Asger Jorn

Jorn goes to school in Silkeborg and develops a very strong political commitment on the radical left wing being internationally oriented and Jorn wants to study in Paris. He succeeds in entering Fernand Léger’s school, and later he enters the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen at Professor Aksel Jørgensen’s school. Through his many international contacts, he brings foreign inspiration to Denmark.

With an extraordinary effort, it is possible to keep the artistic development underway during World War II and to continue this development internationally with the formation of the COBRA Group (Copenhagen- BRuxelles-Amsterdam ) sortly after the end of the war.

1948-55: The COBRA group becomes the first significant avant-garde movement in Europe after the war, but it dissolves a few years later, and Jorn is admitted to Silkeborg Sanatorium suffering from tuberculosis. After recovery, he immediately strats tavelling, forming new, transnational artistic associations such as MIBI, Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste and International Situationists.

1955 – . COBRA’s style is called spontaneous-abstract, but is never completely abstract as with the abstract American color field painters. Jorn managed to further develop this style and to work in many materials. In the late 1950s, Jorn gets such a huge international breakthrough that he can finance himself, his apartment in Paris and his country house in Albisola, Italy. He can sustain his own, many broken families and the activities of several artists, including the release of journals of the International Situationists and his brother Jørgen Nash’s Swedish sanctuary Drakabygget.

In 1964, Jorn refused to receive one of the biggest international awards in the field of art, the Guggenheim Award, which secures major coverage by the media. In 1965, Jorn is working under the heading “Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism” with a new artistic philosophy and systematics called Trio-Lectics, and he founded the large collection of his own and other artists’ works that became the Silkeborg Art Museum, now Museum Jorn.

During the uporising in Paris in May 1968, International Situationists play a certain role as inspiration for activists and agitators.

When Jorn is diagnosed with incurable lung cancer in the early 1970s, he announces that he do not want to be buried in narrow-minded Denmark, but on Gotland, Sweden. He dies on May 1st. 1973.

Source: National Gallery of Denmark