Klaus Jorn Eyes the World
Klaus Jorn – son of Asger Jorn – debuts as a painter in a gallery in New York.
By Hans Andersen,
Jyllands-Posten’s special correspondent
New York, January
Asger Jorn’s son, the 47-year-old Klaus Jorn, has just had his debut as a painter at a gallery in New York. Far from Denmark and his world-famous father’s shadow, he carefully and quietly draws his own image in the small Alexander Wood gallery on Spring Street in the heart of Soho, where 150 galleries and exhibitions are found within a half-square kilometer.
Klaus Jorn breaks no boundaries, but in his paintings, there is a message about a person on the path to freeing himself from a paternal bond, the nature and strength of which only he knows. The debut exhibition’s 17 paintings suggest that even in this liberation, he is close to Asger Jorn.
He has titled the entire collection “Letters to My Father” – formulated as a response to Asger Jorn’s famous painting “Letter to My Son.” Klaus Jorn did not initially want to become a painter. As a child, he always stood in his father’s studio, playing with colors and living with Jorn in Paris, but in his early youth, he broke away. Later, Klaus Jorn found himself emotionally out of sync with life, ending in a deep depression until a few years ago, when he realized he needed to seek freedom where he once found his path disrupted.
He began painting as a response to the challenge his father had become. Now Klaus Jorn believes he can find balance in his life and the world through painting.
Klaus Jorn starts, so to speak, with symbols from childhood in his paintings. They include a childlike symbolic world, expressed by an adult’s searching consciousness. In the thin lines of his paper works, there are toy-like figures, especially in an oil crayon series of six, with symbolic elements like remnants of a teddy bear, a cat, and a toy train.
In other works, Klaus Jorn follows in his father’s footsteps. A black crayon composition forms a nearly hauntingly dark cross-like shape, filled with ornaments and a small red eye-dot, which the painter repeats by coloring the “o” in his signature. In “Two Trolls” – one of the few titled paintings – the figures crouch in a mast with a sail. It also seems like a response to his father, and most clearly, he resembles his father in a painting with three devil-like figures and the caption “City life must go to the countryside before one…” and in the composition featuring the playfully sad face reproduced here on this page. This is the only piece Klaus Jorn signs simply as “Jorn.”
In almost all 17 paintings, there is an eye or eyes that watch. Often they are black, and they sit behind everything, as if they control both the viewer and the painting itself. It could be the gaze of “Big Brother” watching through the colors, or perhaps Asger Jorn’s eyes, keeping watch over it all, because he too is part of the son’s response.
Klaus Jorn’s debut exhibition in New York was made possible through the young gallery owner Alexander Wood’s friendship with a Danish art dealer. Klaus Jorn himself was not present at the opening last Saturday. His paintings are priced between $2,500 and $3,000 in New York.
Letters To My Father, Alexander Wood Gallery, January 1988
The other side of
the hyperbole
Being the son of an artist is not easy, and has never
been. It has both advantages and drawbacks. But the
basis of everything is the common sense, which tea-
ches one to see, and how to see. »The son of an artist
would be wise to change occupations«. This we have
heard many times, but there are also cases where it is
the father who has deliberately invested his son with
the habit, right from his years of childhood, in his
memory to preserve the artistic creation. Once this
disease - as in the case of Klaus Jorn - has been trans-
mitted and is developing at a distance from the father
(even though he is constantly present), it does not
become a release but one’s own existentialist choice,
a continuous course which includes the positive
influence, the immortality which lies hidden in the
handing down process from one’s father, and a favou-
rable opportunity which human nature offers. A
number of exceptions have shown us clearly that in
the deliberate action one should appeal to the public
directly, as the work is drawing in an opposite directi-
on, seeking a continuity of its own, which as a mat-
ter of course makes it clear to us that the son of Asger
Jorn should not necessarily be regarded as a copy of
his father merely because both bear the same sur-
name.
As a child Klaus Jorn painted together with his
father. He also worked in his father’s studio, where
he helped, for example, fixing canvases. He learned to
build up a painting, but then left his home in the
teenage years. After a deep inner crisis which put him
into isolation and self-destruction, he has now freed
himself completely of the historical ballast that wei-
ghed on him, and is now endeavouring, as he expres-
ses it in his own words, through the pictorial art to
find his balance in the world.
There would be not point in discussing all the
points which link his life together with that of his
father. He could have filled entire volumes with sto-
ries rooted in conflicts and love, in passion and rebel-
lion, but it is worth remembering that the »result«
has become Klaus Jorn’s own maturity, and what
counts are his works.
Klaus Jorn helped much in his work by music. He
never tries to push himself to draw more than one
picture a day, and during his work he listens a lot to
music. Ever since he was a child, Klaus Jorn has loved
the clarinet. He is fond of Plato, Kierkegaard and
Freud. He criticizes Hans Christian Andersen, and
he refers to Freud as if he were a writer friend who
spoiled his novel when he wrote about sexuality but
was entirely right when he told us about the I, the It
and the Super-Ego. The daily work with the drawing
and painting on paper is of great importance to Klaus
Jorn. He often visits churches in Copenhagen, and
before he begins painting he performs rituals to bring
luck that send shivers down one’s back when he tells
about them.
He stopped playing jazz serveral years ago. The fact
is that he prefers the traditional genres, which he used
to play himself at the jazz clubs in the old days. The
reference to jazz puts one in mind of the words of the
musician Joe Jackson which seem precisely to descri-
be the art of Klaus Jorn: »Art is a clock without time,
measuring an inner times. His art extends towards
infinity. Klaus Jorn himself says that it depicts a deve-
lopment without limits. He says further that the
beauty and intensity of a picture is like an »egg«,
where the yolk is an expression of the essentiality
itself and of making one’s way in to the centre.
Notre Dame in Paris is one of the churches he loves
most. Because its two towers express a balance be-
tween two creatures who forces, and this is exactly
what he is aiming at in his art: The love and friend-
ship between two meet, and who are in his works
always represented by two symbols for inwardness
and openness respectively.
The close observer could and should note the
many influences that have characterized the work of
Klaus Jorn. They reach back as far as Plato’s Apology
and his dialogue Gorgias, where we meet the charis-
matic Socrates. This is seen, for example, in the
importance which Klaus Jorn attaches to the quality
of life rather than its length, his reference to the
absence of time, the myth about the »naked« man,
and the use of the body as a picture in the reasoning
when he tells us about his search for his mother.
Klaus Jorn says that his artistic development began
on that day when he learned how to draw a triangle.
It is the opposite of a womans’s sexual organ, and sin-
ce then he has, taking his starting point in this tri-
angle, tried solely to create the unique, unifying
work.
The close observe thus will have to explain how -
as it also happened to some artists in the 19th centu-
ry and to certain others in the first half of the 20th
century - since the "60s it has been a return to a
philological-classical world of images that has produ-
ced some of the most radical, epoch-making specula-
tive points of view in the art of painting. In thus
speaking of Plato, Socrates, Kierkegaard and Freud,
the artist makes his reservations and precludes any
possibility of a renewal; instead he does not move
from the importance of antiquity or from the con-
stancy of the Truth and the Word. This antique, anti-
historical and non-topical viewpoint forms a contrast
to the historicism one senses as stealing into the geo-
art and neo-conceptual currents of our time. »At one
time, man takes up a standpoint of cognition and cre-
ates his knowledge«, says Carlo Michelstaedter
(Gorizia 1887 - Gorizia 1910). »The work confirms
its entire personality, provided that the method and
the rights of creation remain intact. And this is the
crucial point, reason, the absolute: the divinity«. (C.
Michelstaedter). This attitude to knowing is characte-
ristic of those few who are critical of modern science.
To criticize modern science is to disclaim the false
»security« that science and the »scientific« society
promise their adherents, fitting them into a ma-
chinery of conveniences and consumption and
withdrawing from them their responsibility as indiv-
iduals. Instead of the confident man we are here con-
fronted by the armoured man. He represents the
other side of the hyperbole. (See C. Michelstaedter,
»La persuasione e la rettorica« (»Persuasion and rhe-
toric«) ed. Sergio Campailla, Adelphi, 2nd edit.,
Milan 1986).
Gabriele Peretta
(This article was produced for the exhibition at Alexander Wood Gallery, New York 1988)
Asger Jorn created his famous painting "Letters to My Son" in 1956-57. Now his son, Klaus Jorn, is exhibiting drawings and watercolors in New York under the title "Letters to My Father."
By Jeanette Andersen
"Letters to My Father" is a title that evokes associations with Asger Jorn's famous series "Letters to My Son," 1956-57, which brought him international recognition. The Alexander Wood Gallery in Soho, New York, is hosting an exhibition featuring a collection of drawings and watercolors by Klaus Jorn, Asger Jorn's son, under the title "Letters to My Father." The title serves as a good introduction to Klaus Jorn’s works, which the American audience has not had the opportunity to see before. It introduces him both as an independent artist and as a continuation of his artistic heritage.
Alexander Wood views the exhibited works as a kind of letters from son to father, despite the fact that Asger Jorn passed away in 1973. Alexander Wood says, "Klaus Jorn was deeply affected by his father's death, and he is mentally out of balance. This is expressed in his works."
The works are full of vivid colors, and the ideas he presents are quite random or childlike. Nevertheless, his works are closely tied to Asger Jorn’s. He can also be reminiscent of Miro in his use of shapes. Objects float in space or are suggested with simple lines. The works also point back to the Cobra group, which Asger Jorn was a part of.
Klaus Jorn’s drawings are, on one hand, childishly naive and simple, but on the other hand, they carry a sense of danger, ambiguity, and internal tension. The elements where this is most strongly felt evoke associations with humans and animals. A series of drawings suggest a conflict between incompatible emotions. One of the pictures shows a neck with two profiles looking at each other, connected by a bridge over the eyes from forehead to forehead. One has an almost closed mouth and tears streaming down its cheek, while the other has an open mouth and fangs ready to attack. It is like silent despair battling anger and aggression.
Another picture resembles a head on a body, where two parts are loosely connected with lines and a circle outside the head. It is as though emotions or parts of a person in the same body are not integrated but exist independently of each other.
Three pictures could be grouped under the theme: Eyes. Common to these is an abstract form that resembles either a face or an animal, dominated by one or several eyes. Like an active gesture, the eyes reach beyond the form into another world. But the action remains passive, as the eyes return to emptiness.
Klaus Jorn also creates imaginative and abstract images that express the same ambiguity. But despite the danger inherent in the images, they give off a warm and gentle impression, as many of them are rendered in yellow, red, green, and blue.
It is a late response Klaus Jorn gives to his father. But perhaps it is a response that only became possible so many years after his father’s death—for it is not easy to be the son of a famous father.
Klaus Jorn's works have been featured in the American art magazines Flash, Art Forum, and Art in America. The exhibition has been well-attended by American critics, and several of the artworks are reserved for sale.
The exhibition was made possible through collaboration with Joakim Rothenborg from Galleri Stalke in Copenhagen, and the two galleries are planning a larger exchange project. Alexander Wood’s interest in Danish art is new, but he finds it fascinating. He has, for example, seen works by Thorbjørn Ebbesen, Thomas Bang, and Margrethe Sørensen, whom he hopes to exhibit in the future.
The exhibition can be seen at the Alexander Wood Gallery, 127 Spring Street, Soho, New York.
STALKE GALLERI - ENGLERUPVEJ 62 - 4060 - KIRKE SAABY - DENMARK - PHONE: +45 2926 - 7433
CONTACT: STALKE@STALKE.DK
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