Sale: 437 / Post War I, Dec. 10. 2016 in Munich Lot 808

 

808
Asger Jorn
Tarass Boulba, 1959.
Mixed media
Estimate:
€ 60,000 / $ 64,800
Sold:
€ 123,750 / $ 133,650

(incl. surcharge)
Tarass Boulba. 1959.
Mixed media, Nails and wood on canvas.
Atkins 1224. Lower center signed. Verso titled. With title and inscription on stretcher. 91.6 x 60.3 cm (36 x 23.7 in).
[EL].

PROVENANCE: Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London (with gallery label on stretcher).
Private collection Southern Germany.

EXHIBITION: Trente et une Peintures de Asger Jorn, Galerie Rive Gauche, Paris 1960, cat. no.13 (with illu.;with label on stretcher and stamp of the gallery).
Barbican Art Gallery, London, cat. no. 34 (with gallery label on stretcher).

Our color-intense painting from the late 1950s was named after the narration "Taras Bulba" by the Russian writer Nikolai Wassiljewitsch Gogol. Since it was released in 1835 it has been subject for visual arts, operas, rhapsodies and films. The story of Taras Bulba, an old Zaporozhian Cossack, and his two sons Andrej and Ostap plays in the Ukraine in the first half of the 17th century. Bulba and his sons join the Cossack forces in their struggle against the Polish forces but Andrej defects to the Polish out of love and is eventually shot by his own father. Taras Bulba is then burnt alive to atone for the infanticide. This dramatic episode from Russian literature was the impetus for Asger Jorn's striking painting in which he merges agony, love and punishment to forms and decomposed structures in a wild blaze of colors creating a swirl that reflects the story's discomposure in a highly captivating and empathic manner.



808
Asger Jorn
Tarass Boulba, 1959.
Mixed media
Estimate:
€ 60,000 / $ 64,800
Sold:
€ 123,750 / $ 133,650

(incl. surcharge)