Galerie Triade, Knokke-Heist
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Post War and Contemporary Art, 4 December 1986, Lot 621
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn, The Final Years 1965 - 1973, London 1980, no. 1745, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although they are more delicate in the original, the oranges more pastel-orange and the greens less turquoise. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are some unobtrusive networks of shallow and stable cracks throughout the composition. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light. This work has not been viewed out of the frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Executed in 1967, almost at the end of Jorn's career, Coucher du Sourire is an outstanding example of the artist's technical command and artistic development. This work emphatically illustrates Jorn's late relish for a palette of intense, undiluted pigments, which contrast with the somber, brooding tonalities of his earlier canvases, heavily reliant on Munch's work. In this work the vivid blues, browns, greens and yellows energetically applied to the picture surface successfully marry areas of black and white to create ambiguous, hybrid images, suspended between the abstract and the ꦑfigurative. This dichotomy in Jorn's paintings was to have a profound influence on artists of a younger generation such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

Although the Cobra Movement which he had co-founded with Appel, Alechinsky and Corneille amongst others in 1948 had disbanded in the early 1950's, Jorn's importance had not dimiꦫnished with its ꦐdemise. His active mission was to promote Danish art around the world and to encourage his contemporaries to use a universal language and find alternative forms of abstraction. Jorn developed a manner of painting that went beyond the confines of a specific art historical category.

Commenting on Jorn's technique, Karl Schawelka remarked that "his recognizable figures arise out of the painting process itself. They are not planned but discovered...Within a wilderness of colours Jorn will suddenly see a face or a body, because in his mind's eye he has brought together brushstrokes that are separated by a space, but to him they suddenly reveal a configuration that make sense of an image" (Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn - Supplement: paintings 1930-1973, London, 1986, p.22-23)

Comp:

Photograph of Asger ꦬ🍌Jorn at work in the garden of his Swedish friends in Villiers-le-Bel near Paris in 1967 by Jean Weber © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/DACS/2008