Asger Jorn
The Danish powerhouse of CoBrA.
Asger Jorn co-founded the CoBrA group and the Situationist International. His painting is spontaneous and ablaze with colour.
Asger Jorn was born Asger Oluf Jørgensen in 1914 in Jutland, Denmark. His parents were teachers and devoutly religious, and he himself trained as a teacher in Silkeborg. In 1936 he went to Paris and studied under Fernand Léger, and he also worked on a pavilion by the architect Le Corbusier for the 1937 World’s Fair.
During the German occupation of Denmark he took part in the resistance and belonged to a circle of young Danish artists seeking a spontaneous, Nordic and popular art. In 1948, together with artists from Belgium and the Netherlands, he founded the CoBrA group, named after the first letters of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. The group wanted to make art as free and immediate as children’s drawings and folk art.
Jorn’s painting is vigorous and ablaze with colour, with fantastical creatures, faces and swirls emerging from the paint. He also worked in ceramics, printmaking, tapestry and large reliefs, among them a long ceramic relief for the State Gymnasium in Aarhus. Around 1959 he began painting monsters and scribbles over cheap flea-market pictures, which he called modifications. He also wrote extensively on art, politics and Nordic cultural history.
In 1957 he co-founded the Situationist International with the French theorist Guy Debord. The movement criticised consumer society and had a strong influence on the student revolts of 1968. Jorn’s brother Jørgen Nash later started a Situationist community in Skåne in southern Sweden. In 1964 Jorn refused a major prize from the Guggenheim Foundation and sent back an angry telegram.
Jorn died in 1973 in Aarhus. He donated a large collection of his own and other artists’ work to Silkeborg, where Museum Jorn stands today. He is regarded as one of the most important Nordic artists of the post-war period.