.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1959, The Normal State dates from a particularly propitious period in Jorn's career. Guy Atkins has declared the decade 1954 to 1964 "the crucial years" of the artist's oeuvre (op. cit.) and it was during this time that Jorn decisively branched away from the CoBrA movement of which he had been a founder member and finally achieved a measure of commercial recognition. Having left his native Denmark in disgust in November 1953, Jorn moved to Albisola in Italy with his family and soon afterwards established a further studio in Paris.
The Normal State emphatically illustrates Jorn's relishment of a palette of bright, undiluted pigments, which stand in complete contrast to the brooding sombre hues which had characterised his earlier works, depicting mysterious subjects from Nordic mythology and heavily reliant on the influence of Edvard Munch. Rather, the painting shows how Jorn embraced the bright light and unabashed colour which assaulted him on his arrival in the Mediterranean. The vivid greens, blues and reds which he has energetically applied to the lively picture surface illustrate his friend Jean Dubuffet's comment that "he excelled at producing meaning during the course of creation being careful not to intervene too much, so as not to lose anything of the spontaneous, vital flow. He likes to keep "meaning" speculative. He was in love with the irrational which, in all his works, he continually faced." (as quoted in Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn: The Final Years, 1965-1973, London 1977, p. 15).
Commenting on Jorn's technique, Karl Schawelka has remarked that "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." (as quoted in Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn, Supplement: Paintings 1930-1973, London 1986, pp. 22-23).
The Normal State emphatically illustrates Jorn's relishment of a palette of bright, undiluted pigments, which stand in complete contrast to the brooding sombre hues which had characterised his earlier works, depicting mysterious subjects from Nordic mythology and heavily reliant on the influence of Edvard Munch. Rather, the painting shows how Jorn embraced the bright light and unabashed colour which assaulted him on his arrival in the Mediterranean. The vivid greens, blues and reds which he has energetically applied to the lively picture surface illustrate his friend Jean Dubuffet's comment that "he excelled at producing meaning during the course of creation being careful not to intervene too much, so as not to lose anything of the spontaneous, vital flow. He likes to keep "meaning" speculative. He was in love with the irrational which, in all his works, he continually faced." (as quoted in Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn: The Final Years, 1965-1973, London 1977, p. 15).
Commenting on Jorn's technique, Karl Schawelka has remarked that "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." (as quoted in Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn, Supplement: Paintings 1930-1973, London 1986, pp. 22-23).