Asger Jorn  (Danish, 1914-1973) 

Painter Asger Jorn (Danish, 1914–1973) first became well known as a co-founder of the artists’ group CoBrA in 1948, which questioned the dominance of French Surrealist artists and fostered an expressive and spontaneous formal style. Jorn originally studied to be a teacher, before taking up painting 1930. His first works included landscapes and portraits, influenced by 1930s Danish art. In the mid-1930s he experimented with abstracted forms, and went to Paris to work on an exhibition pavilion designed by famous architect Le Corbusier for the upcoming Paris World Exhibition. During World War II, he returned to Denmark fleeing German occupation, and after the war co-founded CoBrA, an acronym taken from the founding artists’ home cities of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam; the group had their first large-scale exhibition in 1949. In 1957, Jorn helped combine CoBrA and other progressive groups to form the Situationist International group, which rejected the lifestyle foisted on society by capitalism. Jorn participated in documenta II in 1959 in Kassel, receiving widespread international attention for his work, and later became notorious for rejecting a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. He is known for his paintings, lithographs, and etchings, and experimented with spontaneous line and semi-figurative representation, two fundamental aspects of the CoBrA visual language. He is further recognized for his overpainting of inexpensive 19th century works that he collected at the flea markets, in series he called Modifications or Défigurations, and has also received acclaim for his work with ceramics, collage, and sculpture. After a period in which he focused on Danish contemporary photography, he resumed painting and produced a significant number of works between 1970 and 1972. Jorn died in 1973, and a retrospective of his work opened the same year at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover; recent retrospectives of his work have been held at the Kunsthalle Kiel in Germany, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Jorn was not only a prolific artist in diverse mediums, but was also an accomplished writer and theorist, and published several written works on philosophy, economics, archaeology, and aesthetics.