Towards a reassessment of Danish artist Asger Jorn

I first came across Karen Kurczynski's work on Danish artist Asger Jorn reading her contribution 'Ironic gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism' in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context edited by Joan Marter (2007). That led me to Kurczynski's doctoral thesis Beyond Expressionism: Asger Jorn and the European Avant-Garde, 1941-1961 (2005), a decidedly revisionist work that convincingly challenges the prevalent art historical account of Jorn's work (contact me if you want access to the thesis).

From the periphery of European post-war modernism, Kurczynski places Jorn at the very core of the post-war avant-garde as both a critical voice of and an important counterweight to the leading post-war styles such as Art Informel, Tachism and Lyrical Abstraction. Moreover, because his career spanned three decades (the 40s, 50s and 60s), included long stays in several countries (France, Germany, Italy and Denmark), and involved major theoretical and artistic contributions to a number of movements (Helhesten, Cobra, International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and Situationist International), Jorn offers a unique prism through which to explore post-war modernism.

Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Jorn never solidly positioned himself within one artistic movement. He always broke free of those movements he helped to found, and constantly spoke out against the leading movements of his day. Almost by default he ended up in a group of his own, devoid of any label. Difficult as it is to pigeonhole Jorn, it is nevertheless possible to identify deep-rooted themes and agendas in his work. A virulent opposition to the institutionalisation of art, mistrust of the artist's authenticity, and a belief that art should have a political message and awaken the viewer led Jorn to develop a raw and noisy style where colours, forms and brush strokes fight for survival, and unfinished figures struggle to take form.

Jorn misunderstood

That Jorn was a figurative painter is a general misunderstanding that is echoed in similar misconceptions about the Cobra movement (1948-1952), which he co-founded and which has been denigrated for being little more than a figurative version of American Abstract Expressionism.  However, quite apart from the fact Cobra was founded before the recognition of the American Abstract Expressionist movement in Europe, thus pre-empting any notion of causality, it is obvious just from looking at Jorn's art that his paintings are not figurative. Of course there are figures in his work but, crucially, they are always in the process of figuration, never complete, and so to categorize Jorn's work as figurative would be wrong, just as it would be wrong to describe de Kooning's art as figurative.

By the 1960s Jorn's work had become more fluid and, consequently, less "figurative". Ironically his more fluid paintings attracted the criticism that his work was too expressive of inner emotions, deemed an unoriginal return to the outdated tradition of Expressionism. If there was any European artist who opposed the trace of personality in art, the individual gesture, it was Jorn: for years he had been critical of the individual gesture in Art Informel and Tachism; for years he had opposed the transcendentalism in Lyrical Abstraction.

Although Jorn had always attacked the individual gesture in what was considered to be the European avant-garde, it was the Situationist International platform, a movement Jorn co-founded in 1957, that really spread the idea that Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction had been institutionalised as high modernism and had consequently lost their right to an 'avant-garde' label. Although Jorn was a co-founder and key member of the Situationist International movement, his role has been marginalised in art history. One reason for this is that the Situationists ended up rejecting painting altogether, a position that Jorn could not support and which led to his leaving the movement in 1961. All the same, recent scholarship has considered Jorn's Modifications as part of the Situationist International rejection of painting, a labelling that is simply wrong.