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Lot Essay
With its musical-sounding title, Alegretto Furbo is a work from Jorn's mature period in the 1960s that clearly asserts the artist's long-held belief in the use of pure form as a powerful emotive language. Consisting of a swirling mass of amorphous shapes that merge into a tumult of seemingly animate form, this largely abstract painting appears to be permeated by spectral presences that fleetingly emerge and then disappear into a mist of painterly form and soft colour. Everything is held in a state of flux and transition, constantly shifting before the eye. In this way Jorn brings the stasis of his forms to life in a way that suggests an overwhelming sense of emotion and a powerful archetypal heritage in which ancestors, ghosts and mythological beings all crowd into the confined space of the artist's unconscious vision.
"True realism, materialist realism, lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content," Jorn had written in the second CoBrA manifesto in 1949, and, despite all his later ruminations and complex theorising during the early 1960s, this statement , as a work like Alegretto Furbo shows, clearly remained at the core of his art. Alegretto Furbo was painted at the height of this period of academic and critical research when Jorn, having recently split from Guy Debord and the Situationist group was formulating his own theories for the advancement of modern society through culture and was propounding the central role of the artist as a cultural contributor to the social, political and economic welfare of the state. At the heart of Jorn's philosophy lay the artist's belief in attaining and maintaining a dynamic state of equilibrium between all forces and elements - a form of thinking that can also be seen to lie at the centre of his painterly aesthetic which largely depends on the artist's remarkable ability to sustain the febrile tension that, in his finest work, is deliberately established between the multifarious elements of the picture.
In Alegretto Furbo this dynamic tension holds in check a tumultuous swirling energy in such a way as to suggest a paradox between the furious visual activity of the painting's individual parts and the sublime calm and balance of the composition as a whole. The painting asserts a clear contrast between two mutually dependent opposites that is reflected by the work's enigmatic but evocative title and which also echoes Jorn's feelings about his own theories which he expressed in 1963 in the foreward to the re-issue of his 1952 theoretical work "Comparative Vandalism". Reacting to Werner Haftmann's description of him as a 'nocturnal' painter, Jorn had become heavily introspective and consequently wrote, "It struck me that there was a nocturnal aesthetic in Kant, and when I came to this realisation I suddenly discovered what (my) book (was) about. It is about the sublime, the longing for the lofty; and now I understood as well why I have pondered so much to find out what is meant by the sublime; what it means to lift oneself up. The sentence by Kant that had taken hold of me is this: "The night is sublime; day is beautiful". It is remarkable to see Kant propound an antithesis between two aesthetic categories, in this dialectical way, as night and day. He also says: "The sublime moves; the beautiful entrances. The sublime must always be great. The beautiful can also be small. The sublime may be simple; the beautiful can be polished and embellished. A great height is just as sublime as a great depth." (cited in Asger Jorn - Animator of Oil Painting ed. Erik Steffensen, Edition Blúndal 1995.)
This sense of deep contrast but mutual dependency is a constant theme in much of Jorn's writing and an essential element of all his painting. With its muted colour and delicate forms swirling with the intensity of a painting of the Last Judgement, Alegretto Furbo is an important work that clearly asserts these fundamental values. Its Italian title has a musical connotation that seems wholly appropriate to the delicacy with which the forms and colours of this work interweave and respond to one another. Translating roughly as "craftily lively", it is a title that despite Jorn's insistence on being vague in the titling of his work, evidently seems to fit in this case.
"True realism, materialist realism, lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content," Jorn had written in the second CoBrA manifesto in 1949, and, despite all his later ruminations and complex theorising during the early 1960s, this statement , as a work like Alegretto Furbo shows, clearly remained at the core of his art. Alegretto Furbo was painted at the height of this period of academic and critical research when Jorn, having recently split from Guy Debord and the Situationist group was formulating his own theories for the advancement of modern society through culture and was propounding the central role of the artist as a cultural contributor to the social, political and economic welfare of the state. At the heart of Jorn's philosophy lay the artist's belief in attaining and maintaining a dynamic state of equilibrium between all forces and elements - a form of thinking that can also be seen to lie at the centre of his painterly aesthetic which largely depends on the artist's remarkable ability to sustain the febrile tension that, in his finest work, is deliberately established between the multifarious elements of the picture.
In Alegretto Furbo this dynamic tension holds in check a tumultuous swirling energy in such a way as to suggest a paradox between the furious visual activity of the painting's individual parts and the sublime calm and balance of the composition as a whole. The painting asserts a clear contrast between two mutually dependent opposites that is reflected by the work's enigmatic but evocative title and which also echoes Jorn's feelings about his own theories which he expressed in 1963 in the foreward to the re-issue of his 1952 theoretical work "Comparative Vandalism". Reacting to Werner Haftmann's description of him as a 'nocturnal' painter, Jorn had become heavily introspective and consequently wrote, "It struck me that there was a nocturnal aesthetic in Kant, and when I came to this realisation I suddenly discovered what (my) book (was) about. It is about the sublime, the longing for the lofty; and now I understood as well why I have pondered so much to find out what is meant by the sublime; what it means to lift oneself up. The sentence by Kant that had taken hold of me is this: "The night is sublime; day is beautiful". It is remarkable to see Kant propound an antithesis between two aesthetic categories, in this dialectical way, as night and day. He also says: "The sublime moves; the beautiful entrances. The sublime must always be great. The beautiful can also be small. The sublime may be simple; the beautiful can be polished and embellished. A great height is just as sublime as a great depth." (cited in Asger Jorn - Animator of Oil Painting ed. Erik Steffensen, Edition Blúndal 1995.)
This sense of deep contrast but mutual dependency is a constant theme in much of Jorn's writing and an essential element of all his painting. With its muted colour and delicate forms swirling with the intensity of a painting of the Last Judgement, Alegretto Furbo is an important work that clearly asserts these fundamental values. Its Italian title has a musical connotation that seems wholly appropriate to the delicacy with which the forms and colours of this work interweave and respond to one another. Translating roughly as "craftily lively", it is a title that despite Jorn's insistence on being vague in the titling of his work, evidently seems to fit in this case.