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Asger Jorn (Vejrum, 1914 - Aarhus, 1973)
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 Asger Jorn started his career painting portraits and landscapes. In 1934 his work was influenced by cubism and the abstract style of painting. He became acquainted with the group called “lienien”. At the age of 21 he went to live in Paris. He followed the lessons of Fernand Leger and worked with Le Corbusier for some time. The confrontation with the spontaneous work of Egill Jacobsen in 1937 marked the start of his struggle to arrive at a totally free way of self-expression.
After this meeting Jorn started painting totally abstract and surrealist while he experimented with the automatic way of working of Arp, Miro, Ernst and Chinese calligraphy. After the war Jorn, founder of the magazine ‘Helhesten’ in 1941, which he advocates a free expressive way of painting, wanted to join the Belgian and French surrealists. In 1942 he joined “Host”. In 1946 he got to know Constant and Atlan in Paris.
He managed to bring together the starting-points of surrealist “automatism” and the world of Norse myths and sagas in the CoBrA group, of which he was the co-founder and the source of inspiration. In the CoBrA period his style was of a vehement dramatic nature with heavy shapes and dark colours. Only in the first half of the nineteen fifties did he find the style which made him famous internationally. The vehement line of movement in his previous work changed into a dramatically moving mass of paint in which emerge vague beings, spirits or hazy visions. Jorn experimented with all kinds of techniques. In this way he also worked in Ceramics. In 1959 he made a huge ten tonnes weighing mural decoration in ceramics for the State High School in Aarhus, Denmark.
As Constant Jorn developed revolutionary ideas about the role of the artist in Western society. In 1956 he founded, as a reaction to Max Bill, who wanted to realise a second Bauhaus in Ulm, with Enrico Baj the “Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste”. The MIBI-congress of 1956 at which Constant was present as well, was a step in the direction of Situationist International (1957 – 1969), of which he was one of the founders. This organisation combined forces for a collective participation in art by artists and citizens whose purpose it is to change society and this society itself has to become art.
Jorn had numerous exhibitions at home and abroad among which the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1964) and after his death the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1982) and the Stadtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus, Munich (1987). Jorn donated a large number of his own works and those of artist friends of his to the museum of modern art in Silkeborg.
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