Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Alfred Jensen
Guatemalan (1903-1981)
FAMILY PORTRAIT (1975)
oil on canvas
85” x 102”

STYLE: ABSTRACTION

  

Alfred Jensen was born in Guatemala, but was brought up by his Danish grandfather in Denmark and traveled extensively as a young man. He studied with Abstract-Expressionist icon Hans Hoffman in Munich during the twenties, and then studied painting and sculpture in Paris during the thirties and forties, finally settling in New York. In the late fifties Jensen turned away from gestural abstraction to explore more precise, geometric forms.

It isn't often that a painter admits to using "multiplication, addition, and subtraction in painting a picture." Yet these, and more, are Jensen’s claims when he discusses paintings like Family Portrait. The theories of color and number that Jensen has applied to art-making are from both ancient and modern traditions. Looking at this painting, it is easy to see why many viewers ignore the theories to concentrate instead on the energetic and seductive interplay of colors and shapes.

What's behind Family Portrait:
*The names refer to Jensen and his family. His wife and daughter are represented by black squares, Jensen and his son by white squares. The painting is in four parts because of the importance of the number four in the I Ching.
*The color-relationships are inspired by the writings of the German poet, Goethe, who used a prism to study the interplay of light and dark colors.
*The number of squares and the number of colored dots within the squares are determined by the numerical theories of Pythagoras, as well as those of the Mayans and the Crow band of Native Americans.
*Family Portrait is also inspired by Michael Faraday's work on solar energy and electrical dualities.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

John Yau, ARTFORUM, 12/85
"Jensen's paintings are almost completely predetermined and spin out of his conflation of science and art. They are complex diagrams referring to Goethe's Theory of Colors(1840), magic squares, the Mayan calendar, the I Ching, Pythagoras, astronomy, physics and biology...Taking his cues from Goethe, Jensen restricted his palette to prismatic hues (red, yellow, blue, green, and violet) and black and white...they were spiritually charged emanations...Mathematical signs and specific sequences of numbers are repeatedly employed. In his attempt to confront the viewer with units of palpable light, the artist squeezed paint directly from the tube and never modulated his color...They are impenetrable walls of faceted color, in which each unit of the surface is meant to carry some thought, idea or belief. At times, we feel as if we are looking at a giant game board whose cosmic rules will forever elude us...each of the paintings is a discrete summarization of immutable patterns or forces...one of this century's most difficult artists."
Joshua Kind, New Art Examiner, 6/78
"So through the critical apparatus and the museum situation, Jensen's paintings are presented to the public as if they were more than the seemingly complex, yet most likely naive obsessions of an artist who has omnivorously absorbed ancient and modern magic, number and color theory and "science" to generate his emblem art...One of the clearest insights to the essential meaning of this recent body of Jensen's works is given in his own words when he explains what happened in 1957. 'I got rid of my expressionist paintings entirely and became a diagram painter...I developed my study into a style.' ..As humanists and poets we know little if anything of the actual awesome complexity and mythic beauty of mathematics and sciences...It is as if we are being asked to pretend not to know that Scientific American exists...To value works then such as Jensen's beyond their charm and naiveté...[is to] confuse both ourselves and the larger public about the art enterprise....this should clearly be presented as primitivism...elsewise we will be considered lame and dim-witted to lavish this amount of attention on an art with a past structure and outlook incapable of comprehending our present and our future. To misunderstand Jensen's paintings is not only to overvalue them; it may also be to misunderstand and undervalue ourselves."

Donald Kuspit, ARTFORUM, 4/91
"There is a summarizing impulse in Jensen, a compulsion to cryptic grand statements in laconic form...Jensen, then, does not want to illustrate mathematical precepts, but to show how they inform physical reality. For him, numbers are sensuous in themselves, and they correlate with every kind of vital reality...Without their mathematical mysticism, Jensen's paintings have a quirky, decorative character. Indeed, their numerology adds to their decorative effect. No doubt some will regard Jensen as a proto-pattern painter by reason of his signature checkerboards. Even his interest in Mayan culture--in so-called primitive pattern--seems marvelously prescient...for him, decorative pattern was a meditative device, signaling a higher, universal intelligibility. He had a cultist attitude toward these designs; he was submitting to a form that had the power to transform him...In other words, his practice was meant to be a kind of ritual purification of the mind and the senses; science was Jensen's professed religion and dogma, obscuring its practical cleansing purpose. Jensen restored transcendental intention to abstraction."