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Asger Oluf Jorn (3 March 1914 – 1 May 1973) was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International.
The largest collection of Jorn's works—including his major work Stalingrad—can be seen in the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Jorn willed his property and the works of art located inside to the Municipality of Albissola Marina (Savona), so the Italian museum called "Casa Museo Jorn" was created for displaying his works.
He was the second oldest of six children, an elder brother to Jørgen Nash. Both of his parents were teachers. His father, Lars Peter Jørgensen, a fundamentalist Christian, died from pneumonia (contracted after a car crash) when Asger was 12 years old. His mother, Maren, née Nielsen, was more liberal but nevertheless a deeply committed Christian. This early heavy Christian influence had a negative effect on Asger who began progressively to inwardly rebel against it, and more generally against other forms of authority.
In 1929, aged 15, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, although he made a recovery from it after spending three months on the west coast of Jutland. By the age of 16 he was influenced by N. F. S. Grundtvig, and although he had already started to paint, Asger enrolled in the Vinthers Seminarium, a teacher-training college in Silkeborg where he paid particular attention to a course in 19th century thought. Also at about this time Jorn became the subject of a number of oil paintings by the painter Martin Kaalund-Jørgensen, which encouraged Jorn to try his hand in this medium.
In 1936 he traveled (on a BSA motorbike he had scraped together enough money to buy) to Paris to become a student of Kandinsky. However, when he discovered that Kandinsky was having economic difficulties, barely able to sell his own paintings, Jorn decided to join Fernand Léger's Académie Contemporaine; it was during this period that he turned away from figurative painting and to abstract art. In 1937 he joined Le Corbusier in working on the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. He returned again to Denmark in the summer of 1937. He again traveled to Paris in the summer of 1938, before returning to Denmark, traveling to Løkken, Silkeborg and Copenhagen.Atkins, Guy. Asger Jorn, Methuen, 1964 Asger Jorn was a good friend of the Danish art dealer Børge Birch, owner of Galerie Birch, who sold his art as early as the 1930s. Later on Jorn held many group exhibitions and solo exhibitions in different galleries.
From 1937 to 1942, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
He traveled again to France where in the autumn of 1948 he, together with Christian Dotremont and Constant, founded COBRA (a European avant-garde art movement), and edited monographs of the Bibliothèque Cobra. However, by 1949 Jorn had started a relationship with Matie van Domselaer, the daughter of the composer Jakob van Domselaer and music teacher Maike Middelkoop. She had been married to Constant since 1942 and they had not separated yet. Constant did not take to this kindly, which played a role in the later falling apart of the Cobra Movement. This caused tension in the COBRA group with the Dutch artists boycotting a conference held at Bregnerød later that year. Matie and Jorn were married in 1950 and they had a son Ole and daughter Bodil. The COBRA group dissolved in 1951
He returned, impoverished and seriously ill with tuberculosis, to Silkeborg in 1951 and resumed work in the ceramics field in 1953. The following year he traveled to Albissola Marina in Italy where he became involved with an offshoot of COBRA, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.
He participated in the conference that led to the merger of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Lettriste Internationale, and London Psychogeographical Association to form the Situationist International in 1957. Here he applied his scientific and mathematical knowledge drawn from Henri Poincaré and Niels Bohr to develop his situlogy technique. Jorn never believed in a conception of the Situationist ideas as exclusively artistic and separated from political involvement. He was at the root and at the core of the Situationist International project, fully sharing the revolutionary intentions with Debord.Mario Lippolis (2000) Notizie su Asger Jorn, situazionista iperpolitico published in Asper Jorn La comunità prodiga (edited by Mario Lippolis). Publisher: Zona, Rapallo, 2000.Mario Lippolis (2000) Un dialogo tra vandali civilizzatori nello sfacelo dell’impero della merce published in Asper Jorn La comunità prodiga (edited by Mario Lippolis). Publisher: Zona, Rapallo, 2000. The Situationist general principles were an attack on the capitalist exploitation and degradation of the life of people, and solution of alternative life experiences, construction of situations, unitary urbanism, psychogeography, with the union of play, freedom and critical thinking. Such general principles were applied by Jorn to painting.Francesco Poli (1991), Sulla scia dei surrealisti, published in I Situazionisti e la loro storia
In 1961 he amicably quit his activity in the SI, still fully supporting its contents and goals, and continuing to support it financially, but believing that the new strategy of the SI was ineffective.Leonardo Lippolis (2000) Togliti i baffi, ti abbiamo riconosciuto – La vera storia di un bluff (il Luther Blissett Project e i suoi padrini) e della sua cattiva coscienza (l’Internazionale Situazionista)”. Published in journal Invarianti n. 34, 2000, section Una lezione di ripasso della storia quote: nella realtà storica, dopo le finte dimissioni del 1961, Keller-Jorn si era appena amichevolmente defilato dalle attività dell’IS, appoggiandone in pieno i contenuti e gli scopi (al punto da continuare a finanziarle), ma giudicandone poco efficace la nuova strategia.
Jorn, Asger 1964 Guy Debord and the Problem of the Accursed published in book Contre le Cinema (1964, Institute for Comparative Vandalism ). Translated from the French by Roxanne Lapidus.
He went on to found the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism in Silkeborg and contributed material to the Situationist Times. Later, he donated a museum for modern art to the Danish town of Silkeborg, near where he grew up. He was to remain close to Debord, however, and continued to fund Situationist publications.Atkins, Guy. Asger Jorn, the Crucial Years 1954–64, Lund Humphries 1977, p 57
His philosophical system Trivalent logic was given a practical manifestation through the development of three sided football.
In 1964, he was awarded a Guggenheim Award including a generous cash prize, by an international jury assembled by Lawrence Alloway.The New York Times (1964) Guggenheim Prize Of $2,500 Refused By Danish Painter. 17 January 1964, Friday. Section: Business Financial, Page 41 The following day Jorn sent this telegram to the president of the Guggenheim, Harry F. Guggenheim:Guy Debord, Correspondence, vol. 2 ("September 1960 – December 1964"), ed. Patrick Mosconi, Paris, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2001, p. 273.Tom McDonough (2002) p.6
GO TO HELL WITH YOUR MONEY BASTARD—STOP—REFUSE PRICE sic —STOP—NEVER ASKED FOR IT—STOP—AGAINST ALL DECENSY sic MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY—STOP—I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME JORN
During the course of his artistic career he produced over 2,500 paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, artist's books, collages, décollages, and collaborative tapestries.
He died in Aarhus, Denmark on 1 May 1973. He is buried in the cemetery at Grötlingbo Church, on the island of Gotland in Sweden.
This book consists of two parts. The first is a concise critique of the apparent contradictions in Marx's Das Kapital which Jorn uses to prepare the ground for a discussion of how the work of "the creative elite" can have "value" in any future society aligned on communist principles. This was originally published in French in 1959 by the Internationale Situationniste and is the most straightforward and least discursive of all of Jorn's texts, probably because Guy Debord had a hand in the editing. The second part is a long polemic against contemporaneous Russian revisionism and the failed attempt by Denmark and Britain to join the Common Market, before coming to Jorn's main proposal, an economically independent international "creative elite" adopting typical Scandinavian institutions to realize "artistic value" for the greater universal good. He also attempts to reconcile the unique and individual position of the "creative elite" with his socialist principles. The second part alternates between objective and subjective modes.
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