When the Guggenheim International Award Committee informed Asger Jorn in 1964 that he had won their prize, his reply arrived by telegram: "GO TO HELL WITH YOUR MONEY BASTARD, STOP, REFUSE PRICE, STOP, NEVER ASKED FOR IT, STOP." The gesture was characteristic of an artist who spent much of his life in open conflict with institutional authority and commercial culture.

Born in Vejrum, Jutland in 1914, Jorn studied briefly in Paris in the late 1930s, where he attended Léger's atelier and worked with Le Corbusier on a pavilion project. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark he co-founded Helhesten, an underground cultural journal that kept experimental art alive through the war years. In 1948 he was a founding member of CoBrA, the international group that brought together artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam in a loose avant-garde coalition emphasising raw expressiveness and collective mythology.

After CoBrA dissolved in 1951 he aligned briefly with the Situationist International, contributing theoretical writing alongside Guy Debord before a clean break in 1961. Over his lifetime he produced more than 2,500 works in paint, print, ceramics, and collage, and wrote over twenty books on aesthetics and political theory. He was also, incidentally, the first person to translate Franz Kafka into Danish. The major collection of his work is held at Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, which he helped establish. He died in Aarhus in May 1973.