ASGER JORN (1914-1973)
This volume is a continuation of Jorn in Scadinavia published i 1968, which covered Jorns`s career from 1930-1953 and contained an æuvre catalogue of his oil painting from that period. The present book follows a similar pattern. It covers the ten importent years during which Jorn created som of his greatest paintings and ceramics.
In the autumn of 1953 Jorn decides to leave his native Denmark in order to take up the challenge to become a "Danish European". He spent the winter in the mountains of Schwitzerland, recovering from the after-effects of tuberculosis, which had kept him in hospital for seventeen months.
The following spring he moved to Albisola, a small town on the Italian coast, which has been famous for its ceramics since the early Middle Ages. In Albisola he joined an international group of artists who included Appel, Baj, Corneille and Matta.
The years 1954 to 1964 were "Crucial Years" for they saw the emergence of Jorn as a major figure in European art. In 1958, at Expo in Brussels, his work held its own alongside paintings by other leading artists. The following year he made a huge and magnificent ceramic mural, 10 x 88 ft, for a building in Aarhus, Denmark.
Artistic recognition inevitably brought commercial pressures, against which Jorn found it necessary to defend himself. In 1959 he painted a series of pictures which he hoped would be rejected by the public. His so-called Modifications consisted of sentimental old canvases bought in junk shops and overpainted or "modernized". These pictures did not, in fact, find buyers at the time. But his London exhibition of equally un-Jornlike "luxury" paintings in 1961 was an unexpected sell-out.
The author first met Jorn in 1956, when he came on a brief visit to London. During the next eighteen years, until the artist`s death in 1973, the author belonged to a small circle of close friends with whom Jorn discussed the many projects in which he became engaged. The most importent of these, in view of its international repercussions, was the Situationist movement which Jorn founded with Guy Debord and others in 1957.
As in the previous volume, Guy Atkins has worked in collaboration with the Danish art historian Troels Andersen. This time he has also been able to call upon three other experts who have contributed chapters on the more tecnical media in which Jorn worked. Part Two contains information on Jorn`s dealers and collectors.
Part Three includes the illustrated æuvre catalogue of 751 paintings from the period, as well as an appendix related to earlier pictures which came to light too late for inclusion in the previous volume.
