Asger Jorn valuation
CoBrA founder and Situationist, who bought other people's paintings and painted over them.
Asger Jorn was born in Jutland in 1914, studied with Leger in Paris, and was a founder of CoBrA in 1948 and later of the Situationist International with Guy Debord, from which he resigned in 1961 while continuing to fund it.
What a work by Asger Jorn is worth
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Bio
Asger Jorn was born in Jutland in 1914, studied with Leger in Paris, and was a founder of CoBrA in 1948 and later of the Situationist International with Guy Debord, from which he resigned in 1961 while continuing to fund it. He painted fast, thickly and with deliberate ugliness, in masks, beasts and half-formed faces. The Modifications of 1959 are the sharpest single idea: junk-shop paintings bought cheaply and overpainted, leaving enough of the original visible to make the argument. He founded the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism and died in 1973.
Prices are led by the CoBrA period and the late 1950s and early 1960s canvases. Jorn worked on a wide range of supports including hardboard, found paintings and unstretched canvas, and the paint is thick, unstable and often applied over unsuitable grounds, so structural condition and past restoration are unusually important. The Modifications carry an additional question about which parts are original to the found picture. He produced a very large printed output — lithographs, etchings, artist's books with Debord — and the Museum Jorn at Silkeborg holds the archive.
At a glance
- Born
- 3 March 1914, Vejrum Parish
- Died
- 1 May 1973, Aarhus
- Movements
- CoBrA, Situationist International
More on Wikipedia.
Helhesten, Albisola and Silkeborg
Jorn went to Paris in 1936 meaning to study with Kandinsky, joined Léger's Académie Contemporaine instead, and then studied at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen from 1937 to 1942. During the occupation he co-founded the underground art group Helhesten. From 1954 he worked at Albisola Marina in Italy with the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and with Guy Debord he made the artist's books Fin de Copenhague of 1957 and Mémoires of 1959.
His first American solo exhibition was at the Lefebre Gallery in New York in 1962. He gave a museum of modern art to Silkeborg, now the Museum Jorn, which holds the largest collection of his work, including the painting Stalingrad, and he left his house at Albisola to the town, where it is the Casa Museo Jorn. His brother Jørgen Nash was also an artist.
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