His father, Lars Peter Jørgensen, a fundamentalist Christian, died from pneumonia[2] (contracted after a car crash) when Asger was 12 years old.

This early heavy Christian influence had a negative effect on Asger who began progressively to inwardly rebel against it, and more generally against other forms of authority.

By the age of 16 he was influenced by N. F. S. Grundtvig, and although he had already started to paint, Asger enrolled in the Vinthers Seminarium, a teacher-training college in Silkeborg where he paid particular attention to a course in 19th century Scandinavian thought.

When he graduated from college in 1935, the principal wrote a reference for him which said that he had attained "an extraordinary rich personal development and maturity" – especially because of his wide reading in areas outside the topics required for his studies.

While at college he joined the small Silkeborg branch of the Communist Party of Denmark and came under the direct influence of the syndicalist Christian Christensen, with whom he became close friends and who, Jorn was later to write, was to become a second father to him.

After the war, he complained that opportunities for critical thinking within the context of the communist arena had been curtailed by what he characterised as a centralised bourgeois political control.

Finding this unacceptable, he broke with the Communist Party of Denmark, although he did not hand in his membership until the mid-1960s and remained committed philosophically to a revision of the Marxist analysis of capitalism from the point of view of the artist.

The COBRA group dissolved in 1951[6] He returned, impoverished and seriously ill with tuberculosis, to Silkeborg in 1951 and resumed work in the ceramics field in 1953.

Here he applied his scientific and mathematical knowledge drawn from Henri Poincaré and Niels Bohr to develop his situlogical technique.

After 1966, Jorn continued to produce oil paintings while traveling throughout Europe collecting images with photographer Gerard Franceschi for his vast archive of "10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art".

The first is a concise critique of the apparent contradictions in Marx's Das Kapital which Jorn uses to prepare the ground for a discussion of how the work of "the creative elite" can have "value" in any future society aligned on communist principles.

This was originally published in French in 1959 by the Internationale Situationniste and is the most straightforward and least discursive of all of Jorn's texts, probably because Guy Debord had a hand in the editing.

The second part is a long polemic against contemporaneous Russian revisionism and the failed attempt by Denmark and Britain to join the Common Market, before coming to Jorn's main proposal, an economically independent international "creative elite" adopting typical Scandinavian institutions to realize "artistic value" for the greater universal good.

Having noticed similar scratchings in Scandinavia at the cathedrals in Ribe, Lund, and Trondheim, Jorn decided to study the phenomenon.

[18] nella realtà storica, dopo le finte dimissioni del 1961, Keller-Jorn si era appena amichevolmente defilato dalle attività dell’IS, appoggiandone in pieno i contenuti e gli scopi (al punto da continuare a finanziarle), ma giudicandone poco efficace la nuova strategia.