Asger Jorn

Galerie van de Loo, Munich
Galerie Birch, Copenhagen
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1967

Basel, Kunsthalle, Asger Jorn, 1964

Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn: The Crucial Years 1954-1964, London 1986, n.p., no. 1525, illustrated
Otto van de Loo, Ed., Asger Jorn in München. Dokumentation Seines Malerischen Werkes, Grafrath 1996, n.p., no. 68, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the bright reds in the lower part of the composition tend more towards orange in the original. Condition: Unexamined out of its frame, this work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a small number of extremely thin, short cracks and minor losses to the thicker impasto areas. Further extremely close inspection reveals a speck of loss to a blue area of paint towards the centre of the composition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Designated “the greatest painter of the 1950s” by eminent art-historian T.J. Clark, Asger Jorn is best known for being a founding member of the CoBrA movement and of the revolutionary group Situationist International along with Guy Debord. However, he was also a prolific theoretician on art, philosophy and politics with more than five hundred texts published (T.J. Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism”, in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism”, New Haven 2001, p. 389).

In 1935, Jorn moved to Paris where he came into contact with the automatism of the Surrealists, the exotic primitivism of the Cubists or Jean Dubuffet, the colours of Matisse and the painterliness of Kandinsky. However, non-culturally conditioned art forms such as Tribal, Folk and Informal Arts have always been the biggest source of inspiration for Jorn, as his creative fantasy was to express the liberation of human nature, its essence, roots and instincts. Founded in 1948, CoBrA’s aim was to find a more direct route to spontaneous human expression. Its style, wild, barbarous, and deeply rooted in German and Scandinavian expressionism of the beginning of the 20th century, likens Jorn and his peers to Emil Nolde or Edvard Munch. Jorn’s naive images are neither entirely figurative nor entirely abstract. Rather, they epitomise this fiercely independent avant-garde stance of the Post-War era.

With its dramatic strokes of moody blue and vivid yellow shaping an abstracted creature, Gipfelruhe perfectly encapsulates Jorn’s unique approach to painting, which stems from his interest in Jungian theories. Carl Gustav Jung’s focus on the archetype of a ‘collective unconscious’ comprised of primitive instincts that exist within every man and manifest themselves through spontaneous acts of individuality, introduced Jorn to primordial images and to the concept of painting as an expressed experience. His paintings of the post-CoBrA period are increasingly passionate about the colours, matter and texture of paint, and truly represent the outcome of his progression as an artist.