Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist is Proven By Their Existence, 1939
Feligrams, 1942
Loss of Center, 1958
In the Beginning was the Image, 1965
Blue Horse, 1954
Monster, 1954
Stalingrad, 1957-60, 1967, 1972
The Avant Garde Does Not Surrender, 1962
Nocturne III, 1959
Choux, 1961
We will begin with the 1939 painting, Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist is Proven by Their Existence, which is characteristic of Jorn's earlier style of painting. There are four standing figures on a flat background of yellow ochre, and they appear to be standing in some sort of low puddle, which is a deep ultramarine blue colored part of a curving horizon. At the left, the first figure is a tall, thin amoeboid shape that tapers to a point at the top, painted in a flat brown with a circular black claw an a light blue, horizontally oriented oval for an eye that comes across as though it is partly closed. A frowning mouth is formed by an extension of the boundary line of a black triangle that floats behind the first figure and over the second, visually connecting them. The second creature consists of a much more complex form, the overlapping of a good multiplicity of circles and oval shapes. The head is mostly a rounded equilateral triangle, but it may also be the massive black triangle that extends between the two figures, which has at its this tip a blue oval much like the first figure's eye. This figure's form is the least definite of the four, because it consists of the most complex overlappings of simple shapes that do not themselves seem to represent certain parts, though there are definitely two thin lines for legs extending to the ground's puddle form, and the figure appears to be holding up a large white egg shape to the middle of the upper portion of the canvas. The third figure is the shortest of the four. He looks directly out at the viewer, spreading his arms out, and stepping forward. He appears to be wearing some kind of loose robe, established by multiple shapes. First, there is a rectangle over the middle of his body, with a zigzagged lower edge. The top edge of the rectangle is the figure's arms, and hands extend from each side, pointing up. This rectangle apparently represents loose fabric of the sleeves. The figure's body is a somewhat triangular shape with curved edges that starts with a thin point above the large rectangle of loose fabric, extending through the middle of it, and below, stopping at the horizon line, where it has spread out noticeably. The head is its own dark green amoeboid shape with two eyes of the same yellow ochre color as the background, eyes that tilt on a diagonal axis, creating the appearance of a head tilted to the right in a confused gaze, a gaze which points directly at the viewer. Behind the head there is a red-orange shape, rounded at the top with straight vertical lines as edges below, like a hood for the figure's cloak. One can interpret this figure as some sort of a preacher or prophet, stepping though the puddle to reach the viewer, but without much of a clear narrative going on between the figures this is hard to say as a definite intention of the artist. Yet, this third figure remains probably the one with the clearest narrative quality, and he has one of the more definite expressive qualities of the four figures. Finally, the figure at the right consists of a massive dark head shape, and another dark body shape, that are connected by a very thin neck, and with thin lines extending out for arms. The right arm has an additional loop for the hand, and smaller intersecting lines for the fingers. The head is altogether bizarre, being quite large for the size of the body, with two pseudopod-like extensions from the top. Most oddly, there are three dots in a very small inverted triangle shape, which is registered immediately as a face with an expression similar, but not identical to that of the preaching figure, yet this face is outside of the head shape, directly on the ochre background.
All of these figures are painted in a hard edged style, which is to say, their forms are mostly rendered in flat colors, and each shape has a very definite, clear boundary. Sometimes there are outlines, and some forms consist only of lines. Usually in this style of painting there isn't very much of a trace of brushwork, because the colors and their boundaries are produced so flatly. There is very little illusion of depth. In this one, the only thing that shows depth is the placement of some shapes directly on top of others, and there are some aspects with the horizon and the puddle on the ground: figures whose feet end closer to the top of the horizon are perceived as being further back, but on the whole the space shown is very shallow. Unlike a lot of hard edged painting, a style more characteristic of early 20th century abstractions, Jorn's Obtrusive Figures allows some painterly technique. Variations in the tone of the mostly flat blocks of color are visible, and some brushstrokes can be seen, though they are not very thick. Variation is especially evident in the ochre background, and the edge of the blue puddle at the bottom of the picture does have a more jagged edge, with a few lines extending off of the main shape, and some small lines left unpainted within it.
The title of the piece is also of interest: it is a humorous name, somewhat tautological in its form, or logically fallacious, like a statement that “it is wet because it is wet.” Yet this aspect of the title fits the figures perfectly well. The figures are standing there, and they are strongly asserting themselves. The two on the right are looking directly at the viewer, the cloaked one is even stepping forward; the two at the left are in profile, looking dazedly or intently or scornfully at the two right figures. They have their own sort of vitality, and they come across as strong creatures, capable of sustaining their own identities. To me, this seems to express quite well Jorn's idea of art as life form, which he articulated two years after this painting was made.
Feligrams was painted from 1942 to 1943, a little more than three years after his Obtrusive Creatures. It has a lot in common with both his earlier hard-edged style and his abstract expressionist works. There is a scattering of figures about the canvas, apparently emerging from the upper part of the canvas, where they are the smallest, to the center and the lower right area. The creatures here range from not definitively human to definitively non-human. At the top there is a fish, a red wormlike creature, a penguin holding its fins up as though in celebration of its existence, and a blocky form in purple and blue, with yellow squares upon it, that might be a whale or a large fish. Below there are three larger creatures, who are situated just below the middle of the picture, though they extend off to both sides as well. They are blockier and rather more humanoid than the fish and penguin of the upper portion, though in the end their identities do not refer to creatures that we already know about: they are just themselves. The smallest of these has an immense, joyful smile, a red crescent on a face that consists of yellow and blue shapes and wide white eyes looking off somewhat to the right. The other two figures are not smiling as much at all; the central one gazes rather blankly at the viewer and the right-most one is nearly walking off of the paper. This picture is quite different from the Obtrusive Creatures. There is a greater illusion of space: the creatures seem to be floating about in rather an unrealistic space, but there is still the difference in the scale of the figures, and the diagonal direction of their emergence, like a single-point perspective drawing, that create some sense of depth between the various characters, even though any of the characters taken individually is quite flat. The color palette used is that of Jorn's later paintings, consisting of rich greens, yellows, blues, and reds, and some oranges, purples, and browns, though these are not as frequent in this painting. The blocks of color are still cohesive, but are allowed to mix into each other more than previously, especially in the background, which is a dark red at the top, and blue and green in the lower two thirds, with dark shadows scattered about behind the figures. It shows a considerably greater freedom of brush work than the earlier paintings, and this aspect of Jorn's work continues to increase over time. It comes across as a very joyful painting, full of vitality and happiness, without coming across as having a naïve, childish kind of happiness; there is no sense that this is a kind of joy so sugary-sweet or twee as to be immediately off-putting and mostly lacking in substance. Instead the figures come across as having a strength of their own, a certain level of energy that relates again to Jorn's idea of art as life form in all its varieties: beautiful, ugly, impressive, grim, contradictory, and all. Perhaps this sense about the characters in the painting is established by the richer and darker color palette and the general indecipherable nature of some of these figures. In fact, the three figures at the front seem to be more of scattered arrangements of coloured polygons than actual figures. The faces are constructed as faces, but the rest of their bodies seem to have only occasional hints at representation of particular parts. At the back there are concentrations of shapes that are registered as having faces only after some time of examination, but when they are seen as faces they come across as extremely expressive: there is a lightened blue form near the penguin, a round shape with two semicircles at its bottom like the two drooping cheeks on a bulldog or a walrus; this face comes across as tilted 45 degrees to the right, while maintaining a tight gaze forward, as though the creature is actually held quite still, but suspended in water and floating up through it, rotating slowly and involuntarily. There are other concentrations of shapes, there are shapes that seem to meld in with the background and these figures simultaneously, and these apparently fishlike forms that are expressing themselves, their movements, and their emotions, simply by how they are extended in space, as these forms are fully lacking in facial features, but they are still perceived as animals of some sort, floating and swimming about, extending their limbs, going off into some direction. In all I would attribute the joyous, vital, and overall strong character of this painting to the variety of elements working together: the colors along with the shapes, their abstraction and scattering, the directions of the lines in the background's brushwork, the implied directionality in the arrangement of the figures, and the altogether strange sense of space which in places has an illusion of a rather deep space, and in other places no space at all, only the two dimensional shapes.
Loss of Centre is a painting from 1958, which is almost completely abstract. Its colors are not as bright as some of Jorn's other paintings: the greens seem manually muted and tinged with cyan, this color is overlayed in a part of the background on an orange colour with a similar luminosity, and they are allowed to mix and dull each other. The blues are more of cobalt tones than ultramarines, and the yellows are allowed more variation than usual, being lightened to various extents over the canvas. Over these colors there is a large amount of pure black, especially in the right half of the background, and pure white, which occurs more in the outlines of the main round forms at the left of the canvas. In this already there is a sense of imbalance: the right is dark, empty space, and most of the forms are on the left side, and consist of lighter tones. There are hints of faces in the round forms, but these are difficult to discern, and on the whole, what one perceives are shapes in motion. The title, Loss of Centre, fits quite well: there are three main round forms at the middle and the left half of the painting, which seem to be rotating, colliding, and moving away from each other. Two of them appear to have faces, but the rest are fully abstract. The left-most one appears quite distressed: it is a long, bearded face, covered in thick strokes of the fairly light, cyan-tinged green that is also present through the left side of the background. The other face is in the central yellow outlined form, and it is certainly expressive, although indefinite; it is far from blank, but its features are so incomplete and distorted that one cannot discern a particular expression. An odd pale yellow shape, something like a capital L with curves and bulges, seems to form about a third of a skull: the center of the face and a bit of a curvature around the right eye; and at the bottom of this form there is a series of white lines, which do not end defini9tely but instead blend into the black background, to represent teeth. They are large lines with a definite sense of motion, the left cluster pointing straight down, and the two lines at the right going diagonally away from the faces, more into the lower right corner. There are spots for two eyes, and the right one seems to be drooping, or having its skin pulled down, while looking off dazedly into the distance above the right half of the painting. Yet as a whole, the face's outline is moving toward the upper right corner. The outline is made in a deeper yellow color than the yellows that appear in the face, and its outline, an oblong but mostly round shape, extends to a point at its upper left corner, stretching far away from all of the facial features. Another dark bulge between the right eye and the teeth seems to extend down in the opposite direction. It is indeed a loss of center; it is being pulled apart just by a matter of the conditions of its existence. It applies for this particular face, and it applies equally for the entirety of the canvas. The various shapes are arranged so that they are all moving somehow off of the edge of the picture plane, or at least away from the center; the brush strokes are loose, and rough, and very thick, giving the sense that the image was born out of an act of intense movement, and the resulting picture is, itself, apparently in motion. It is a loss of center, but it appears that whatever center there is can only have been there momentarily, accidentally, as the objects began colliding with one another.
The 1965 painting, In the Beginning was the Image, is painted in a style fairly similar to Loss of Center, though in a color palette more similar to that of Feligrams, with deep greens and blues, and variations between strong reds and oranges. These are the main categories of colors on the canvas, which are separated into clear categories or spaces for each color, as though they have not yet had time to start acting and dashing and mixing about. The upper left corner is blue; the lower left corner is red-orange; the right side, though mostly its lower portion, is green. They mix in places, and scattered throughout there are pieces of white, and yellow, and black. And these are not the main components of the space, but they instead occupy for the most part the spaces between the main masses of color. In terms of physics, this kind of composition makes sense for something that is representing a beginning. Over time, entropy, or chaos, increases. When a glass falls from a table onto the floor, it shatters, and its condition becomes more disorganised. It will not happen in the reverse; that is to say, glasses that have been shattered do not spontaneously rise back up to adjacent tables and reassemble themselves. To use a simpler example more directly applicable to this painting, we can look at the diffusion of fluid substances, which can be either gases or liquids, as long as they are in a phase that does not hold its own shape. One can begin with two discrete containers of a red and a blue liquid. This is a very organised state; all of the reds are together and all of the blues are together. But if a wall that is dividing them is removed, they will spontaneously mix. This is because their particles are always in motion. Simply by that aspect of their nature, some of the particles will move away from those of their own color. Over time they will mix into one uniform purple mass, the simplest possible state. This is the increase in entropy, and this process occurs in any closed system. One might be able to organise something locally, but this depends on the addition of energy from outside. A person can reassemble a shattered glass, but this act will require an amount of effort, and that human effort will have required the eating of food and the deposition of wastes, so that on the whole, the total entropy in the universe has increased. So, Jorn's painting, which has rather discrete spaces of bright colours at each corner, is a perfectly logical way to represent a beginning, a time before his forms, which have a strong sense of motion, have been given a chance to mix and combine into a violent, messy chaos.
A vast multiplicity of faces appear to the viewer over time. One of the first that is seen is the figure on the white section, a man with a skinny face and glasses. His head is tilted to the right, and he looks stylishly off to the left. A face below him, on the red mass, is made from an additional layer of pale blue, which looks to have been applied with a very dry brush. He appears quite uncertain and stressed as he looks up in the general direction of the first face. At the upper right corner there is a particularly amusing figure. Her head is set is such a manner that she appears to be leaning back quite a lot. The face is wider than it is tall, and there are upward indents in the lower edge of the open mouth that give the appearance of a chin in that kind of a position. It is an extremely angry figure, with large dark eyes with diagonals pointing to the inner corners, and a mouth sprawling open widely, taking the shape of a sideways tilted bean, with three little pointed teeth. At its right is a messy hand, pointing to the centrally positioned figure, as though in absolute rage at that person. Elsewhere there are vague faces, harder to define or see, that seem distressed, astonished, sad, or hopeful, or silly, or some combination thereof. The world has apparently just begun and the interactions between the characters on stage are already extravagant and chaotic.
The title, in addition to setting up the picture as one of a beginning, is more importantly a reversal of the traditional idea of language as the originating force behind the world. Jorn grew up in a traditional Christian household, and under the Christian story, shared by the other Abrahamic traditions, the world is created from the words of god: “let there be light; let the trees grow here; let there be a moon to provide some light during the night hours,” &c., &c., and in particular, “in the beginning there was the word,” the first line of the Gospel of John. In Jorn's painting, this is reversed, and the image takes precedence. Jorn was prolific both in painting and in writing as expressive forms. The title of this painting makes the bold assertion that, even if both media are important expressive tools, visual art is the more original of them.
Blue Horse and Monster, both made in 1954, though linear sculptural works, have a lot in common with Jorn's figurative paintings, especially in terms of his use of color texture, and shape. They are colorful, fairly flat forms, made from thick curved lines. In both of these sculptures, but more so in Blue Horse, there is not very much of a definite form: the lines are abstract; the feet are indefinite and seem to exist more as a way to keep the figure propped up than to represent the legs of a horse; upper limbs are only hinted at with extended lines; and the head is more of a loose semicircle that extends out to the left of the body, intersected by a thick vertical bar glazed white (to support one of the eyes). The lower line has a somewhat upbending curve to it, and its lower edge is full of little stubs of lines pointing down; these are registered as teeth. The eyes are simple yellow circles with dark indented centers, of the same ultramarine glaze color as most of the form. The entirety of the form itself, as the title suggests, is mostly this dark blue color, though much of the head, and some of the left edge of the body, is glazed flat white. Like in his paintings the colors are allowed to mix freely where they overlap. The most striking aspect of this sculpture, in my opinion, is the way that in spite of the rather free use of abstraction, it is still registered immediately as a figure. Its head is about twice as long as its body, and its limbs are for the most part tiny stubs, and yet it still remains possible to talk about the lines as though they represent these bodily parts. It certainly is not first registered as a horse, and would not be registered as a horse at all if not for the title, but it is certainly a tetrapod of some sort. In this sense, it is very much like the figures in Jorn's paintings, which are often simply amorphous organic shapes, even in some of his paintings as early as those of the 1930's, which retain a mostly hard-edged abstract style that was more widespread at the time. I also see the use of a rougher, obviously modeled texture on the ceramic lines of both Blue Horse and Monster as a parallel to the use of thickly applied, rough brushstrokes in his paintings: both serve to show the activity behind the artistic production, and add an expressive vitality to his works. This is a characteristic that is visible in his earlier hard-edged paintings, as a product of the freely curved, vaguely figurative forms, though ultimately the very emotive, intense, vital character of his work is not fully realized until his more mature paintings of the late forties and fifties, when the texture and brushwork, in addition to the shapes, are treated completely freely, with energetic bursts of action. Blue Horse and Monster, made in 1954, demonstrate these characteristics that were coming about in his painting: Jorn did indeed also speak against an absolute separation between sculpture and painting in 1941.
All in all Blue Horse is an extremely fun sculpture. It seems to be smiling vibrantly at the viewer, and below and to the right of this smile there are two additional lines that echo the same shape of the smile, which extend a little off from the torso at the right and the left sides: these are registered as arms thrown up in excitement, or gesturing at the viewer to come and follow him somewhere, though since there are two lines that each might be pairs of forelimbs it is quite unclear which one would take this role—in fact I would say that neither of the lines represent the forelimbs; they are parts of the expression, not a representation.
Besides the pure aesthetic aspect of the sculpture the Blue Horse can also be understood as a reference to the artists' group known as Der Blaue Reiter, or, The Blue Rider. This was a German movement active from 1911 to 1914, and it included various expressionist painters, like Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, and Gabriele Munter, though centering largely around Kandinsky and Marc. During this time both of these artists painted some canvases showing blue horses. The color was not completely arbitrary; Kandinsky believed the deeper blue colors to have a uniquely spiritually powerful quality. Both the German expressionists of Der Blaue Reiter, and Asger Jorn made expressive uses of color and form, focusing more on emotional or intuitive content than literal representation, and in fact distorting literal representation for this expressive effect. Working at the middle rather than the beginning of the twentieth century, though, Jorn's work might be called more artistically advanced, in that action painting such as that which is very much evident in Jorn's painting did not come about until long after the expressive figures and geometric abstractions that emphasized the importance of elements like form, shape, and line, precisely arranged and applied, that came about in the first half of the century. Regardless of this stylistic difference the mentality of the earlier expressionists is a similar one to the later action painters, and the Blue Horse sculpture can be seen as a recognition of this shared artistic pursuit.
Jorn's Monster, stylistically, is quite similar to his Blue Horse: both are made from freely textured ceramic rods that make a curved, freely shaped abstraction, with limbs and facial features that allow the whole sculpture to be registered as a figure. Both are glazed in a freely mixed manner that brings to mind Jorn's use of blended color in his paintings. Monster differs from Blue Horse in its particular expression, which is more of a focused, determined walk, advancing to the left, in the photograph I have. There is a greater variety of colors used. There is an olive green, a fairly dull red, and white and black, and many individual lines will have more than one of these colors. The figure comes across as less abstractly distorted than the Blue Horse: it is primarily one round, beanlike shape, extended vertically, with feet, hair, eyes, a mouth, and a tail, which although certainly quite unrealistic at least fit logically with the idea of the figurative form. On the whole it is still clearly abstracted and expressive, though I find it to be less so than the Blue Horse. For this reason I personally prefer the Blue Horse sculpture to the Monster, though this is still mostly a matter of my own aesthetic opinion.
The Avant Garde Does Not Surrender is a painting edited by Jorn, from 1962. In these kinds of paintings that Jorn made, old images are edited, of pleasantly posed figures painted in an academic style, pastoral landscapes and nocturnes of equally traditional styles. Altogether, they are generic images, familiar ones, that can be considered generally pleasant. They are painted over with apparently quick, almost momentary and rather expressive brushwork, that clashes completely with the original painting. The Avant Garde Does Not Surrender began with a girl of about ten holding a jump rope. Whatever the original background was, it has been painted over in a textured black, and mostly illegible scribbles of French text, from which the title of the text comes, are added in white, along with two scribbled creatures, a messy thing that looks like a half completed stick figure at the lower left, and a form at the upper right that might be a dinosaur missing its forearms, or a duck with an unusually large head. But the first thing the viewer notices is the mustache and goatee that have been painted on the girl, who gazes directly at the viewer, situated in the middle of the picture plane, very obviously posed for a portrait. With the addition of three brush strokes for facial hair the little girl comes across as a middle aged man, though she retains her childish body, the hands are still clutching the jump rope, and she's still wearing her fluffy white dress, which may have previously served to symbolically highlight her childish innocence and purity—now it is simply something jarring and ironic.
The painting is a clear reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous edit of the Mona Lisa, LHOOQ, which features facial hair irreverently drawn on to the iconic portrait. Jorn's edit, in contrast to this, takes a portrait that is not at all well known in particular, but still is painted in such a traditional, familiar style that this aspect of it is recognised immediately, though its exact identity remains unknown. That is to say, while Duchamp's edit defaced a particular High Renaissance portrait, Jorn's defaced the whole generality of academic portraiture, and the concept of the great virtue of childhood purity which is expressed in this particular little girl's portrait.
Nocturne III, from 1959, is another example of this kind of painting. Here, rather than portraiture a landscape is the subject of the original painting, a night scene with trees and a large setting moon in the center of the picture. It was already dark to begin with, and Jorn's additional deep blue brush strokes over the masses that were probably trees make it quite obscure. These are loose, expressive forms reminiscent of the loose figures and amorphous bloblike faces from his other paintings of the time, thick with texture, and although mostly a deep, pure blue color there are visible variations in white, red, and light ochres. The additional forms add to the sense of deep space in the painting; they turn a mundane and fairly typical scene into something surreal, being vastly unusual in its juxtaposition of contradictory styles, yet unified by the general darkness of the scene, and the blue colors, though Jorn's additions are of a much brighter blue than those which are found anywhere else in the painting. The result is an altogether beautiful scene. The original painting may have been pleasant enough, and those who saw the painting at the time may have seen it as an expression of natural beauty, though the work seems generic to the modern viewer. Jorn's additions make a completely unique appearance, adding his large vaguely facelike forms over the trees. He saw these edits not as acts of contempt toward the academic styles of the past, (although some of his contemporaries interpreted them as such) but as ways of bringing these old works up to date with the modern period. There are particular paintings in this manner where it is hard to see how they could possibly have had motives of endearment towards the original works, merely adding on to them the way one might add on to ideas that a friend is having while brainstorming about. The Avant Garde Will Not Surrender, in fact, seems to contradict the entirety of this idea, and it is completely possible that different works are expressing fully contradictory ideas, and the artist is aware of it, perhaps even accentuating the differences between these positions for effect. There is nothing wrong with this at all, and in fact it adds to the complexity of the artist and the body of work, and avoids letting the work start coming off as propagandistic in its lack of ambiguity or nuance.
Choux, of 1961, is another painting done in this manner. It shows a woman in an elegant blue dress resting her elbow on a low dresser, which has a lock and key on one of its drawers. Loose brush work in red, orange, and yellow coats the background. The brushstrokes are long, applied with a wide brush. Each of these very long lines follows the outline of the woman's form, making a large arch at the top of the canvas. There is also a loop around the lock behind the woman's elbow. This area is a green, which is made from the same yellow, mixed with a blue that also appears at the left side. On the woman's outline the colors of the lines closer to her are more yellow, and the more distant ones are red, giving the sense that she is exuding light. This sets up a jarring contrast between the original academically styled woman, and the new brush work, a contrast made ever more jarring by the fact that the woman's face is painted over entirely; there is none of the original face or hair visible. In its place is an androgynous, chubby, round ball of flesh coloured brush strokes, and absolutely massive eyes in flat blue, and a massive, expressionless mouth of green and blue. It shows teeth, and seems, if anything, to be showing a slight, vague smile. The overall effect is to make an image that is, at first, quite shocking to us. Yet ultimately, after looking for a while, the new strokes force one to take notice of the original painting, in its traditional gilded age style of beauty in the female form and her clothing, and the rather corny, kitschy romantic symbolism of the locked door. The title of the work, Choux, is a French pun, being a word that can be translated into English as either “cabbage” or “darling.” The title, then, supports this dual sense about the image, of the simultaneous endearingly familiar and beautiful subject matter, and the light humour and mocking of the image's treatment.
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