Asger Jorn Danish 1914-1973

Mrs Elna Fonnesbech Sandberg, Copenhagen
Kunstnernes Kunsthandel, Copenhagen
Michael Jardorf, Copenhagen

Copenhagen, Bellevue, 13 kunstnere i telt, 1941, no. 65
Aarhus, Aarhus-Hallen & Gothenburg, Nordisk Kunst, 1941, no. 99

Guy Atkins & Troels Andersen, Jorn in Scandinavia, 1930-1953, London, 1968, p. 214, no. 160, catalogued; p. 333, illustrated

Original canvas. There are no signs of retouching visible under ultraviolet light, and this work is overall in very good condition and ready to hang. Held in a simple, gold-painted composite frame.
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Painted nearly a full decade before CoBrA was founded, the rich colouring, night-time setting, and dramatic forms that stare out at the viewer in Nocturne clearly reflect both the international style that informed Jorn's early years and the bleak reality of Europe at war.

At the time Jorn was greatly influenced by the Surrealists. He saw their works in Copenhagen at the 1935 exhibition Cubism-Surrealism, and through his association with the Danish Surrealist group Linien, who invited leading foreign artists to exhibit with them including Kandinsky, Klee, Ernst, Tanguy, Mondrian, Arp and Míro. In Paris in 1937 he was attached to the studio of Fernand Léger and worked with Le Corbusier. In Paris again the following year he exhibited alongside Picasso and Matisse in 'Les grands maîtres et les jeunes devant le mur' in the Troisième Salon Mural. 

As the present work attests, such exposure to the work of so many leading artists of the day had a crucial impact on his artistic development. In Nocturne the simplified human and animal forms, the bright colouring and dramatic gestures of the standing cloaked man on the left, and the bird with spread wings top right show the influence of Miró on Jorn's aesthetic. As a comparison of Nocturne to its virtual pair painted the same winter reveals, however, the present work goes far beyond being a pastiche of Miró's work (fig. 1). Literally like night and day, Obtrusive creatures whose right to exist is proved by their existence not only uses the Spanish master's palette but also carries a Miró-esque title.

In contrast, in Nocturne, much deeper and darker forces seem to be at large. The splayed form of the bird top right and the menacing outstretched arms of the pipe smoking witchdoctor on the left is almost Guernica-like. In turn, both the title and the placid lion's head that stares out in the lower right of the composition recall the bewitching naivety of the work of Paul Klee. The brooding palette, the broken paint surface, the use of cross hatching and the jarring local colours suggests the abstraction of Kandinsky.

Jorn had long held Kandinsky's work in high esteem. By his own admission when he first went to Paris in 1936 his plan was to study under Kandinsky: 'I would have gone to Kandinsky's school, but unfortunately he had no school. I knew his pictures from reproductions, because I had read the Bauhaus books which were coming out at the time.' When recounting the genesis of his work in 1940 he recalled: 'It was derived from my immediate impression of Danish art at the time, not really Kandinsky, although his pictures were always at the back of my mind' (quoted in Atkins & Andersen, Jorn in Scandinavia, 1930-1953, pp. 27 & 35).

Jorn's assimilation of the work of such artists into his own aesthetic at the time became a vital source of inspiration for him as his style evolved. For example, whether conscious of it or not, Jorn's depiction of a duck's head and beak in profile in Le canard inquiétant (fig. 2) of 1959 apes the head and beak of the bird in profile top right in the present composition.

FIG. 1. Asger Jorn, Obtrusive creatures whose right to exist is proved by their existence, 1939-40, Private Collection

FIG. 2. Asger Jorn, Le canard inquiétant, 1959, Private Collection