Public and private histories in cloth Other stories : Asger Jorn ’ s and Pierre Wemaëre ’ s Le Long Voyage , 1959-1960

In the autumn of 1958, the Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-1973) received a commission for a large, coloured tapestry to be installed at the Statsgymnasium in Aarhus, Denmark. Jorn drew in his friend, the French artist Pierre Wemaëre (1913-2010), as a collaborator in this initiative. In this article, I shed light on Jorn's and Wemaëre's effort to push boundaries when producing the work. These included a challenge to disciplinary boundaries – that is, between art, craft, design and architecture – as well as social hierarchies between the artist as the creator and the weavers as the executors. The attempt was also to challenge institutional boundaries between high art and popular art, as well as professional boundaries – that is, between a spontaneous production method versus one that is based on planning combined with a division of labour. But, as I reveal through an exploration of the making of the weaving, these ideals were of necessity compromised during the process of production and, while resulting in an impressive and memorable work, the project did not ultimately challenge existing norms of creating large-scale weavings.

Among the many stories to be told about Le Long Voyage, the following one takes its point of departure from the fringes, rather than the centre. As the title of this paper implies, there is an existing context of research on this tapestry available in Denmark, as well as on an international level. The goal here is neither to document precisely how the tapestry came into being, nor to praise the artists and/or anchor the work in any specific discursive field of art history; that would only result in a compilation of existing research on the work.
Instead, I aim to shed light on Jorn's and Wemaëre's efforts to push boundaries when producing the work: disciplinary boundaries between art, craft, design and architecture; social barriers such as hierarchies between the artist as the creator and the weavers as the executors of the artwork; institutional boundaries between high art and popular art and, last, professional boundaries between a spontaneous production method versus one that is based on planning combined with a division of labour. While doing this, I would also like to show Jorn's criticism of utopian tendencies of high modernism in architecture as expressed by the architect Le Corbusier, amongst others. Jorn's intention in creating a tapestry in a spontaneous, improvised manner is shown to have taken place against a backdrop in which tapestry often served a propagandistic function between the 1930s and 1960s. The novelty of this research -which was conceived for the Material Statsgymnasium Aarhus, interior, photo: Børge Venge.
Narratives Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa in November 2019 -lies in the fact that the investigation creates a narrative by looking at the material properties of the tapestry and connects qualities in the work to statements by the two artists and explanations, as well as memories, of the weavers who worked with them. Even though it goes beyond the scope of this article to interrogate the gendering of roles in the creation of this tapestry, I briefly indicate some aspects related to it. Furthermore, I show how Jorn´s ideals -especially when it comes to notions of collaboration, crediting others, and so forth, within the creative process -ended up being compromised during the process of production, and how the project ultimately failed to challenge existing norms of creating and producing large-scale weavings. The idea behind the tapestry exhibition was to revive the study of French masters of the medieval period in order, on the one hand, to distance itself from the classics and, on the other, to find an artistic language suitable for the new socio-political and cultural situation in which there was an interest in popular art. For Léger, the tapestry incorporated the future of modern wall art. His brother in arms, the architect Le Corbusier, 3 would later confirm this idea when claiming that when 'The destiny of today´s tapestry appears: it becomes the "Mural" of modern times … We cannot have murals painted on the walls of our apartments. This "woolen wall" can be detached, rolled, carried under one´s arm, travel hung elsewhere' (Le Corbusier 1960:sp).

Motivation
Undoubtedly, Léger and Le Corbusier conceived of the tapestry as a movable painting.
Their attitude was typical of the works of the artists commissioned by Cuttoli, which were reduced to design only. All their tapestries were conceived as drawings or paintings and were subsequently translated into weavings in wool by artisans, not the artists themselves. Jorn (1957:44) 1983:sp). In this description, the different roles they will take on in future weaving collaborations already becomes apparent ( Figure 3). Their initial idea was to copy the motif of a Peruvian textile, depicting a bird Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 and some ornaments. In the end though, they could not stick to just translating the piece as it was, and soon they broke free from their sample by spontaneously incorporating a moon into the imagery. Wemaëre's wife had supposedly pointed out the beauty of the moon in the sky one night, which made them take a detour in such a way that they went astray from their original intention to just copy the pattern and instead, spontaneously added the moon. ideas for future textile projects, and the beginning of their first collaborative weaving, L´oiseau dans la forêt (Bird in the Forest, 2,52 m x 1,34 m) under the simplest circumstances (Figures 4,5). And yet, even though the means were sparse, their ambitions were high. They aimed at nothing less than revolutionising the production method of this atavistic craft. Jorn (1957:44) retrospectively recalls their first real common weaving adventure, Jorn and Wemaere, Pinson, 1947. Photo: Pierre Gassmann.
When we considered creating a new kind of tapestry in 1946/47, everything was still very vague. The only aspect, we agreed on was that the distinction between idea and its materialization was insupportable. The imagery, which was created by us without a patiently elaborated cartoon, would need to develop spontaneously from the matter. Wemaëre set up a loom. We started working and were weaving for a period of six month, during which we were using all kinds of threads from our surroundings. We were delighted by the result.
Their approach distinguished itself significantly from the conventional production mode of their time. Artists around Cuttoli, for example, would rely on a division of labour, according to which the artist took on the role of the creative inventor and the weaver would be reduced to the executor. Naturally, such a procedure would not allow a spontaneous reaction based upon the performance of the respective material and/or tools. Instead, it is based on detailed planning, where design and fabrication are separated, and every step of the process is fixed.
It is obvious that a collaboration between two or more artists on equal footing is impossible without a stylization based on what they have in common. The orchestration of our work was in many respects similar to that in jazz. If you work in this profession, the comparison with an organ is obvious; only here, instead of the keyboard you have colours. We never consciously considered the question of a particular style or a structured composition. One [of us] can resume work and then at some point let the other continue it without restriction or specialization. Our common structuring is therefore the immediate and unconsidered result of what we had learned at the Academy Léger from the generation before us and our joint opposition to its theories (Jorn 1958:143).
Jorn would later describe their approach as based on improvisation and material imagination. On the one hand, their goal was to fight alienation, which they saw rooted in the division of the labour into different work steps to be performed by various people, and to prove that artistic creation was possible despite prior specialisation. On the other hand, they aimed at creating a woven artwork which was conceived based on the property of its material and the process of its production. Bird in the Forest pictures a sequence of rhythmic lines filled with colourful segments in between, from which creatures looking at the spectator evolve. According to an interview with Wemaëre, the initial intent of creating an absolutely spontaneous tapestry without using any kinds of specifications, provisions or instructions, had to be compromised (Kurczinski 2014:134). A simple sketch, rather than a cartoon, 4 was developed, according to which the two men started weaving. The piece was woven sideways, which allows the imagery to stem from the direction of the weaving process.

Material Properties of Le Long Voyage
Almost a decade later, Bird in the Forest served as a point of departure for Le Long Voyage, both in terms of the artistic motif and the mode of production. Even though the multi-coloured tapestry was almost ten times as large, the idea was again to fabricate it manually on a loom. The nearly abstract imagery also evolves from a mash of back lines and segments of colour in between. Different kinds of creatures seemingly float on the surface of the tapestry. Just as in their earlier project, the idea was that the artists themselves conceive, create and produce the piece on the basis of the material property and the process of fabrication. And yet, Le Long Voyage, measuring 25 square metres in size, made for a much bigger challenge. Would the two men be able to finish the piece according to the standards (no division of labour between the artist as designer and the craft person as executor) they had earlier set for themselves?
Compared to Bird in the Forest, the imagery on Le Long Voyage is more dynamic; in parts even chaotic ( Figure 6). It is divided into four different colour zones, each of which has its own atmospheric effect. A smaller part on the left is dominated by dark green, blue and brown tones, and is followed by a yellow, green, brown and red section in which the imagery is less compressed, more loosely distributed over the surface, and lighter and more gay in expression. The next section, characterised by tones of blue, green, brown and beige is more balanced and static, while the closing section to the right, in strong red, green, yellow and dark and light brown, marks a powerful closing point. The number of colours is striking and, owing to the combination of the nearly innumerable different colour segments, there is not one single colour thread going through the entire width of the tapestry.
Even though the materials -wool, cotton, silk, hair -vary greatly, the thickness of the threads is fairly even, which creates a more-or-less flat surface. Some threads are in one colour and material, while others are spun together from various thinner, different colour threads. This, in combination with how dense the wool is pressed together, provides  (Figures 9, 10). Given the fact that now there was a client on the one end and weavers on the other, the concept of developing the tapestry in a purely spontaneous manner had to be compromised, as ideas and intentions had to be communicated and approved. Both artists created a collage of one of their earlier works and made a drawing on translucent paper. To obtain control of the composition, two ink drawings were developed. Based on this, a pencil and gouache sketch was made, which Jorn took to Denmark to present to Kunstfonden, who financed the project ( Figure 11). After this sketch, a 1:5 scale oil painting was made to serve as their model ( Figure 12). They started out painting collaboratively and then each took the painting to The tapestry was supposed to be finished in only 18 months, but it soon became clear that it was impossible for anyone to finish a tapestry of this dimension in such a short period of time. The only way to accomplish this goal was to increase the production speed, which is revealed in the decrease of threads, visible on the back. Looking at the tapestry from the front, one can see some bulges on the otherwise flat surface (Figures 13, 14, 15). Moreover, how come the piece varies about 10-15 cm in width? In addition, while the mesh of lines in the tapestry to a large extent corresponds precisely to the ones from the sketch, there is more difference in the colours. To the left, where the weaving started, colours are more blurred and shaded, which results from the composition of the threads in various materials and/or colours. How can these inaccuracies be explained?
According to Inge Bjørn, the process imposed by Jorn and Wemaëre left room for interpretation, which put the weavers in a situation where they either did not know how to go about it or even executed the work differently than expected. Usually, it was then up to Wemaëre to decide whether or not these misunderstandings would remain or needed to be corrected. Bjørn recalls that this continuous need for clarification made the work interesting for them (Sørensen & Yde 1996:38 The Belgian artist Yvette Cauquil Prince also took an interest in the project. She became part of the group and offered to continue the work in her studio in Rue St. Denis. In Yvette Prince they found a perfect ally for their endeavour, because she wanted to do something similar to Marie Cuttoli. And yet, the intention was to give ordinary people the opportunity to do in textile with thread what they can do in drawing, and have them bring everything they understood into play (Bjørn 1984:99). In addition, Gilbert Heck from Alsace, who was a soldier during the war with Algeria, and Michelle Vanderschrijven, a Belgian artist, joined the project. 'He was unbelievable. A natural talent, hardworking. It was a total explosion. It almost turned into a problem, because they had to respect each other a lot' is how one of the weavers described Gilbert Heck's efforts when it came to finishing the piece (Bjørn 1984:100). When two thirds were finished, Jorn brought in Bjørn, who was a needlework teacher, to support the team. He had got to know her through his friend, the ceramicist Erik Nyholm, with whom she taught at Askov Højskole in Denmark. 7 None of them had any formal training in weaving but knew well how to compensate for their lack of professionalism with enthusiasm and engagement.
Le Long Voyage, Detail.

Intentional Inconsistencies
One evening, Bjørn was sent to Jorn's Parisian family home with a mission. As she recalls retrospectively, weavers had worked under an enormous time pressure in order to meet the contract obligations the artists had towards the government. During this process of fast, collaborative development, the tapestry obviously showed bulges owing to the fact that one of them had worked at high speed, and it was now up to the artist to decide how to solve this problem. When she arrived at the apartment of the Jorn family, she encountered the artist and his wife, Matie, just about to go out for dinner. They wanted to celebrate the fact that Jorn had sold one of his paintings. The atmosphere was exhilarated and gay, as the couple had not gone out for 12 years owing to financial restraints. Matie had even bought a fur coat from the money of the sale, but forgot to buy stockings, so Bjørn was asked to lend her stockings to Matie. In the end, Bjørn was not able to accomplish the mission on which she had been sent but was instead given the task of babysitting the couple's four young children. As this example shows, Jorn's spontaneous recruitment was not restricted to finding weavers, but encompassed all aspects of human life.
When Jorn came to the atelier later to inspect the artwork, he crawled under the loom and asked the team to roll out the tapestry. Surprisingly, he was not concerned about the bulges. On the contrary, he liked them! Nor did he mind the inaccuracies in the width of the piece. He regarded these as traces of the human hand that had created the work, and that -in his opinion -was certainly not to be erased. Most obviously, he preferred authentic human expression to the perfection that machine production could achieve.
What seems to be a minor detail of an artist's personal preference thus opens up a larger field of discourse, namely, the value of the irregularity and imperfection of a hand-crafted work in contrast to the flawlessness and impersonality of something that is industrially produced (Bjørn 1984:100).
With Le Long Voyage at Aarhus Statsgymnasium, Jorn and Wemaëre wanted to draw specific attention to the relationship between art and architecture. Their work was not just about artistic decoration in a building, but rather about making a plea for atavistic crafts such as ceramics and weaving. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper in Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder Praktische Ästhetik (1860) had stressed the importance of textiles as an "ur-art" in the development of the architectural form through cladding. In opposition to that, at the turn of the twentieth century, most modern architects had banned textiles from architecture, as they conceived of it as part of the decorative arts, which was of no obvious purpose or use for them. Even worse, textiles in the forms of covers or curtains, for example, were conceived as a means of concealment, and therefore contradictory to most modern architects' claim that form had to follow function.
If there was any room for textiles as a material, the focus lied on serial production rather than authentic artistic expression. This shift is best illustrated in the work from the Bauhaus  showing that everyone can engage in the creative process, regardless of national, institutional and professional boundaries.
How did this intercultural team of amateur weavers function in practical terms? An interesting detail Bjørn repeatedly stresses is the fact that the team was unable to communicate in words, as they could not speak each other's languages. They also conceived of colour differently, and the finetuning of this happened not by speaking, but by the act of weaving itself. Her description stresses the artists' claim to develop a tapestry which was the result of the material performance and the process of fabrication, rather than of a specific preconceived concept. When comparing the tapestry with the sketch according to which it was woven (Figure 16) Most obviously, Bachelard was blind to the fact that Jorn and Wemaëre also had to compromise their ideals in order to create this tapestry. And yet, the philosopher´s statement, in combination with the fact that the work was signed J/W, makes us believe that it was the two men only who created it. Was it not precisely this cult around the artist and the artist's work -fuelled by the fact that the author signs an art piece -that Jorn wanted to fight, and to instead empower everybody to take on creative activity?
Looking carefully at the signature, we see that most of Wemaëre's name is written with light letters on a dark background and is therefore clearly legible, whereas Jorn's name is in bright letters on a rather bright background and therefore more difficult to decipher (Figure 19). What does this tell us? Is it a way to communicate their respective engagement in the project? Is it about Jorn's reservation to claim authorship for something accomplished by many people? It is known that Jorn seldomly titled his paintings and very often did so only upon request of his art dealers, who argued that paintings with a title sell better than the ones without. Perhaps once again here, it was the pressure of the client who demanded a signed piece from the artists, rather than the group of people who created it, that made him sign in such a way.
Most obviously, all of those who collaborated on Le Long Voyage did not stand on an equal footing. During the process of production, Jorn, who appeared only occasionally, had the last word when it came to certain decisions about the execution of the work.
Bjørn retrospectively stated that Wemaëre came every other day and the project would not have worked without his 'supervision' (Sørensen & Yde 1996:40). Her use of the word 'supervision' implies that -just as in the weavings from the artists around Cuttoli -it was practically unavoidable to distinguish between the artists who designed and made the decisions and the ones who followed and executed the piece. Weavers had to endure rather extreme working conditions, no payment, spontaneous babysitting, and so forth, while being overworked owing to the almost impossibly tight deadline Jorn had agreed to. The signature perhaps represents his struggle between holding on to the original idea of producing a 25 square metre tapestry in a spontaneous, affective and improvised manner himself and the desperate recruiting of weavers -one man and three women page 25 of 27 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 -which was absolutely necessary to accomplish his ambitious task on time. Moreover, in order to participate in the weaving, Bjørn, for example, had to take unpaid leave of absence from her teaching job. And when she asked Jorn about payment, he told her not to worry and assured her that this problem would resolve itself, as he expected some extra funding to come in. In the end though, this unfortunately did not happen, and nobody involved in this ambitious project earned any money from the work invested.
Among the many stories Le Long Voyage tells, this one certainly reveals some of the underlying gender politics which made this magnificent tapestry come into being.