Asger Jorn Worth Millions: Liberation Image from 1945 Sold at Auction

Tuesday, Bruun Rasmussen marked the 75th anniversary of Denmark's liberation in style when a work by the Danish artist Asger Jorn came under the hammer at a Live Auction in Copenhagen.

The hammer price of the work "Landscape in Finkidong", which came into being in 1945, was no less than DKK 3.7 million (€ 645,000 including buyer’s premium) – a pleasant surprise for the auction house’s specialists, who had estimated the work to be worth DKK 2.5 million (€ 335,000).

"It is a work of museum quality. It has everything you could wish for in a painting from this period – the happy colours, the many figures and the festive mood from the time right after the liberation of Denmark. It is an impressive and not least well-deserved hammer price," says Niels Raben, Head of the Department of Modern Art at Bruun Rasmussen.

Critique of the Occupation Forces

With its colours, lush landscape and glorious sun, "Landscape in Finkidong" presents itself as a life-affirming liberation painting – as if it were an attempt to encapsulate the euphoric mood felt in the wake of Denmark’s liberation in 1945. The work is related to one of the most crucial paintings of the period, "Guganaga", which today belongs to ARoS and was the first painting Jorn completed after the liberation of Denmark.

"Landscape in Finkidong" belongs to Jorn's early period, where, in collaboration with a number of artists and poets, he published the culturally and socially critical wartime journal "Helhesten" (The Hell Horse). With Modernist art and articles on everything from African masks to jazz music, the contributors delivered a both humorous and scathing provocation of the German occupation force.