Although a keen eye can spot almost all colours in the many layers of paint, the dominant colour is white. Underneath the white layer the spectator can faintly see dark shadows, and the eye can also catch the red tracks that have been pulled down across the surface. Perhaps an inner film has already begun to play in your head?
Bloody tracks in the snow
You can imagine a lot of things. We know that, as a point of departure, the painter had one picture in his head: the battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
Asger Jorn was one of the founders of Cobra. This world famous group of artists sought the primitive human instinct and, as a result, painted freely and in abstract, and with focus on colour and brush strokes. Normally he and the other Cobra artists painted pictures that exploded in colour. Compared to them, Stalingrad is unusually quiet. The white colour covers the picture - like the snow that fell over the city and covered the traces of war.
Jorn wanted to show the opposite. He painted the battle of Stalingrad to bring it out into light and memory. Dug out the horror from oblivion. If you look carefully, you can faintly see the bloody bodies and the bombed-out, gutted houses under the thickly layered paint.
Reaction
Jorn knew Picasso's great, monumental painting of Guernica, that described the atrocities of the Spanish civil war. Like Picasso's masterpiece, Stalingrad is large and chaotic. Both in form and content. It takes time to experience and digest the picture.
Jorn worked on the picture for many years. The last time was just a few months before his death. While he was painting, the superpowers rearmed and the nuclear arms race was launched. Was World War III on its way? Jorn reacted to the manmade chaos with his wild brush. Facing the big canvas, it is now your turn.
Trine Moeller Madsen is a writer on art and cultural affairs and an author. Among her works is "KUNST" ("Art") (Gyldendal, 2004), a textbook on image analysis for the oldest students in the Danish Folkeskole.
Stalingrad, le non-lieu oú le fou rire du courage, 1957 - 1972. Oil on canvas, 296 x 492 cm. Photo: Lars Bay/Silkeborg Kunstmuseum. © Silkeborg Kunstmuseum.