TEXT CHRISTIAN DOTREMONT

Danish painter. Born 1913 in Copenhagen.

At a distance Carl-Henning Pedersen reminds one of Harpo Marx, and it even happens that he is mute, in order, while you speak to him, to follow the universe’s cunning (like a kid) and natural (like a kid) lines, which exist between the universe and him, and which participate in the universe and in him.

Up close he is a giant, who eats well, drinks well, smokes well, and who lives well together with his wife Else Alfelt and their two little girls, who collect foreign coins and things from Lapland, and who sing French songs with an accent that makes them “abstract.”

Not so long ago Carl-Henning and Else had their little apartment so filled with pictures that they no longer had any apartment. They were far from André Malraux’s “musée imaginaire.” But I am certain that the next time I come there, it will be just like before. For they paint a lot.

They love to paint.

As for Carl-Henning’s painting, I have never seen anyone whose fantasy is more distant from fantasy-making. Carl-Henning is essentially different from Heerup. He places the dream on the canvas, and the dream places itself there, as if it were at home, with its vague “logic” and its “logical” voluptuousness. I believe that the dreams, the fantasies, the images here hold by means of their own means.

We find ourselves in opposition to this way (which Heerup escapes through absurdity) of hanging the fantasies up like clothes on a painterly clothesline, which has come from elsewhere, and works like a hair in the soup. It is this façon of detaching “a good piece” from the pictorial reality or the imagined reality, and thereafter hypocritically placing it with great care in painting’s box. Carl-Henning does not treat life like an insect collector.

I will not say that Carl-Henning paints on tiptoe, neither on fingertips, for he is in love with painting. I say on the contrary that he to such a degree abandons himself to painting that painting gives itself in the most intimate we have, and which we must show forth, if only to make visible the unity between the external world and ourselves (who are a part of it).

Carl-Henning makes what seems awake dream, that whose wakefulness seemed veiled.