It wasn’t that former Cobra artist Asger Jorn really wanted to burn down his contemporary Jackson Pollock. At least, maybe there was some jealousy, but it doesn’t matter. What mattered to him was that Pollocks meant to be brutal drips, the abstract expressionist throwing and dripping of paint, had become so popular that it became a stylistic device with decorative appreciation. Jorn parodied this often imitated style in abstract paintings with over-aesthetic drip lines and called them, very lethally, ‘Luxury Series’.
Becoming decorative, that was a nightmare for the artists Jorn and Constant Nieuwenhuijs: the two greatest talents in the Cobra movement. They warned against sluggishness, nurtured in this by the situationist philosopher Guy Debord. After all, the war was not won only to collapse civilly afterwards. People had to stay sharp, creative, really live and art had to fuel that active freedom. And that is why Jorn campaigned against coquettish art. He, Constant and Jacqueline de Jong would also make situationist publications and collages of sentences and snippets: no strings attached, because they were also against pre-chewing. Just go think for yourself.
Canon
This and more can be seen in an anniversary exhibition about 75 years of Cobra, in the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen. With about one hundred and fifty works of art, it celebrates the fact that on a good day in November 1948 a small group of artists from Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br) and Amsterdam (A) united under the name Cobra. They aimed for an expressive expression of personal emotions, but as an expression of the post-war freedom of society as a whole. They did this in such a radically new way that Cobra ended up in the canon of art history.
The Danish branch of Cobra: unlimited imagination, but limited freedom for the trans woman avant la lettre
Jorn and Constant belonged to the club, Pollock and De Jong did not. The fact that they are also represented here is because the exhibition places Cobra in a broader overview: also older and younger art with expressionist features and Cobra-like interests such as outsiders and children’s drawings.
That is a good idea. Because Cobra was also part of a larger network: the borders were open again and artists shopped for inspiration in Paris and elsewhere in the world, and in art history. A dead winter landscape by Max Beckmann from 1930 forms a beautiful occasional duo with a scorched earth that Constant painted in 1951, with limbs and palisades under a pitch-black sky. Such lugubrious war art therefore also belonged to Cobra, just like Corneille’s cheerful, nothing-to-the-hand-bird scenes, who would later crumple it up – speaking of decoration. No wonder that Cobra had already fallen apart in 1951. The differences were too great.
This short existence is embedded in the exhibition in a broader art history. In the room about the painting gesture, for example, Karel Appel hangs next to Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, and of course Pollock. But, as Jorn already indicated, there is something to be said about that. It is precisely this part of the exhibition that looks sacred and bombastic, and the gallery text feeds into the myth of the genius painting gesture. This fits in with the misconception that often belongs to Cobra that all wisdom about art can be found in the work of art itself, as if it were separate from the outside world. That’s cool of course. Several museums now highlight how post-war modernism, with its drive for innovation, fitted in with the ideal image of economic revival and Western capitalism, but this exhibition ignores that.
Cobra men
That is not a bad thing, but there is also no other interpretation. It is, however, a look-and-compare exhibition with beautiful comparisons, such as with female talents such as Dora Tuynman and Lotti van der Gaag, who were never really allowed to participate with the Cobra men. Yet embedding Cobra in more than a century of art history requires more insights than the well-known Cobra series of children’s drawings, the painting gesture, nature and what is here called ‘folk art’. This lack of additional interpretation grows as the chronological exhibition progresses with a summary of late art and still later art – Baselitz, Basquiat, Ritterbex, Meese. Well, the expressive gesture is still used. But how does that relate to the shared idealism of Cobra? For example, say that it has been replaced by individualism with expressionism as a private stylistic device, or zoom out in a different way. What remains is a long colorful list without much message – almost a Luxury Series. Although, maybe Jorn would have liked this lack of explanation – don’t pre-chew, think for yourself.