Asger Jorn: Louisiana Library

by Asger Jorn (Artist), Poul Erik Tøjner (Contributor), Helle Brøns (Contributor)

The second publication in the Louisiana Library series, from Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, is an in-depth look at that institution's impressive Asger Jorn collection. Jorn, a founding member of COBRA (an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam), remains one of Denmark's most influential painters. He was also a founding member, with Guy Debord, of the Situationist International (SI). There has been a tendency to view Debord as the sole motivating figure behind the SI, but while Debord's role was indisputably central, Jorn's influence should not be underestimated. In his four years of activity with the group (1957-1961), Jorn not only continued to make some of his best paintings, he also assisted in the editing of the movement's journal, Internationale Situationniste . This volume provides an introduction to the life and work of this key figure of the European postwar art scene and is illustrated with color reproductions of the museum's entire Jorn collection.

Genres: Art

162 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2009

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice book which extrapolates from this particular museum's Jorn holdings to summarize the different phases and aspects of his work, throughout his whole life, and includes many color reproductions. The author's main point -- that Jorn was never satisfied within any one school of painting or art, yet refused to either leave painting for theory or to paint without also theorizing -- is a nice way to represent Jorn's basic stance. It's as if Jorn really wanted to create self-aware, or self-disclosing, paintings (whether through his odd titling, or through his "modifications" or "disfiguring" of found paintings), yet also not give up a certain modernist sense of aesthetics. In other words, he was way ahead of his time -- whether in terms of prefiguring conceptual art, merging a return to crafts with "fine art," playing with different painting techniques without obsessing over innovation or personal style per se, etc. G. Atkins' three books on Jorn seem to be the standard, but this is a nice recent intro. Also includes some hard-to-find reproductions of page spreads from his "tongue book" from 1968 (La langue verte et la cuite [The tongue (or language) green and cooked]; title parodying the title of Lévi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked), which features images across cultures and history of people sticking out their tongues.