Discusses the artistic strategies of the mature (late 1950s) work of Danish painter Asger Jorn (1914-1973) as a combination of celebration of the possibilities of gestural expression and a critical response to the limited way gestural painting was framed in the movements of Abstract Expressionism in the US and Informel in Europe. Considered in light of his theoretical writing and his participation in the collective avant-gardes Cobra and the Situationist International, Jorn's art work politicizes abstract painting at the height of the Cold War and presents neo-Marxist and/or Situationist responses to the artificial social isolation of painting through specific strategies of materiality, parody, and pastiche.