The Sixty-Seventh A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, Part 4: Asger Jorn and His Creatures

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of five artists. In the fourth lecture, “Asger Jorn and His Creatures,” held on April 29, 2018, Foster considers how Jorn saw the beastly figures of his CoBrA paintings as expressions of political crisis.