Top 38 Quotes & Sayings by Asger Jorn

I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection.

In the beginning was the image.

We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition.

You can often give a better description of the fight between people, the essentials of it, by means of fantastic animals, the simple, primitive, naked instincts, than by depicting a specific situation. It is not the human animal we should describe, but ourselves as human animals.

True realism, materialist realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.

This is what aesthetics, development and progress depend upon: that we go out on thin ice.

Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.

If a symbolic language dies, it tortures us like a nightmare, like a thousand piece orchestra grating on our nerves and tearing our mind to pieces.. .It is a corpse with no symbolic power or strength.

My work is based on a tradition quite distinct from the Eckersberg tradition, a Nordic line of development that had never been clearly and consistently defined in the literature on art. This line is not a straight one; it has the strangest and most fascinating twists and curves, and includes such artists as Edvard Munch, Ernest Josephson, Hill, Hansen Jacobsen, Johannes Holbek, Jens Lund, and Emile Nolde. Not all of them equally well known.

We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation.

Being an artist is being an isolated individual.

To get anywhere, one must choose one's mistakes, I chose experimental acts.

We like to learn all we need from earlier generations, but we have to find out for ourselves what we need; nobody else can do that for us.

To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today.

Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today... It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on.

We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art.

During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength.

The artist's interest cannot be restricted to a single field; he must seek the highest perception of everything, of the whole and its details.

The reverse process is extremely important to me - that artistic images can inspire to words and different myths, and that in certain cultures this process has been the normal relation between images and words.

In 1939 I wrote my first article ("Intime banaliteter" [Intimate banalities] in the journal Helhesten) in which I expressed my love for sofa painting, and for the last twenty years I have been preoccupied with the idea of rendering homage to it. Thus I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection. Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.

Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.

We are sparks that must glow as brightly as possible.

We have defined art as the life form and aesthetic art as the life renewal: the stimulating, animating, agitating, inspiring, inspirational, fermenting, fascinating fanaticising, explosive and outrageous: the renewal of the unknown.

The goal changes from the general to the individual from need to wish, from ethics to aesthetics.

Anything really new is repulsive, because it is abnormal and unreasonable.

If you add something to a painting, never let it be for aesthetic reasons. Only let it be for reasons of expression.

To make the material speak to man in the name of man, this is the aim and reality of art.

The artistic formulae wear thin quickly and yet daily the artist - when developing his own foundation - must enter his own time and the problems of other contemporary artists. Paths cross and the soil of time is starting to be turned.

The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics.

There can be no question of selecting in any direction, but of penetrating the whole cosmic law of rhythms, forces and material that are the real world, from the ugliest to the most beautiful, everything that has character and expression, from the crudest and most brutal to the gentlest and most delicate; everything that speaks to us in its capacity as life.

The act of expressing oneself is a physical one. It materializes the thought.

A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible.

To break and be able to grow together again in a better way: that is the difficult art.

The significance of something lies in its presence here and now. I don't care what it has been or what it will become. It is the experience of things that matters, the confrontation with things.

It is said that my art has some typically Nordic features: the curving lines, the convolutions, the magical masks and staring eyes that appear in myths and folk art. This may be. My interest in the dynamics of Jugend style probably also comes into it.

Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc … It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.

Everything is in constant flux, from state to state, from good to bad and back again... only in transmutation, perpetual motion, lies truth.

If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity.