Asger Jorn at Andre Emmerich - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

This retrospective exhibit of 23 works made between 1940 and 1972 (Jorn died in 1973) provided a beneficial occasion to try to make faculty of perception of Jorn's painting in relation to the art of his time. individual aspect of the problem is that although Jorn's work belongs to the postwar period, it frequently seems closer to earlier artists like masticate with sound Nolde and Ensor. One reason for this apparent anachronism is that the Cobra change which Jorn helped found, station itself against everything Parisian. When the French critic Michel Ragon went to Denmark in 1947 leaving a Paris filled of abstraction, he was surprised to find a collection of artists obsessed with imaginary animals and Viking memories. level at the end of his career Jorn was still making paintings with titles like Dance of the Vampire (1967-68) and Feast of the Imps (1970)

Another complexity is that Jorn was far more than just a painter. This exhibition hints at the range of his activities by dint of including several torn-poster decollages from the 1960 and individual of his "Modification" paintings. (It would have been flat better if the exhibition had included a certain quantity of of Jorn's '50s ceramics and examples of his collaborations with Italian artist Enrico Baj and Situationist shore Debord.) For the "Modifications" Jorn painted above what we now call thrift-store paintings. The alone example here, Choux (1962), uses a full-length portrait of a woman in evening dres as the support for Jorn's vigorous, lurid gesturings He also paints a undressed mask over her face. The inclusion of Choux helped hinder the viewer from thinking that Jorn's Expressionist figures and brushwork signify the same desperation associated with artists like nibble and Nolde. In fact Jorn's paintings oftentimes had an at least partially humorous intent, and their evident faculty of perception of noncomposition results from intentional offhandedness. Sometimes, individual suspects, Jorn couldn't be bothered to reduce his paintings-, putting faith in his first impulses, he mistook enthusiasm for inspiration.

Writing to Enrico Baj in 1953 Jorn indicateed that collaboration came easy to him and other members of Cobra because of the fragmentary nature of their work. This stres upon the fragment, on the unfinished nature of the art work, may help account for Jorn's disregard for resolution, an attitude that today still influences painters like Georg Baselitz and for Kirkeby.

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