Showing posts with label Asger Jorn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Asger Jorn. Show all posts

Friday, January 7, 2022

The avant-garde won’t give up

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Collective Automatic Painting over wall and Gerda van der Krans "automatic sculptures" at the Gallery 13 (Germany, Hannover) during a "Collective Automatic Painting" exhibition held in October 1992. In the picture: Freddy Flores Knistoff (front) and Dave Dobroske (background) working (Action Painting) over Gerda sculptures hanged in the same wall, creating a sort of a Collective Automatic Experimental Installation. This picture was taken by Mauricio Jalil (photographer and friend of Freddy)

Making a nemotechnical exercise through the dense documentation that involves the History of Art and this movement of automatic artists and, always attending the main source of such context through the automatic artist Freddy Flores Knistoff; we see how from the beginning of the practice of Collective Automatic Painting there was a continuity with ideas related to the "Modificationism" as a field of experimentation. This is how Freddy tells us that even before the realization of the countless canvases he realized next to Rik Lina in 1991 at the Kennedylann studio in Amsterdam; he already worked for several years under the aesthetic concepts of the "Modificationism", proof of this, are the same works that he shared in other artistic activities and publications prior to the emergence of the Collective Automatic Paintings, such as the publications of the Anarchist-Surrealist magazine "Droomschaar" (pictures (1), (2)) or the same Freddy exhibitions at Hannover Gallery 13. Wathever the case may be, the experimental opening that occurred in CAPA always operated as a skillful conservator of this artistic trend and that Freddy himself inserted from the beginning in performing what it means today CAPA. On the history of "Modificationism" there is a capital and mandatory text for the understanding of this variant or rather, knowledge of what it was "the last European vanguard" from a historiographical point of view. The thesis in question is that of the researcher and Art Historian Karen Kurczynski, (today associated Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts) entitled: "Expressions as Vandalism: Asger Jorn's" Modifications "published in the research magazine of the University of Massachusetts in 2008, "Anthropology and Aesthetics" Volume 53-54 in Association with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; text that we include integrally below. To recap, the text in question talks about the importance of this "trend" that arose around 1959 under other aesthetic concepts such as that of the "New Disfigurations" in the work of Asger Jorn and soon from other artists such as Enrico Baj and Daniel Spoerri and who drank other artistic solutions contributed by the genius of Marcel Duchamp . However, each artist understood in a different way the hatching of this type of artistic solution but unwittingly opened a new field of experimentation that until today has been maintained as something innate of contemporary artistic production. It is also interesting to note that this type of attitude arose as a protest, a protesting attitude that protested - if you will forgive the repetition- about the alienation of the historical vanguard's by the Parisian Artistic Academy. Therefore, we could say that this protest arose as a new solution to the demands of a context marked by the "robbery and mercantilism" of the historical avant-garde's and what is already popularly accepted as valid. That is why the new "Modification" movement was presented as the last great and genuine movement or "ism" of liberation of Arts.

Saturday, February 13, 2021

CAPA and its legacies. A "CoBrA Modification" and the Danish "Linien" group

It is difficult to find collaborative paintings on CoBra's legacy but sometimes we have enough luck to discover great masterpieces hidden, wrongly catalogated or cataloged in so many ways that definitely makes research and revisionism more interesting. Like the painting that we are going to talk next and that the Dutch art historian Willemijn Stokvis has cataloged as a "Cobra Modification", a painting with no title, but whose elaboration rise as a strong testimony of a "modified" painting inside the CoBrA group; an idea that Capa (Knistoff branch) has been developing since its beginning giving it a huge importance during the Capa creation process, the idea of the never-ending painting. It is well known, that CoBrA was a huge collective of artists and writers that was not limited to Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam but it transcended its limits sharing with artists and writers from other parts of Europe, like, France (Jean-Michel Atlan, Jacques Doucet), England (Stephen Gilert, William Gear), Germany (Karl Otto Götz), Sweden (Carl Otto Hultén, Anders Österlin, Max Walter Svanber) and Iceland (Svavar Gudnason), among other countries and artists that probably still remain in the shadows... When we talk about CoBrA, immediately comes to mind, the members of the Netherlands, like Karel Appel, Corneille, Constant, Anton Rooskens, Theo Wolvecamp, Jan Nieuwenhuys, Eugène Brands, Lucebert and so on, and rarely we talk about the Danish components. Everyone knows that the strongest pillar was Asger Jorn but also participated in CoBrA activities and actively: Carl-Henning Pedersen, Egill Jacobsen, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Else Alfelt, Erik Nyholm, Sonja Ferlov, Erik Thomemesen, Erik Ortvad, Mogens Balle and the most important one of this little story, Richard Mortensen, who was responsable for sending this "unfinished" abstract painting to the CoBrA friends of Amsterdam via Asger Jorn and to modify it. Thanks to Willemijn Stokvis, we also know that this painting it is an oil on canvas of 1949 (size 42.5 x 62.2 cm. Now owned by the Erik Nyholm Collection) which was later modified by Erik Nyholm, Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Constant, and Corneille, being a missing link of the only known "Cobra Modification". Even though we have more "collaborative work" testimonies, like the collective work done in Bregneröd (near Copenhague), the same house of Erik Nyholm (near Silkeborg), "One of these days" (a unique litography done in Malmö by CoBrA components of Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands) and, some other puntual colaborations in book ilustrations (something very common in the field of collaborative arts between writers and artists) where one of the more important components of CoBrA was Christian Dotremont with a vibrant calligraphic style (from this kind of production, we can highlight the collaborations together Jean-Michel Atlan, Corneille, Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Pierre Alechinsky) but none of these resemble the importance of a painting made as a collective modification; being Richard Mortensen a link of special interest to CoBrA. We know that Richard Mortensen (1910-1993), certainly became one of Cobra's main references due to his progressive vision of experimental art as well as for his long experience as one of the founders of the Danish school of abstract and symbolism painting "Linien" (1930-1952).
 
Jorn, Appel, Constant, Corneille, and Erik Nyholm painted this Cobra Modification over a Richard Mortensen oil painting in 1949. Size, 42,5 x 62,2 cm.

 

Now, beyond Richard Mortensen, there were other very important components around the "Linien" group (founded in the 1930s in Copenhagen), such as Egill Jacobsen and Ejler Bille who in 1934 stated that Linien should go further its limits, go beyond Surrealism (at that time seemed to dominate the international artistic circuit) and go beyond, beyond its imaginary and the topic of the dreams to find and give free rein to expression. They proposed abandoning this oppressive model and looking at other models such as German expressionism, but at the same time, going beyond the same one that according to Egill Jacobsen had been locked in a naturalistic vision. To do this, the new model had to follow the freedom and liberation of the expression, seeking the fantasy of expression in order to find an authentically human art, a kind of spontaneous abstract-expressionism. However, and although Ejler Bille was the first to reveal himself, soon other Linien artists followed him in their ideas. This disclosure is attached to other Danish and non-Danish artists that today are linked to CoBrA (the majority of the list being announced above). The most interesting of all this is that at the core of this split appeared from the mists, the figure of a young Danish artist named Asger Jörgensen (1914-1973), who soon adopted the world-famous alias of Asger Jorn in 1945 and, who soon over time came to play a predominant role among his peers in "Linien", first as a participant in the Höst group and then as editor and founder of the magazine "Helhesten" (magazine of the Danish experimentalist artists, between March 1941 and 1944) to finally be one of the pillars of the CoBrA Movement. In this sense, we can assert that the origin of CoBrA laid the anchor on the foundations given by critical thought in "Linien" and in its eagerness to recover the expressive component in the development of the visual arts, being the recipe for German expressionism and existentialism, other foundations on which CoBrA anchored its concerns.

 

Linien exhibition in Tokanten 1947. Photo Richard Winther

Linien exhibition at Lund University, Sweden 1950

Henrik Buch, ”Bamse” Krag Jacobsen, Albert Mertz, Kujahn Blask, and Ib Geertsen. Linien at Den Frie Exhibition Hall, 1948.


About the Collective Automatic Painting Amsterdam Group (1991-2021)

CAPA (from, Collective Automatic Painting Amsterdam) is an International and Experimental group of artists founded in the 90's by the ch...