SALZBURG.- In the exhibition Asger Jorn. The Prints, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents around 550 works of graphic art by the preeminent Danish visual artist, including lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, linocuts, silkscreen prints, and potato prints. “As with past exhibition projects, we are drawing on our own collection; fine art prints make up half of our holdings, and among them are works by Asger Jorn given to the museum by its founding director, Otto Breicha, that are now on view in our galleries. A generous loan from the Museum Jorn enables us to show the complete set of ca. 550 prints, the first such presentation anywhere in the world,” Thorsten Sadowsky, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, notes. An ensemble of fifty-two works dating from between 1933 and 1939 that were recently rediscovered in Denmark and have been on public display only once is also on its way to Salzburg.

Complementing his work in painting—and, to Jorn’s mind, in no way secondary to it—the prints he created between the 1930s and 1970s bear witness to the artist’s zest for experimentation and his interest in the potentials of his materials as well as his prodigious fabulist’s imagination and wit. Like no other artist, he stands at the juncture between the classic Expressionism of the early twentieth century and the figurative-expressive tendencies in contemporary art, forging a synthesis of Surrealism, art informel, action painting, and Nordic folk art. Determined to create a distinctively Scandinavian modernism, he often draws inspiration from Norse mythology, legends, and a pantheon populated by failed personalities. In pictures and extensive writings, Jorn celebrates a merry artistic vandalism that jettisons all classical conceptions of value and form and instead embraces the creation of the marvelous, unwonted, mysterious, imaginary, and chaotic as the true mission of art.

Jorn the political artist and networker
In pursuit of his goal of integrating art, politics, and society, Jorn, a lifelong avid networker, starts cultivating contacts in numerous countries in the 1930s. Between 1936 and 1938, he is in Paris, where he frequents Fernand Léger’s Atelier de l’Art Contemporain and exchanges ideas with Le Corbusier. In occupied Denmark, he collaborates on the journal Helhesten (Hell-Horse), the unofficial organ of the artistic resistance, seeking to disseminate subcultural phenomena and ideas vilified by the National Socialists, and in 1942 he is actively involved in printing and distributing the banned communist monthly Land og Folk. Resuming his networking activities after the end of World War II, Jorn, in the fall of 1948, teams up with Danish, Belgian, and Dutch artists to found the group Cobra—the moniker is an acronym combining the English names of the three countries’ capitals. Cobra’s members share his enthusiasm for a radically visionary art that defies all boundaries of genre and is characterized by spontaneity, experimentation, and openness. Jorn goes on to initiate a series of artist collectives with varying aims, including the Movement for an Imaginary Bauhaus, the Situationist International, and the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism. Irrepressible in his excitements and restless in his embrace of creative innovation, Asger Jorn puts his stamp on the evolving modern conception of art and is a major influence on the postwar avantgardes; together with Edvard Munch and Per Kirkeby, he is now recognized as one of the most important Scandinavian artists of the twentieth century.