Le Futur du Passe (V. 402)
Maker
Asger Jorn
(Danish, 1914 - 1973)
Date1971
MediumOriginal woodcut in colors
DimensionsBlock: 25 1/2 x 19 11/16 in. (64.8 x 50 cm)
Credit LineGift of Edward Stowe Akeley, estate executed by his widow
CopyrightCopyright managed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object number1995.21
Status
Not on viewAfter leaving Denmark to study painting in Fernand Léger’s academy in Paris, Jorn was a key member of numerous European avant-garde groups. He first joined the Line and Harvest Group in Copenhagen before banding together with Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky, among others, to found CoBrA in Paris in 1948, named for the home cities of its core members: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. After meeting Guy Debord in 1954, Jorn was also a founding member of the Situationist International in 1957. This print comes from a series of twelve woodcuts entitled Studies and Surprises (Études et surprises), printed a decade after Jorn left the Situationists in 1961. Jorn reversed the printing process by first smearing colors onto the woodblock and then carving figures out of the arbitrary color formations. While most printmakers use separate blocks for each color, Jorn reused the same block, creating new carvings for each color. Between abstraction and figuration, the dark central form echoes the silhouette of the back of a body, mimicking the position of the viewer. The Future of the Past hints at a retrospective temporality that asks the viewer to consider the present in relation to past utopian visions of the avant-garde.
