JORN and POLLOCK, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen

Asger Oluf Jorn (3 March 1914 – 1 May 1973) was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International.. He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark, and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen.
The largest collection of Asger Jorn's works—including his major work Stalingrad - can be seen in the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark.

Asger Jorn: Letter to my son, 1957

In 1929, aged 15, he was diagnosed with
tuberculosis although he made a recovery from it after spending 3 months on the west coast of Jutland. In 1936 he traveled (on a BSA motorbike he had scraped together enough money to buy) to Paris to become a student of Kandinsky. However when he discovered that Kandinsky was in straitened circumstances, barely able to sell his own paintings, Jorn decided to join Fernand Leger's Academie Contemporaine, it was during this period that he turned away from figurative painting and turned to abstract art. In 1937 he joined le Corbusier in working on the Palais des Temps Noveau at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. From 1937 to 1942, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. Jorn  was the first person to translate Franz Kafka into Danish. During the course of his artistic career he produced over 2500 paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, artist's books, collages, décollages, and collaborative tapestries. He died in Aarhus, Denmark on 1 May 1973. He is buried in Grötlingbo, on the island of Gotland in Sweden.

Pollock, nr. 5 1948

 












Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety, a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.
Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related, single-car accident; he was driving. In December 1956, several months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)  in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London. In 2000, Pollock was the subject of the film Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris, which won an Academy Award. 

Source: wikipedia

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen has taken a closer look at the work of two outstanding artists with an exhibition Revolutionary Roads. (with 135 works, paintings drawing and prints) From November 15 2013 - February 23 2014. .

Jorn and Pollock never met, but they both  revolutionized painting during and immediately after World War II. They were the same age, one a northern European born in Vejrum, Jutland, the other an American from Cody, Wyoming, in the USA. This exhibition focuses on the period 1943-1963. For both artists there was a ‘before’ this period, and for Jorn also an ‘after’. It was in this period that the two artists’ work was defined and they achieved the greatest international attention.
 
Some of Jorn’s and Pollock’s works are almost indistinguishable in style. Jorn and Pollock offer us different versions of the routes that the revolution in painting could take, and often what looks identical is really fundamentally different. With his drip technique Pollock changed the rules of the game for painting itself for many people. He staged the artist as the modern hero; he was in the painting, but outside society. Jorn went a different way. For Jorn it was about commitment to the real world, about getting history and the contemporary world into art and a residue of the figurative in his works, a recognizability to which we can relate as viewers.

Jorn is a central figure in Louisiana’s collection and has been presented retrospectively several times, but it is half a century since Pollock’s paintings were last presented at the museum (in 1963). This exhibition shows 135 works, paintings, drawings and prints lent by some of the world’s leading museums and private collections.

The meeting between the works of the two artists has been organized in five thematic sequences, each with its own expression – routes that constantly cross paths: Myths and Mythmakers, Figuration and Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism and What Looks Like It, The Accidental and The Controlled and Jorn & Pollock. Revolutionary Roads. 


Source: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art