Asger Jorn

Frederik Dam, Copenhagen
Carl Aegidius, Odense
Galerie Ariel, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Purchased by the present owners in the mid-1970s

Possibly, Copenhagen, Tokanten, Forårsudstilling, 1950, no. 4
Council of Art Societies outside Copenhagen, 6 Malere, 1951-2 (touring exhibition, including Silkeborg)
Basel, Kunsthalle, Asger Jorn - Eugène Dodeigne, 1964, no. 20 (as Composition)
The Hague, Nova Spectra Galerie, no. 723

Guy Atkins & Troels Andersen, Jorn in Scandinavia, 1930-1953, London, 1968, p. 259, no. 723, catalogued; p. 396, illustrated 

The board is in good condition, even and flat. There are no signs of retouching visible under ultraviolet light, and apart from pinholes running along the edges of the work (approx 2-5 to each side), light scattered craquelure to the areas with heavier impasto, and as some paint loss to the upper right corner, this work is in good condition, with rich and vibrant colours and a strong surface. Held in a decorative, gold-painted moulded plaster and wood frame.
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Begun in 1950 in Suresnes, the double date on the reverse of the present work indicates that Jorn almost certainly put the finishing touches to the composition when it was exhibited in Silkeborg in January 1952. One leg of an exhibition that toured Denmark, its arrival in Jorn's home town coincided with his recovery there from tuberculosis. Jorn's depiction of the faintly comic  - if slightly demonic - family of primal monsters beneath a radiant sun belies the testing times that he had encountered between starting the painting and its completion. 

By 1950 Jorn increasingly disassociated himself from the CoBrA movement. His marriage of ten years collapsed when he fell in love with Matie, the wife of fellow CoBrA artist Constant. At La maison des artistes danois on the outskirts of Paris he lived in extreme poverty with Matie, her children and their new born son, together with the similarly penurious sculptor Robert Jacobsen and his family.

Most detrimental of all - especially to his creative output and self-esteem - was his contraction of tuberculosis. His condition forced him to leave Paris in May 1951 to return to his home town of Silkeborg. Jorn's mother described his ill-health on his homecoming: 'I have never seen anything like it. He could hardly walk. Tuberculosis and scurvy. He was all skin and bones because he had been starving. The children had to eat first so he lived on cigarettes and coffee' (quoted in Atkins & Andersen, pp. 83-84).  Jorn was hospitalized in Silkeborg for the following seventeen months.

Jorn's travails, however, coincided with one of the most formative periods in his career. This included the publication of his book Risk and Chance, Dagger and Guitar, which he described as a reconstruction of philosophy from the point of view of an artist; the opportunity for futher collaboration with fellow CoBrA artist Christian Dotrement, who had also contracted tuberculosis and was in the same ward as Jorn in Silkeborg; and the genesis of a series of important painting cycles: The Seasons, The Wheel of Life and Silent Myth, all of which emerged from within the context of his illness and recovery in the Silkeborg sanatorium.