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| Asger Jorn Letter to my son 1956-57 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Asger Jorn Paris by night 1959 oil on canvas Collection Pierre Alechinsky, Paris |
"If this frame of reference for Abstract Expressionism turns out to work at all, one of the things it ought to be good for is rethinking the stale comparison between America and Europe. European painting, after the war, alas, comes out of a very different set of class formations. Vulgarity is not its problem. In Asger Jorn, for example – to turn for a moment to the greatest painter of the 1950s – what painting confronts as its limit condition is always refinement. Painting for Jorn is a process of coming to terms with the fact that however that set of qualities may be tortured, exacerbated, or erased, they still end up being what (European) painting is; and the torture, exacerbation, and erasure are discovered in practice to be refinement – that is, the forms refinement presently takes if a painter is good enough. They are what refines painting to a new preciousness or dross (it turns out that preciousness and dross are the same thing)."
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| Asger Jorn Disquieting Ecstasy 1956 oil on canvas Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels |
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| Asger Jorn Happy New Year 1958 oil on canvas Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid |
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| Asger Jorn Fugitive and Dutch Windmill 1953 oil on canvas private collection |
"In calling Jorn the greatest painter of the 1950s I mean to imply nothing about the general health of painting in Europe at the time (nor to deny that Jorn's practice was hit and miss, and the number of his works that might qualify as good, let along great, is very small). On the contrary. The cliches in the books are true. Jorn's really was an end game. Vulgarity, on the other hand, back on the other side of the Atlantic, turned out to be a way of keeping the corpse of painting hideously alive – while all the time coquetting with Death."
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| Asger Jorn Soul for Sale 1958-59 oil and sand on canvas Guggenheim Museum, New York |
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| Asger Jorn The Black Flight 1955 gouache on paper Tate Gallery |
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| Asger Jorn Untitled 1956 oil on canvas Guggenheim Museum, New York |
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| Asger Jorn Jungle Drama 1952 oil on masonite Essl Museum, Vienna |
"An Asger Jorn can be garish, florid, tasteless, forced, cute, flatulent, overemphatic; it can never be vulgar. It just cannot prevent itself from a tampering and framing of its desperate effects which pulls them back into the realm of painting, ironizes them, declares them done in full knowledge of their emptiness. American painting – by contrast – and precisely that American painting which is closest to the European, done by Germans and Dutchmen steeped in the tradition they are exiting from – does not ironize, and will never make the (false) declaration that the game is up. Hofmann and de Kooning, precisely because they are so similar to Jorn in their sense of "touch" and composition, register as Jorn's direct opposites."
– from the chapter In Defense of Abstract Expressionism from Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999)
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| Asger Jorn Aganaks 1950 watercolor, gouache Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris |
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| Asger Jorn Le Bon Sauvage 1969 oil on canvas Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris |
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| Asger Jorn Kyotosmorama 1969 oil on canvas Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris |
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| Asger Jorn Untitled 1956-57 oil on canvas Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice |
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| Asger Jorn Green Ballet 1960 oil on canvas Guggenheim Museum, New York |
In 1964 the Guggenheim Foundation in New York awarded Asger Jorn one of its lucrative Fellowships, electing him to the honor without prior notice. The text of his telegram of response is reproduced below --
"GO TO HELL WITH YOUR MONEY BASTARD—STOP—REFUSE PRICE (sic) —STOP—NEVER ASKED FOR IT—STOP—AGAINST ALL DECENSY (sic) MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY—STOP—I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME. JORN"