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Lot Essay
CoBrA artists found inspiration in non-academical subjects, such as primitive art, history, culture and myths, as a means to oppose the sterile art of the Academy. These subjects enabled them to paint in a raw and primordial way without any strains on their emotions. Art had to be spontaneous, nightmarish and wondrous, provocatively hostile and reluctantly aesthetic. In the present lot Asger Jorn shows his admiration to a Nordic people, the Goths. Compared to the classical European culture of Greeks and Romans, this people was considered to be uncivilized and barbaric, and played an important role in the fall of the Western Roman empire. Jorn has managed to put this unruliness onto the canvas, both through the dynamic composition, as through the thick impasto layer of brightly coloured paint. This combination was developed in the early 1960s when Jorn began to formulate his thoughts and philosophical beliefs and incorporating his beliefs into his art. The painting is thus packed with life and colour. The viewer can vaguely discern the features of various characters in the chaotic maelstrom of paints. Here Jorn's belief in the importance of aesthetic creation is played out to an epic scale.
The chaotic mesh of barely distinguishable shapes can flummox the viewer completely by the almost appearing faces and forms within the work. No one interpretation is correct - that would destroy the entire point of the work - and yet some of the faces seem almost unambiguous. Each face and recognizable feature in this work was deliberately marred by Jorn before it had the chance to take on a truly visible form; he was himself the architect of this painting's colossal opacity, manoeuvring the viewer into a corner of incomprehension and hence wonder.
Jorn himself claimed that his titles were mere tags to distinguish the one from the other: 'I use the titles in a very slapdash way, and at the same time making sure not to be too precise, not to give a painting too precise and unambiguous a meaning' (Jorn, quoted in Peter Shield, Comparative Vandalism: Asger Jorn and the artistic attitude to life, Aldershot 1998, p. 67). This is in fact very misleading, as during this period of reflection and formulation of his philosophical views Jorn was using his titles to complement his works and, despite his belief in Pataphysics, to guide the viewer's interpretation to some extent. In this work the title directs the viewer to the Nordic history, while at the same time confusing the onlooker, since the Goths were a travelling people who originated in southern Scandinavia and then migrated on to Central Europe without ever having a country with actual borders. Jorn thus appears to be giving the Goths a place in history, which they were always denied.
While the 1960s were a period of great advances in his philosophy, they were also the years in which his mastery of colour truly came to the fore. He had always hoped to somehow imbue each individual colour with an autonomous, almost mystical strength, and it was during this period that he finally began to achieve them. The predominantly primary colours are placed on the surface as if they were living entities and not just static elements on a canvas. The lines and forms are swirling and appear to be ever-changing. Thus 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 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 all crowd into the confined space of the artist's unconscious vision.
The chaotic mesh of barely distinguishable shapes can flummox the viewer completely by the almost appearing faces and forms within the work. No one interpretation is correct - that would destroy the entire point of the work - and yet some of the faces seem almost unambiguous. Each face and recognizable feature in this work was deliberately marred by Jorn before it had the chance to take on a truly visible form; he was himself the architect of this painting's colossal opacity, manoeuvring the viewer into a corner of incomprehension and hence wonder.
Jorn himself claimed that his titles were mere tags to distinguish the one from the other: 'I use the titles in a very slapdash way, and at the same time making sure not to be too precise, not to give a painting too precise and unambiguous a meaning' (Jorn, quoted in Peter Shield, Comparative Vandalism: Asger Jorn and the artistic attitude to life, Aldershot 1998, p. 67). This is in fact very misleading, as during this period of reflection and formulation of his philosophical views Jorn was using his titles to complement his works and, despite his belief in Pataphysics, to guide the viewer's interpretation to some extent. In this work the title directs the viewer to the Nordic history, while at the same time confusing the onlooker, since the Goths were a travelling people who originated in southern Scandinavia and then migrated on to Central Europe without ever having a country with actual borders. Jorn thus appears to be giving the Goths a place in history, which they were always denied.
While the 1960s were a period of great advances in his philosophy, they were also the years in which his mastery of colour truly came to the fore. He had always hoped to somehow imbue each individual colour with an autonomous, almost mystical strength, and it was during this period that he finally began to achieve them. The predominantly primary colours are placed on the surface as if they were living entities and not just static elements on a canvas. The lines and forms are swirling and appear to be ever-changing. Thus 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 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 all crowd into the confined space of the artist's unconscious vision.