ALFRED JENSEN

Born in 1903, the same year as his close friend Mark Rothko, Jensen is recognized for his enigmatic universe of grids, diagrams, and fantastic calculations rendered in brilliant, prismatic color. Before settling in New York in the early 1950s, Jensen spent much of his young adult life moving from place to place. He lived in Guatemala until his mother’s death when he was seven years old and moved to Denmark to complete his education. Following many years traveling as an itinerant worker of odd jobs on ships and farms, he found his calling studying art in Munich under Hans Hofmann and later at the Académie Scandinave in Paris. These experiences informed his lifelong interest in the philosophies, systems, and aesthetics of cultures around the world, which became basic to his art.

Strongly influenced by Guatemalan textiles and pre-Columbian art, Jensen also drew inspiration from sources ranging from the intuitive to the theoretical and scientific. James Clerk Maxwell’s formulation of electromagnetism and foundational texts like the I Ching, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Color (Zur Farbenlehre) (1810), and J. Eric S. Thompson’s Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (1960) were key to his art. The Mayan calendar and the Chinese alphabet held special meaning for Jensen and appear in many of his paintings.

Though Jensen’s grids often take on the familiar appearance of games secreting solutions, these works do not serve as maps toward any unified meaning or objective endpoint. While many of the works in Diagrammatic Mysteries have titles that point to their origins, like The Pythagorean Theorem (1964), or symbols with recognizable meanings, as with the arrows in Physical Optics (1975), these psychic footholds only go so far in orienting us within the compositions, which are ultimately guided by essential mystery. As Donald Judd, who himself was inspired by Jensen, observed in 1963, “The theories are important to him and completely irrelevant to the viewer.” Jensen’s place in contemporary art is perplexing, and, in many ways, he can be viewed as a link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Generationally, he was working in the arena of Abstract Expressionism and was a part of that community. Unlike the Abstract Expressionist’s rejection of Pop art, Jensen developed strong friendships with the next generation. He attended the Happenings and was a fixture at the Pop openings and parties that took over the scene in the early 1960s. The toy store colors and formats suggesting games in his paintings link him to this scene. However, the Pop artists’ denial of surface was completely opposite to Jensen’s embrace of pigment as thick as frosting on cupcakes. His paintings are as comfortable juxtaposed with Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictographs as they would easily blend into their place on the shelves of Claes Oldenburg’s Store. These challenging works, at once accessible and secret, make us realize that Jensen himself is his greatest mystery.

Diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in the late 1970s, Jensen, then one of the stars of the contemporary art world, went into seclusion, and his work disappeared from the scene for decades after his death. Alfred Jensen: Diagrammatic Mysteries is a reawakening of his extraordinary contributions.