Asger Oluf Jorn was a founding member of the avant-garde COBRA movement and was later aligned with the Situationist International.
In 1994, the famed art historian T.J. Clark described Jorn’s work in its potential for being ‘garish, florid, tasteless, forced, cute, flatulent, overemphatic.’ He concluded, however, ‘…it can never be vulgar.’ His comments came on the footsteps of an art history conference where he had championed Jorn as ‘the greatest painter of the 1950s.’
And yet today, Clarke’s judgment begs to be questioned given American’s unfamiliarity with the Danish artist’s work. Though exhibited from the 1960s to the 1980s at Lefebre Gallery in New York, there has only been one retrospective of his work in a major institution: at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, from 1982 – 83.
For Jorn, art was an expression of life, of activism, of an uncensored freedom that could never be confined to studio practice alone. In a diverse career spanning 50 years, he made over 2,500 paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, artist’s books, collages, décollages and sculptures. His vast, under-appreciated oeuvre attests not only to his beliefs, but also to a practice permeated with excess.
