Asger Jorn (1914–1973) was born in Western Jutland. His first artistic education was under the artist Martin Kaalund Jørgensen. In 1936, he drove to Paris on his motorbike, where began studying at Fernand Léger’s L’Académie Contemporaine. Before the outbreak of war made travel difficult, Jorn lived between Paris and Copenhagen, taking in influences from the Surrealists, and working for the pioneering architect Le Corbusier at the 1937 World Exhibition.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Jorn, along with his friends and colleagues Egill Jacobsen, Ejler Bille, Carl-Henning Pedersen and Robert Dahlmann Olsen, published the underground journal Helhesten. Through this collaboration and in the isolation of the occupation, these Danish artists evolved a new kind of abstraction. This was characterised by vibrant, unmixed colours, and an interest in unmediated, spontaneous expression with thick, gestural brushstrokes. Beyond the markmaking, this led group members to explore children’s painting and folk mythology, concentrating their subjects around human/animal figures, particularly birds and faces. Jorn recognised the strengths of this work, and sought collaborators abroad.
In 1948, Jorn established the CoBrA group with Belgian poet Christian Dotremont and the Dutch artists Karel Appel, Constant and Corneille. The name derived from a shortening of Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, the cities these artists represented. Many of Jorn’s fellow Helhesten members also joined. While CoBrA was dissolved in 1951, it was a wildly productive and influential period for many of the artists involved, considered the most influential movement in Nordic Modernism.
Not content with founding one generation-defining artistic group, in 1957, Jorn was instrumental in establishing Situationist International alongside the French philosopher Guy Debord. The two brought together artist collections from across Europe for the First World Congress of Free Artists in Italy. Out of this meeting, the group formed. Jorn and Debord were insistent that it was not an art movement, instead they saw it as a radical social movement with the aim to dismantle capitalism. Situationist International was dissolved in 1972.
Jorn maintained an interest in Nordic mythology and folk art, bordering on an obsession, establishing the “Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism”. He expended huge amounts of time and personal funds in working on a 32 volume history that promised to explore “10,000 years of Nordic Folk Art”. The year before his death, he had been planning a two-volume work on Theoderik, the King of the Goths.
Following his involvement with CoBrA and the Situationist International Jorn enjoyed international acknowledgement and developed a small but dedicated group of collectors. In 1964, Jorn refused the prestigious Guggenheim award. In 1982, the Museum Jorn was officially opened in Silkeborg, Jorn had committed to building the museum’s collection with his own work and work by other artists in gratitude for their early support. Jorn’s first retrospective exhibition was held in 1964, travelling to Basel, Amsterdam and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Jorn’s works are held by major collections globally, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Statens Museum for Kunst.