Guillaume Apollinaire

Asger Jorn’s post-war painting of French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire depicts an abstraction of the subject. By painting Apollinaire Jorn reveals his admiration for the critic and his desire to be associated with the pre war avant-garde. Jorn was an important representative of the avant-garde Cobra movement. The portrait borders on caricature in its expressive exaggeration. Apollinaire’s large, simplified head is schematically composed with brown fluid running from his mouth. Irony is central to this painting and is indeed characteristic of Jorn’s work. By invoking humour the artist assumes a position that is critical towards the more serious works produced by the abstract-expressionist painters of his own time. In place of gestural marks on the canvas Jorn’s brushstrokes resembles absent minded doodles. The artist consciously invokes the anti-heroic with scratches and scribbles to target the assumptions of genius associated with his contemporaries.