The twentieth-century Nordic artist researcher Asger Jorn (real name Asger Oluf Jorgensen, 1914-1973) worked in many media, created paintings and drawings, and made collages of ceramics.

Asger Jorn’s Babyhood

He was born in 1914 in Weirun, Jutland. The boy grew up in a teacher’s family and was brought up in a strictly Protestant spirit. This later had an impact on his art, in which he protested against all forms of tyranny. The boy graduated from a teachers’ college in 1930, where by chance he became a member of the Danish Communist Party and fell under the influence of the syndicalists.

Beginning of creation

Asger Jorn early work indicates the influence of Scandinavian Expressionism on his work. However, all that changed after his first visit to Paris. In 1936 he went to study at the Académie Française Contemporain. He met his teacher Fernand Léger, who commissioned him to design the decorations for the New Age Palace for the 1937 World’s Fair. This was a period when the budding artist depicted fantasy worlds on his canvases and became increasingly fascinated by surrealism. His first solo exhibition began with this year.

War Years

But in the 40s, Asger Jorn sought to free himself from the influence of Léger and the Surrealists, whom he had met in Paris. From the point of view of the painter himself, he considered the work “The Blue Painting” (1940), which was created in the style of abstractionism, a decisive factor in his creative development. 

Jørn participated in the Resistance movement, which was created by the Danish Communists during World War II. However, at the same time, when times of peace came, he began to create again. So in 1948 the artist, together with Appel, Constant and Cornel, organized the avant-garde group COBRA in France. The first letters of the capitals of the countries from which its members came – Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Cobra’s style was close to the abstract impressionist style. During the time between 1950 and 1952, Jørn theorized about this manner of drawing in his published work Salvation and Casualty.

Post-war years

Demonic beings, dark forces, masks and fetishes appear more and more frequently in Jörn’s paintings. In addition to his paintings, he began to create a series of prints, which were not completed until 1961. Work on them was suspended due to illness. However, after the artist recovered health, he began to work with extraordinary productivity and in a few months created a lot of engravings and ceramics.

And it was from the middle of the 50s that a period of abstraction began in the artist’s work. Asger Jorn left Denmark in 1954 and wandered around Europe. In Switzerland he produced a series of prints, which were presented in 1961 under the title Swiss Suite: 1953-1954. His painting changed over time: abstraction gave way to subject representation, figures were often distorted beyond recognition, and the artist applied strong, vigorous colors thickly. 

In the mid-60s, Asger Jorn almost completely stopped giving titles to his paintings. It seemed as if the works were created from some kind of artist’s own world in which the charms of magic and the legends of the ancient Scandinavians were intertwined. They were based on the rhythm of colors, lines, and light. Jorn’s iconography of the time depicts human heads and bodies, animals and fantastic creatures, as well as certain cellular forms.

Jorn’s name was known in the United States in 1962. And it happened after the exhibition of his works at an exhibition in a New York gallery. The following year, the artist created a series of collages of posters that are usually hung on fences around construction sites. He then cut the prints into fragments and put them together in a completely new way.

Jordaan’s culture matured and gained international recognition, and he organized his own exhibitions in several cities. He also joined the radical groups Situationist International and began work on a very large painting, Stalingrad. It was not completed until 1972.

In 1961, Asger Jorn left Situationist International because his personal views and those of the other members of the group disagreed. The Scandinavian artist collected some 15,000 photographs of Scandinavian folk art on his travels and published four monographs with commentaries. The artist placed two color lithographs on the pages of a book of poems and lithographs by Walasso Ting (1929-2010)

A year later he turned down the prestigious international Guggenheim Prize for his painting Dead Drunken Danes (1960, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art).

The graphic artist Asger Jorn had the most direct connection with literature. He wrote a number of books on aesthetics, philosophy, and history. He was the first to translate some of Kafka’s novels into Danish.

End of Life

He passed away in 1973, at the age of 59. According to him, he left the world more than two thousand paintings and engravings on ceramics with many drawings in the most prestigious museums and art galleries.