Heated debates: Petit suisse versus Grand danois

In fall 1953, right after a life-threatening tuberculosis, a painful divorce and without any financial means, the Danish Cobra artist Asger Jorn found himself in Switzerland. His desperate efforts to gain recognition as an artist led to nothing and he had decided to leave his homeland for good and got stranded with his new family of six in a remote chalêt in the Alpes. It was there, where he learned by coincidence about the resurrection of the Bauhaus as the HfG Ulm. Spontaneously he offered his services to the school´s founding director Max Bill, who – other than Jorn at that time - has been an established curator, editor, member of various international associations and a highly acclaimed proponent of concrete art. It never came to any cooperation on a practical level between the two of them, what remained is a series of hilarious letters. In them, the Dane accuses the Swiss of practising a reactionary policy of restauration à la Adenauer in his new school, while Bill ridicules Jorn as a hopelessly romantic esotheric. In opposition to Bill, Jorn finally establishes his own, Imaginist Bauhaus and his own theory of a Dynamic Form.

The dispute between the two artists as it is represented in their letters, happened at a moment when industrial design for the first time flooded Europe on a mass scale. Besides the ironic tone of both opponents, it features some of the key questions within the post-war discourse of art and industrial design. Jorn, who would soon become one of the founding members of the Situationist International raised issues such as experimentation, participation, crafts and technology, critique of standardization, artistic subjectivity against scientific objectivity, etc.