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Lot Essay
Painted in 1968, Kühle Luft is a striking and powerful work executed during the highpoint of Jorn's painting career. During this period Jorn's innovative and instinctive style continued to take form. In the early 1960s Jorn also became consumed by his philosophical interests and spent most of his energy on writing numerous books and treatises that focused on his complex philosophical beliefs. Centering around the idea of the artist's crucial role in society as an agent for change - the very issue which had previously led to Jorn's split from Guy Debord and the Situationist group - these beliefs were essentially a complex variation of much modern philosophical thinking blended with a strong dose of Pataphysics. Pataphysics was the science-less science that had been inspired by the legendary 19th Century writer and proto-Surrealist Alfred Jarry. According to Pataphysics, every theory, scientific or other, was merely a belief as valid as any other. Jorn started to incorporate his philosophical beliefs into his art. The paintings that he made from this period onwards reflect the coming together of his painterly art with his unique and complex personal philosophy.
While the 1960s were a period of great advances in Jorns philosophy, they were also the years in which his mastery of colour truly developed. He had always hoped to somehow imbue each individual colour with an autonomous, almost mystical strength, and it was during this period that he finally began to achieve them. The predominantly primary colours are placed on the surface as if they were living entities and not just static elements on a canvas. Colour in these late works is clearer and stronger than ever before. In Kühle Luft, colour clearly has a life of its own. Jorn's loose brush-strokes half suggest images, but he refrained from clarifying them; thus they remain in the shadowland of the subconscious. His kinship with Nordic Expressionism, and particularly the work of Munch, prompted his interest in the expressive power of colours and the value of myth as a source for his imagery. However, in this piece, the colours are stronger than the images. It is the yellows, reds, golds and blues that dominate, and Jorn applies them with such aggression that the piece generates its own dynamic tension. Karl Schawelka commented, 'Forms halfway between abstraction and concrete legibility have been familiar in modern art for a long time, so we have to ask ourselves by what special means Jorn creates this state of suspense and what is the nature of his personal iconography. His recognisable figures arise out of the painting process itself. They are not planned but discovered... Within a wilderness of colours Jorn will suddenly see a face or body, because in his mind's eye he has brought together brush-strokes that are separated by a space, but to him they suddenly reveal a configuration that makes sense of an image.' (repro. in G. Atkins, Asger Jorn - Supplement: Paintings 1930-1973, London 1986, pp. 22-23)
While the 1960s were a period of great advances in Jorns philosophy, they were also the years in which his mastery of colour truly developed. He had always hoped to somehow imbue each individual colour with an autonomous, almost mystical strength, and it was during this period that he finally began to achieve them. The predominantly primary colours are placed on the surface as if they were living entities and not just static elements on a canvas. Colour in these late works is clearer and stronger than ever before. In Kühle Luft, colour clearly has a life of its own. Jorn's loose brush-strokes half suggest images, but he refrained from clarifying them; thus they remain in the shadowland of the subconscious. His kinship with Nordic Expressionism, and particularly the work of Munch, prompted his interest in the expressive power of colours and the value of myth as a source for his imagery. However, in this piece, the colours are stronger than the images. It is the yellows, reds, golds and blues that dominate, and Jorn applies them with such aggression that the piece generates its own dynamic tension. Karl Schawelka commented, 'Forms halfway between abstraction and concrete legibility have been familiar in modern art for a long time, so we have to ask ourselves by what special means Jorn creates this state of suspense and what is the nature of his personal iconography. His recognisable figures arise out of the painting process itself. They are not planned but discovered... Within a wilderness of colours Jorn will suddenly see a face or body, because in his mind's eye he has brought together brush-strokes that are separated by a space, but to him they suddenly reveal a configuration that makes sense of an image.' (repro. in G. Atkins, Asger Jorn - Supplement: Paintings 1930-1973, London 1986, pp. 22-23)