One of the 20th century's most unique artists
Alfred Jensen (1903-1981) was described by fellow artist Allan Kaprow as "arguably the most original artist ever."
Here you may learn more about Alfred Jensen's life, read articles and the artist's writings, and see current and historical exhibition lists.
Artwork painted from 1957 to 1962.
Artwork painted from 1957 to 1962.
Artwork painted from 1963 to 1967.
Artwork painted from 1963 to 1967.
Artwork painted from 1968 to 1975.
Artwork painted from 1968 to 1975.
Artwork painted from 1975 to 1981.
Artwork painted from 1975 to 1981.
Artscanada article by Peter Perrin that Jensen painted an homage to the next year.
The exhibition, Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Diagrams From the Years 1957-1977, which originated at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and traveled to five other American museums in 1978, was a rich and rare thing to see, and a challenge to us to rethink our definitions of the words "abstract" and "obscure."
Jensen's work is always "about" something, referential, but it's also extremely personal in the way the subject is handled; his own thinking plays with the topic until it isn't necessarily even recognizable any more, and will certainly take some thought to figure out. Critics, always slow-moving and always pressed for time, haven't begun to do a proper job on this artist yet. It isn't enough to pinpoint the reference and call it elucidation, and few writers have done even that. A commentator might do his homework and tell us that a "Katun" is a 20-year period in the Mayan calendar, but so far no one goes on to explain why Alfred Jensen, then, in one work says in so many words that a Katun is 72 years, which is what we really need to learn. His calculations and intuitions are not self-explanatory; I can in fantasy imagine meetings of a future Jensen Society where the workings of his mind are mulled over and thrashed out in debate, like the Browning Societies at the end of the last century (though O. Henry in a wicked short story tells us that these were actually just an excuse for women to consume ice cream without their husbands' knowledge). We must leave definitive explanation to the lucky future scholars who have background, leisure, imagination, and foundation grants. I envy them, it's going to be soul-satisfying work. And it isn't going to get done in a day.
The artist, who was 75 in December, understands this and accepts it. Instant comprehension hasn't been his motive any more than quick-and-easy fame has. He wryly cites Pascal, who was content to have his thinking understood by two men in his lifetime, knowing the number would grow eventually. On the surface of Jensen's earliest painting in the show, My Oneness, a Universe of Colours (1957), we read in his handwriting, "So we'll live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies," which the catalogue strangely calls "a written reminder of mortality...from the death scene of King Lear." Wrong on both counts. It's from the "let's away to prison" speech, and marks Lear's breakthrough from vanity to wisdom—having insisted on status more and more futilely throughout the play, he now realizes he no longer wants it; he only wants to spend his days in obscurity with Cordelia whose loving heart he has, through suffering, at last learned to value. Jensen, already in his mid-fifties then, is saying that attention, adulation, don't matter as long as he can follow his own route, at his own speed, to self-identity, self-integration—and both these words are written on the canvas as well.
Therefore Man is the heart and mind of Heaven and Earth, and the visible embodiment of the five elements. He lives in the enjoyment of all flavours, the discriminating of all notes of harmony, and the enrobing of all colours.
Thus it is that when the sages would make rules for men, they felt it necessary to find the origin of all things in heaven and earth; to make the two forces of nature the commencement of all; to use the four seasons as the handle of their arrangements; to adopt the sun and stars as recorders of time, the moon as the measurer of work to be done, the spirits breathing in nature as associates, the five elements as giving substance to things, rules of propriety and righteousness as their instruments, the feelings of men as the field to be cultivated ...
The Li Yun or Ceremonial Usages, in the Li-Chi (Book of Rites),
translated by James Legge
And self-integration involves the integration of wisdom from all parts of the world. Jensen is particularly partial to correlative systems, ways of hanging things together in an attempt to keep meaninglessness out of the universe, the drive behind all religion and philosophy. Making things hang together by will and imagination, and sometimes by any way that can be made to work. As Edward Maziarz and Thomas Greenwood show, the Pythagoreans were expert at correlating by number: any two things expressible in numbers could be said to be related to one another, even when it didn't make much sense according to any other kind of reasoning. The catholicity of what they could represent this way was the root of the Pythagorean fascination with number systems themselves. (Certainly Alfred Jensen is the only visual artist alive today who would paint the words "All the original 9 numerals with the addition of a place-value-component, which was not itself a numeral" onto a canvas containing ten number grids, and then interpret the resulting sums in lunations.1) The Pythagoreans weren't alone in this kind of thing; here is an early Chinese sample. "Heaven is 1, Earth is 2, Man is 3. 3 x 3 makes 9. 9 x 9 makes 81. 1 governs the sun. The sun's number is 10. Therefore man is born in the tenth month of development."2 The Mayans too, in such things as their calendar-related temple architecture. And the Mesopotamians, for what is astrology but a correlative system of the shakiest kind, with nothing but post hoc ergo propter hoc, and our need to believe, to justify it? Yet there isn't one of us who isn't fascinated by the "meanings" in his own chart. (We tend to lose interest when other people want to talk about theirs.) The Crow Indian who interprets the ritual number of cupfuls of water poured on the hot stones in the sweat lodge ("They still pour the four, seven, ten and countless number of cupfuls on the red-hot stones, but many do not know what this means. The first four cupfuls are First Worker's arms and legs. They are also the four main supporting willows of the sweat lodge. The next seven are the pipe-pointer star [the Big Dipper]. The ten cupfuls represent the cluster stars, and the countless number means the Other Side Camp, where we live after we die"3) is hanging number images together arbitrarily like the anonymous English poet of "Green Grow the Rushes, O!", obeying Michael McClure's call to "Absorb all the beautiful systems."
ABSORB ALL THE BEAUTIFUL SYSTEMS
to enhance our perfect freedoms.
Enjoy the liberation of breath.
Do not fear death.
Love the children of dreams.
We move in warm streams...Michael McClure, "Up Beat," from Jaguar Skies
McClure may seem an odd man to cite, McClure who once wrote "There are no laws but living changing ones, and any system is a touch of death." Clearly "system" can mean different things. The pedantic/critical system building encouraged by the publish-or-perishers (the kind of thinking that compares Jensen with Hanne Darboven because both are preoccupied with numbers, as if this were a bright observation or as if the two preoccupations had anything in common) doesn't make for the "beautiful" systems that enhance freedom; for McClure these are found in the natural world (the way a snake sheds its skin, for example), and occasionally in more abstract orders (as in his brilliant number sestina); for Jensen they are found not only in both of these, but also in the correlative belief systems of man; handled with imagination, these are responsible for some of the most affirmative recent statements in the arts: McClure's poem on gravity, or Jensen's intuitions about the earth's spectrum which resulted, after the flight of the first astronaut, in a complex but lighthearted collage of diagrams and newspaper clippings about the event with these words added in the artist's writing: "convex picture produce a converging sense and one sees an orange edge ... concave picture produce a diverging sense and one sees a blue edge. Bravo Gagarin, I knew it to be so! 4/14/61 Al Jensen."4
The sky is pitch-black. The stars look brighter and clearer against the background. The earth is surrounded by a blue halo. It can be observed very well in the direction of the horizon. The color of the sky merges very gradually and beautifully from a delicate light-blue, through ultramarine, dark-blue, and violet, and finally into inky black.
On emerging from the shadow the sun shone through the earth's atmosphere and the halo was of a somewhat different color. At the very horizon, close to the earth's surface, it was a bright orange which then passed through all the colors of the rainbow to ultramarine, blue, violet, and black.
Yuri Gagarin, press conference at the Scientists' Club, Moscow, Sunday, April 16, 1961
What else interests Jensen? A lot, and the retrospective was especially welcome for the way it let us see how all themes, all systems, are foreshadowed and aftshadowed, interlinked in unlooked-for ways with other systems, treated from different angles and in different graphic formats from work to work across the 20 years (or "Katun"- we might as well use the vocabulary we learn from this artist) the show encompassed. The workings and observations of the prism are the subject of almost the first, and almost the last, paintings on view (A Prism's Light and Dark Spectral Color Action, 1957, Diagram for a Prism Machine, 1977). This theme is combined with the points of the compass, also a recurrent subject, in A Glorious Circle, A Story of Cosmic Color Correlation, as early as 1959, and with the protons and electrons, which will recur often in the mid-seventies, in Correspondence in Function of Magnet and Prism (1961). What else? The Lo-Shu magic square, the rectangle, solar physics ("In a school story about his family, six-year old Peter wrote, 'My father is strong and good because he paints solar energy'"5) spectral effects of the earth's motion in space (Mr. Faraday's Diagram, 1975, and from the same year the remarkable giant Spectral Timing, where the turning world reminds us of Rilke's image of our heavy planet falling through the darkness), time, and systems of time measurement, seasonal change, the calendar generally, particularly the solar year (Jensen calls it the "antediluvian" year) of 360 days, number systems including one built on 20 (vigesimal), one on 5 (quinary), color theory, temple architecture, and as has been said, correlative systems of thought, whether ancient Chinese, Mayan, Pythagorean, Babylonian, or combinations of these. This list is not exhaustive. We're confronting what Wallace Stevens calls "the never-resting mind."
You have to know all sides before you can present the diamond.
Alfred Jensen, videotape interview by Christopher Crossman
and Nancy Miller, April 6,1977
The work would be less trouble if he took his systems straight, but Jensen plays with his sources always—conquers them, subdues them, and transforms them. If he just painted the Lo-Shu diagram in his smashing array of colors (unmixed straight from the tube, usually), instead of combining it with other things to make a new creation, we could look it up in the library, say "Oh yes, I see!" and go our way feeling wise. It wouldn't be Jensen's kind of wisdom, though. Artist rather than scholar, his references are just raw material for new inventions. His approach to his sources is reverent enough—he clearly loves them—but there's no humility in the handling; he combines them and builds onto them in ways we can only call regal. There are different kinds of conqueror: the destroying kind, which Jensen isn't, the kind who settles down to colonial administration and retires to a boarding house to write his memoirs, which Jensen isn't (though I'm starting to realize that a good many artists over 30 are), and the Alexander the Great kind who imposes harmony upon the opposites of East and West by a combination of individual vision and kingly will, and single-handedly lays the groundwork for the Hellenistic world. As a painter, Alfred Jensen's task has been to find pictorial means of presenting his wide-ranging, referential, correlative, and imaginative thinking. Some fresh symbolic configurations lay ready to his hand, like the ancient Shang numbers, the Lo-Shu diagram, the geomancer's compass, lines of force—also Mayan numbers as in a beautiful work from 1973 that was regrettably not in the exhibition, The Sum of the Square of the Houses. (I called them "abstract signs" in an article in this magazine only a year ago,6 but I didn't know what they were then. We always run the risk of being wrong with Jensen.) Others had to evolve out of the diagrams he had been making for himself alone to chart his developing ideas. "I was unconsciously doing my style for ten years, but didn't know a painting could look that way." The visual format suited to his thinking which he has used as frequently and flexibly as any is the grid.
... the greatness of the Chou Pei is that at a time when astrology and divination were universally dominant, it speaks of the phenomena of the heavens and the earth without the slightest admixture of superstition.
Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 3
In Jensen's work the grid most often takes the form of a two-or-more-color checkerboard, and can never be called nonrepresentational; if it isn't an out-and-out "picture" it will be an ideogram or a demonstration of a particular process of thought. One of its most logical applications is as the architectural ground plan of a temple. A striking painting from 1962 called Athena, Hephaistos Above; Aphrodite Below, Marduk presents, in one design, four checkerboards of differing lengths and widths (the Parthenon is recognizable, being 17 x 8 squares; the Hephaesteion's 12 x 6 departs from the actual temple's 13 x 6 columns and makes it clear that the artist is involved in private arithmetical calculations awaiting a paper to be presented at a future meeting of the Jensen Society—as I've said, he's never going to take data as they are, he's always going to play around with them, and we're not always going to be able to follow; for Marduk, presumably the Esagila in Babylon, I can't find a plan that explains his grid). Number totals and the word UNITY are painted on the canvas, and, a very Jensen feature, the Athena and Aphrodite gridded ground plans are not filled in in their centres, while the Marduk and Hephaistos plans are: the opposition of male and female is never out of his consciousness. In more "abstract" gridded works like the "acroatic rectangle" paintings or the later, simpler, Study of a Rectangle, 1970 (upside down in the catalogue, by the way) the opposites of black and white, left and right, up and down, and numerical oppositions like odd and even which seem to increase in import in the seventies, can all be read as metaphors for the twoness of the sexes.
But the temple ground plan works are correlative too. It was a Mayan practice to include calendar calculation in architectural design (some temples were rebuilt at the end of each "long count" of 52 years),7 and Jensen is fascinated by combines of time measurement and space measurement, and makes considerable effort to harmonize them. 190 Columns of a Temple (1962) is not a painting, but a page of arithmetic containing notations like "30 + 30 + 130 + 210 = 400 and so completes a 400 cycle of 20 years duration." Mayan Katun (1973), also a checkerboard painting, has been mentioned, and the culminating calendar study is also a triumph of pictorial structure based on alternating 10-color diagonal checkerboards, the beautiful The Earth's North-East-South of 1974.
The Maiden: Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers? The Youth: Numbers!!! I cannot imagine anything drier or more repulsive. The Maiden: They are fascinating, just fascinating. I want to get away from our eternal dancing and music, and just sit down by myself and think about numbers.
Bernard Shaw, As Far as Thought Can Reach, from Back to Methuselah
Beautiful and puzzling. Mayan Katun, which tells us "72 years of Solar Time = 25,920 Days = a Mayan Katun," applies a numerical ratio of 18/5 to the actual Katun, a ratio that obviously has real meaning for Jensen, since it reappears here: the year gridded in The Earth's North-East-South contains 1,296 squares (36 times 36, though arranged on grids of 9 x 18 and 9 x 9) which is 18/5 of 360, the days in a solar year. It is also 360% of 360: the painting is some kind of attempt to harmonize decimal and nondecimal systems of time and space measurement. If we divide the year into 100 equal arbitrary units, and then multiply such a unit by the actual number of days in a year, 360, the result will be 1,296 days. But why should we do this?
Maybe the reader to whom it is obvious will have the kindness to write. Meanwhile I'll hazard that it may be an extension of the "stems and branches" way of measuring time by multiples of 10 and multiples of 12 together; the two multiples coincide at 60 and multiples of 60.8 With cycles of two other numbers the points of coincidence would be different, but only a lot of trial and error calculating would prove this guess right or wrong. That something cyclical is involved is almost certain—recurrence in the course of endless change, for which the turning year is the commonest metaphor and the circle shape the most universal visual symbol. If stems and branches don't apply here (they do preoccupy Jensen elsewhere without doubt), we can rest, in this predawn of Jensen scholarship, in Loren Eiseley's dream-certainty that the counting matters.
At the end of a poetry reading in the early fifties, a girl in the audience asked Edith Sitwell, "But, Dame Edith, how can we understand your poems?" Relishing the moment, Dame Edith inclined her turban and answered resonantly, "Read them, my dear, read them." The question always has a right to be asked, though. No art of any value is beyond the reach of understanding. Jensen's work is harder to figure out than most, but only because it requires us to know more than we do, not because it tries to hide anything.
I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane and solid figures which are formed out of them by turning lathes and rulers and measures of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other works of art, but they are eternally and abstractly beautiful.
Plato, Philebus
Is it possible to consider it strictly pictorially? Yes, though we miss a lot if we do. It is what most reviewers have done up to now. Sensually, Jensen is pretty easy. His color may have its roots in Goethe's Farbenlehre and be arranged according to number, but it hits us at gut-level. Do you remember being so young you chose ice cream flavors by their color? When which came next in the roll of Lifesavers was a crucial issue? That's what Jensen's color is like. Massed together in Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, there was a wham-bam-alacazam look to the show that made it seem to give out energy, not just depict it. The artist thinks long and deeply, then presents it as boldly and handsomely as he knows how. People should be warned against judging his paintings from color photographs. Jensen's paint surface is rough and thick,9 reflecting light from all different directions, and the flat, slick, picture-postcard look of color photos does the originals considerable injustice. (In all of Chicago I saw only one artist's work with a thicker, richer surface—Hans Hofmann, in a painting in the Art Institute called Burst Into Life, 1952. Hofmann much earlier had been for a while Jensen's teacher.10) The ocean with the sun on it, omniplanar and reflecting light in thousands of little glints, which also don't show up well in photographs, is the closest parallel to Jensen's surface.
Even the checkerboard paintings are more sensual than they sound. The nearly innumerable bright small squares that make up Reciprocal Relation (1969) are globbed thickly onto the canvas and then seemingly punched in the centre, maybe with the wooden end of the brush, to make each a little crater. It's as if a Hellenistic coffered ceiling, jubilantly colored by some Minoan painter's ghost, were hung sideways for us to see better. A group show called "Grids: Format and Image in Twentieth Century Art" was recently mounted at the Pace Gallery in New York, and the Village Voice, recommending it, couldn't resist adding, "It's all very anal compulsive." Journalists say this kind of thing to save the trouble of thinking. Inept this time, for any exhibition containing a Jensen color-grid painting from the "Aperspective Nature of the Square" series has to be at least partly oral expressive, if that's the right phrase. Or, to talk something closer to sense, the paintings are physically immediate rather than distant. Jensen wants to present a square, a number, a spectrum, a thought process that will appeal to our senses and feelings exactly the same way a landscapist wants a tree, a field, a seashore to reach our senses and feelings, the way the ancient wanted to paint cherries so that birds would try to peck them from the wall.
When the Pythagoreans were obliged to take an oath, they would say: "By him who revealed the Tetractys, Fountain of Eternal Nature, I speak the truth." By "Him" they referred to Pythagoras. The Tetractys, or Four, was depicted symbolically by ten points arranged in the form of a triangle.... The Monad stood for Harmony and the Dyad represented the boundless Aether. The Triad was a symbol for the atoms and the Tetrad referred to the nature of Number. Taken together they became the Decad, a name they gave to the universe and everything within it.
Leslie Ralph, Pythagoras
As for form, this tends to be so directly related to content that if we see even a glimmer of what a painting is about we find we also like the look of it. A huge, elaborate work that was not in the show, A Quadrilateral Oriented Vision (1960), is disturbing in the photo in the catalogue because the various parts seem to conflict, but I know this is only because (1) I haven't seen it in color and (2) I'm unsure of the ideas behind it. In one of the more readable reviews of Jensen's work so far, Peter Schjeldahl took the opposite view, praising "their success as modern abstract paintings, scarcely needing the prop of comparison to, say, Hindu yantras or Moorish mosaics, let alone a concordance of old lore. Jensen is, simply, a painter of wonderful skill and intensity."11 But this is taking the easy way out.
With every constellation and every musical note characterized by a number, the study of the heavens and of sound would suggest by analogy the establishment of a number theory extending to ethics and religion. From trade to liturgy through astronomy and acoustics, man's interests would be linked together by the power of number. Merged into the things perceived by the senses as well as the higher values of life and destiny, numbers must have appeared to Pythagoras as more universal than any other human conception. Stripped of the accidents identifying them with specific objects, or even with the astrological chart of any person, numbers could be taken as the real constituents the very nature of the world. Thus Pythagoras was led to declare that number is the essence of things.
Edward A. Maziarz and Thomas Greenwood, Greek Mathematical Philosophy
It's also clouding the issue. Schjeldahl pretends that Jensen's referents are merely metaphorical, so that we have the choice of considering them or not. A Jensen painting isn't comparable to ancient lore, its subject is ancient lore. To pretend otherwise is like saying "Vermeer's The Lace Maker is so successful as a composition of light and color that it scarcely needs the prop of comparison to other Vermeers or other Dutch painting, let alone to a young woman doing something intricate with her hands." Jensen in a way is just as representational as Vermeer is. We just aren't so familiar with his referents.
And these, though we don't find them on the front page of the daily paper, are not truly obscure. Or maybe it's better to say they aren't any more obscure than much of the best art of the past. We often have to do our homework there too. In the Chicago Art Institute (for me forever haunted by the shade of Charles Laughren, who maintained that the best viewing angle for La Grande Jatte was from the floor; astonished visitors, it is said, would find him sitting on the marble for quarter hours at a time) I saw an El Greco I didn't know, Christ in the House of Simon. Jesus and the disciples were clear enough, and the older, slightly sleazy man was presumably their host; but the good-looking woman in the if-you've-got-it-flaunt-it gown—too young for Simon's wife—who was she? Christ's sympathetic yet intense expression—what was he saying? What was the point? The Gideons don't seem to leave Bibles in hotel rooms any more; I had to wait till I got home to find out. But no one calls El Greco an obscure painter on this account. We shouldn't complain about present-day art that imposes a task on us that we perform willingly for the art of the past. An example from a different discipline, requiring even more specialized theological knowledge, is the violin solo in the Missa Solemnis. No one can fail to find it beautiful, but if we aren't Catholics we may have no notion why it comes just there. Even Protestant Christians will be more than hazy about the import of the elevation of the host, which this solo accompanies. Is it important that we know? Yes, it's knowledge Beethoven could count on in the Catholic Austrians for whom he wrote; he expects us to know exactly what he's doing, and the extraordinary nature of the risk he's taking. Music for a miracle, the moment of transubstantiation, the actual physical presence of God—to listen just to violin-playing is to create our own loss. No one with or without knowledge of this reference blames Beethoven for being obscure here, though. Nor should we carp at Alfred Jensen's "obscurity" if we say in the next breath that The Waste Land is one of our favorite poems. Eliot is apropos in a discussion of Jensen with his dead-on phrase about the work of art as "a lemon to be squeezed until the juice of meaning runs."
Und in die Nachten fallt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.Rilke, "Herbst"
Also, Jensen's references are to such interesting stuff. We're all glad to garner some new lore, it's actually one of the attractive things about works of art: they're a more painless place to pick up random information than the lecture hall. Here is a couplet by Auden; we like it for the poignant fact in it, not for anything poetically astonishing:
After Krakatoa exploded, the first living thing to return
Was the ant, Tridomyrex, seeking in vain its symbiot fern.
Even a yarn in the modern ironic-fantasy manner, Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is full of interpolated bits like "The normal rectal temperature of the hummingbird is 104.6" which for all I know may even be true.12 What it's like to work on a nineteenth-century A.D. whaling ship or a twelfth-century B.C. sailing ship are not why we read Moby Dick or the Odyssey, but we're glad of every bit of data all the same. It isn't elitist for a work of art to teach us something we didn't know before, as long as it isn't thrown in to impress us; as long, that is, as it's something that honestly interests the artist so much he doesn't have the choice of leaving it out.
THIS IS ONE
and two,
then rosy three.
I know four
and sweet black five
and swanlike six.Yet another six.
A new one.
The hand's shape makes five.
(Ten is that times two.)
What is this four?
The next is stanza three.This is three.
Times two it is six.
I am for
all being one
but it is nothing, too.
Zero plus fingers is five.Right before the swan is five.
And minus three
leaves two
(one-third of six).
All being one
is something I am for.Thoughts move at our bodies' fore
in this stanza, five.
The muscles have won
the charge past three
toward swans of six
we're moving to ...We have become two
in trails of what we're searching for...
Swan silhouettes of six
flutter on past five.
Their sounds are like three
symbionts moving into one.A cell moves to meat five
before the rosy three
divides to six and halves again
to make one.Michael McClure, "Sestina of Numbers," from Jaguar Skies
Since "abstract" is loosely used to mean nonrepresentational in general (this is obviously how Schjeldahl uses it), and since all of Jensen's work is not only about something, but seeks to communicate rather than to obscure its subject and its processes, we can question the aptness of the word when applied to him. There aren't any doves or a tree in the fall (there were, in the retrospective, some "representational" horse-and-rider shapes from the Parthenon frieze, color-gridded in checkerboards, which I could only see as a divertimento though most of the public seemed to like them best13) , but a temple platform plan or a geomancer's compass are equally "subjects." Possibly even a repeated pattern which grows numerically in color components from left to right is too describable a process to be called abstract, to make purely visual sense when its sense is also numerical, and the shape of the pattern is, again, a ground plan. This painting, Taj Mahal (1975), Marcia Tucker calls "the closest Jensen comes to making a completely decorative painting," and it isn't too close.
I find in the square specific settings, divisible areas, number structures, possibilities of time, measure and rhythm as well as the essential form of color which can be placed in the square to interplay with number forms.
Alfred Jensen, "Explanations for a Friend and Artist,"
in Alfred Jensen: The Aperspective Structure of a Square
For a more precise use of "abstract," I can recall a time when art students were told to take their sketch blocks to a "real" subject, a bridge, say, and draw it over and over until there was nothing left but pictorial form, not recognizable as a bridge except to those in the know. This was making an abstract in the dictionary sense. But if your real subject is the Pythagorean tetractys and you paint a canvas full of them and conjoin them with other forms and ideas as well, you haven't abstracted, you've done the reverse and fleshed out an abstraction. I don't know a word for this, perhaps the Jensen Society will have to coin one.
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate
Alfred Jensen has had an interesting life, and a publisher would be wise to ask him to tape an autobiography. It's unlikely that he would want to take the time away from painting to write one down. Born in Guatemala of a Danish father and a Polish-German mother, as a young man he traveled widely, working as a seaman and a rancher, began to study art seriously in San Diego in 1924, went to Europe to work under Hans Hofmann in Munich and Charles Dufresne in Paris, among others, and in 1927 met the American art collector Mrs. Saidie Adler May, with whom he lived and traveled until her death in 1951. She was forming a collection which was eventually to go to the Baltimore Museum of Art, buying directly from artists where possible, which gained Jensen entry to the studios of Matisse, Giacometti, Miró, and others, and the acquaintance of people like Etta Cone, of whom his reminiscences would surely be worth preserving. In the fifties Jensen settled in New York, and though he never stayed long with one gallery he gradually gained a reputation among artists and a few collectors like Henry Luce III. Rothko and Sam Francis were friends. In the sixties, while his work was being seen more widely and regularly both in the United States and Europe, he married and became a father for the first time.
A great fortune, to have lived through the second half of the past century
A great advantage, to have lived at the time of the great inventionsGoethe, Notes for Naturwissenschaftliche Entwicklungsgang, 1821
The seventies have seen continuing growth in critical awareness and appreciation, culminating in the work being sent to the São Paulo Bienial and touring America in this 20-year retrospective. Criticism worth reading is still rare, though it includes Don Judd's 1963 review ("Jensen is great. He is one of the best painters in the United States.") which looked directly at the works and observed that they are "thoroughly flat, are completely patterns. Jensen's paintings are not radical inventions but this aspect is. There are no other paintings completely without space."14 I've tried to suggest that the missing third dimension is the referent, and it is always there: it is we who are two-dimensional if we persist in thinking only pictorially. The other essential reading on the artist so far is Marcia Tucker's catalogue essay for this 1978 retrospective. She is in line with present-day prejudices, going out of her way to align the artist with myth rather than with the search for truth, new and old, and she leans too heavily on Cassirer when she needs someone to cite; but she has faced the work head on (you have to extend yourself to write adequately about Jensen, he gives you no choice), and though not any more precise about his processes than she has to be, she has come up with some excellent generalizing, of which it is a pleasure to quote: "Jensen's amalgamation of so many kinds of information from disparate and arcane sources, his life-long attempt to combine and unify them in a single pictorial system, and the origination of this work in profound personal conviction and feeling, constitute an attempt to infuse each work of art with all the knowledge and feeling available in the world."
I respond to the sensibility of my epoch. I don't predict things - the artist's message is faith in his own epoch. The artist is the predecessor to actual events and discoveries. I don't want results. I want the road ... the way . . . the Tao, whatever you call it. That is the presence I want in my painting.
Alfred Jensen, Crossman-Miller videotape
It's easier to be general than specific all the same, and Tucker's refusal to admit that anything puzzles her, and her unwillingness to go to Jensen's own sources—among her 77 footnotes there are 40 references to Cassirer and none to Needham or de Groot!—make us hope that she will someday be given the time to do a study that goes deeper into the exact and formidable processes of Jensen's ratiocination than an introductory essay, which is obliged to cover all the ground however lightly, is able to do. If I quibble with her at all it is with respect and out of a shared love for our subject, the spirit in which I hope later writers on Jensen will quibble with me.
I slept as the temple slept in the timeless Caribbean sun. This was what it meant then, the counting: the dots and bars on the great stelae. The wisdom could take care of itself. It was beyond me. It was beyond every man. But for all that the counting mattered.
Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours
The rest of the crop so far is not all very flattering to the art of criticism. "In his own words, Jensen is a mystic."15 "I agree with Jensen that he isn't a Mystic."16 "Essentially, Jensen is a naive painter."17 "Jensen is a rogue Conceptualist."18 "the appearance of primitive op art."19 "the richness of oriental rugs."20 "they look like hooked rag rugs."21 With his love of black/white, earth/heaven, male/female, odd/even oppositions, Jensen may be entertained by these contradictions, but those of us who remember Orwell's two imaginary art critics ("The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality" ... "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness."22) may feel a twinge of shame for our profession. We may have Jensen's own comment on his critics in the magnificent A Divine Mission (1976)—Confucius' humorous despair at the lack of a sage in his own time, or the lack of recognition of his own sagacity, may be the painter's also.
The supreme benefit for which sight is responsible is that not a word of all we have said about the universe could have been said if we had not seen stars and sun and heaven. As it is, the sight of day and night, the months and returning years, the equinoxes and solstices, have caused the invention of number, given us the notion of time, and made us inquire into the nature of the universe; thence we have derived philosophy, the greatest gift the gods have ever given or will give to mortals.
Plato, Timaeus
I've imagined a Jensen Society to give this artist his due since most of us as individuals are too specialized, too limited, to do it alone. Artists, supposedly freer to choose and less at the mercy of the labor market, have also played an increasingly specialized game. "A is into zeppelins," "B is into dots this year (big breakthrough!)," "C is still exclusively preoccupied with formal problems." In the end it does make a difference what subject matter you choose. Campbell's soup, punk rock, or politics; where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Jensen's strictures on specialization ("...it leads to self-destruction, through the atom bomb and so on"23) apply to us all. He has managed to avoid that wrong turning we all took, away from the Renaissance we are fated to miss forever, away from the eighteenth century of Voltaire, Diderot, Burgoyne, Jefferson, and especially of Goethe, where it's still possible to pursue anything that intrigues us as far as we can go. His breadth is part and parcel of his art. In an era of unimaginative pessimism he finds new things to fascinate him continually, as well as new ways of putting old information together. Like Goethe in his day and Cardano in his, he is glad to be alive in his own time, and says so in his work. There are a few people one is grateful to be sharing the world with, and Alfred Jensen is one of them.
We are here!
We are here!
Absorb the beautiful systems.
We move in warm streams
we're cousins of eagles and deer
and the flesh that we wear
is our dress.
Heartbeats in the ocean of stress.
Love the children of dreams.
Love the children of dreams.
Absorb the beautiful systems.Michael McClure, "Up Beat," from Jaguar Skies
"Per" means "panel" and is a term used by Jensen consistently.
...called the Lo-Shu diagram, or the Lo Writing, which according to one tradition was given to the Emperor Yu by a turtle from the River Lo. The "magic" of the square is that all columns—horizontal, vertical, or diagonal—add up to 15. Therefore the "equivalent squares of value 5" in the title refers to the average value of each square.
Also from ancient Chinese mathematical sources is the diagonal grid superimposed on the square grid in the second panel, which is an early demonstration of what in the West is called the Pythagorean Relation ("the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides"), as it appears in the Chou Pei Suan Ching (Han period).
The two ideas are unrelated except that each employs the square grid; the construction of a sequence which joins the two is therefore the artist's idea, as is the circle around the tilted square grid in the first panel which becomes progressively more dominant; blue in all five panels and not even complete in the first, it dominates in the last like the earth's penumbra seen from space.i
The number arrangement in the panels other than the fourth are built on the same pattern as the Lo-Shu although none is a magic square in the same degree. Only in the first panel do all vertical and horizontal columns add up to exactly the same number (45), and even there the diagonals do not. In the second panel only the sums of the vertical columns are equal (35), and in the third panel one column equals 23, one 27, and three 25, both vertically and horizontally, so that the average value of 5 per square can only be determined when all columns are added together.
That Earth is square and Heaven is circular is also an early Chinese belief.
The colors are consistent with the numbers in their squares throughout the
painting (that is all 8's [
's]
are yellow, all 9's [
's]
are blue, et cetera), except for 5 (
),
which occurs so frequently that two alternating colors are assigned to it.
The title refers to the number abstraction of Pythagoras: 10 as the sum of 1, 2, 3, and 4.
The "ground" is a grid of free-shaped triangles, alternately white on black and black on white except in the rows where the painting's three panels adjoin. Their loosely controlled, bear-paw shapes are obviously intended to contrast with the regularity of the squares making up the inner, colored "figures."
These latter are also figure-ground structures in themselves: 4-color (red, orange, blue and purple) areas in a number of variegated patterns are contrasted with 2-color areas (green and black in alternating squares, checkerboard style).
The figures suggest the architecture of the ziggurat or of the step pyramid of the New World: seen in elevation in the central, four-part shape, and in top view or ground plan in the outer figures, the right of which is twice the width of the left.ii
The area relationships are built on square numbers. Reading from the centre outward of the figure on the left, the numbers of individual squares contained in each color-combination area are 6, 24, .54, 96, 150, and 216. Taking 6 as the basic unit, it is x 1, x 4, x 9, x 16, x 25, and x 36, in other words 12, 22, 32, 42, 52, and 62. This is the same in the right figure, except that there the basic number is 12.
The square number relationship is also found in the central figure, whose top element (the apex of the tetractys) alternates the two color combinations in areas of 3, 12, 27, and 48 squares, reading from the bottom up, or 12, 22, 32, and 42 of the number 3. The remaining parts of this central figure are simply 2, 3, and 4 times the top element. The alternating left- and right-facing pattern of these four sections may refer to brickwork or stonework patterns of China or Central America.iii
This is the right half of a diptych.
Among the sources combined freely by the artist here are the sundial, the planisphere, and the ancient geomancer's compass. The "pole-pointing gnomon"iv refers to the earliest known device for measuring solar time (it goes back to ca. 3500 B.C.), a stick or pillar the length of whose shadow indicates calendar time or the time of day. "Everything depends on whether the gnomon was placed vertically, pointing towards the zenith, or whether it was inclined at an angle depending on the latitude, and pointing at the celestial pole [as in the sundial]—only in the latter case are measurements of equal time possible."v
The radiating white lines dividing each quarter into 24 parts are found in early examples of the geomancer's compass,vi a correlative divining device originally for choosing favorable tomb sites and house sites, among other purposes, taking into account topographical, seasonal, and climatological factors, which was the ancestor of the navigator's magnetic compass. As explained in De Groot, these divisions symbolize the stems and branches (12 and 10) and the four cardinal points, the two missing divisions forming this total being assumed to form the centre of the circle. The lines separating these divisions are numbered from 1 to 23 in each quarter of the outer rim.
Outward from the abbreviated names of the months are fourteen numbers in each quarter, 1 to 14 twice and 15 to 28 twice. These are the hsiu, the Chinese divisions of the zodiac, twenty-eight "houses" instead of our twelve. Where we see six houses in the sky at any given time of year, they therefore saw fourteen. "These constellations very likely represent the most ancient divisions of the Chinese sphere." (De Groot)
Outside the larger (white) square are the 64 hexagrams (kua) of the I Ching, with their own richly correlated symbolism. The four colors in the outer rim may also refer to early Chinese astronomy, which divided the sky into four seasonal quadrants: Blue Dragon (Spring), Red Bird (Summer), White Tiger (Autumn), and Black Tortoise (Winter), though Jensen, perhaps following other sources, varies these somewhat.
The squares of the grids in the corners of the picture (actually the same grid turned right 90° each time) that are tangential to the large circle contain the initials (in English) of the four compass points, and the upper left division between quadrants is labeled CELESTIAL POLE in black. On the line running from lower left to upper right is written EQUATORIAL COORDINATES in white. The inner square is labeled TIME INDICATOR in black.
The central sphere in the geomancer's compass is the earth, which sits inside the celestial sphere "like the yolk within the egg" according to the Hun I Chu (Commentary on the Armillary Sphere) of Chang Hêng, 1st century A.D.vii
Jensen's characteristic impastoed surface can be seen in this photograph.
Another painting using the gridded Lo-Shu diagram, which is here made a component of a larger additive grid based on number totals. The length of the progression is determined by the sum of the numbers in a single Lo-Shu column (15), combined with another consideration in Jensen's familiar fashion—this time, the need to put the number 360 in the centre of the total design. 360 could be called the central number in Jensen's work altogether, the number of days in a solar year and a key number in all cultures (witness the 360 degrees in our circle); in China it was applied correlatively to many aspects of life other than time or measurement: there were 360 kinds of each of the five types of animal, for example.
It was an ancient practice, which Jensen observes throughout his extensions Of the original diagram, to write the odd ("heavenly") numbers of the Lo-Shu in white, the even ("earthly") in black.
The
colors of the squares are keyed to odd or even as well, six colors being
allotted to each. Only six different color grids are used in this painting,
some repeated once, some twice:
so although the painted numbers are in an ongoing order there is a symmetrical, closed form to the picture as well.
Notice also the repeating, alternating order of odd and even number patterns:
Odd and even are another fundamental opposition basic to Jensen's work, like yang and yin, male and female, earth and heaven, which will be "reconciled" in A Divine Mission (see p. 48).
The trigrams from the I Ching signify (clockwise from top left):
Ch'ien,
male, heaven, father, metal, king, deep red, head, donator
Sun,
female, wind, eldest daughter, wood, merchants, white, car, penetration-mildness-continuous
operation
Chen,
male, thunder, eldest son, wood, young men, dark yellow, foot, stimulation-excitation
K'un,
female tale, earth, mother, earth (the element), people, black, abdomen,
receptor. This painting is a study, like many by Jensen, of the harmony of
opposites.ix
The diagonal checkerboards filled with protons and electrons are in alternating colors in each row, the colors of the row on the outermost edge in the left half being the colors of the innermost row on the right half so a total contrast is created between left and right, inner and outer.
The only rows of unalternating color are the vertical rows of black (Alfred) or white (Regina), which appear in the checkerboards on the right (Anna and Peter), but horizontal, so that north, south, cast and west are all represented in one family. The colors of the squares in the grids are the same for the two males and for the two females, though again pointing in different directions. The ground of the painting is the same rich red as in Solar Energy Optics. The written words, and the trigrams, are white for male and black for female, which is traditional in China. The picture thus shows four related individuals, each with his own direction and essence, giving and receiving energy from one another.
Each row in the grids is thirteen squares long, but since the corner-to-corner row crosses them all with another element, there are only twelve squares that "belong together" in each row. So 12 and 13, an odd and an even number, are contrasted within each single row.
The artist calls this painting "a side trip into the dualities, as Faraday saw the physical realities of positive and negative electricity, so the everyday life is the positive and negative actions of the family, the father and son and the mother and daughter." Elsewhere he says, not referring specifically to this work, "I am still attentive to the revelations of the four corner edges of a square and the rectangular picture plane."
Among the extraordinary, though quite natural circumstances of my life, the first and most unusual is that I was born in this century in which the whole world became known... (and) what is more amazing than pyrotechnics? Or than the fiery bolts man has invented so much more destructive than the lightning of the gods? ... Nor of thee, O Great Compass, will I be silent, for thou dost guide us over boundless seas ... The fourth marvel is the invention of the typographical art, a work of man's hands, and the discovery of his wit—a rival, forsooth, of the wonders brought by divine intelligence.
Girolamo Cardano, The Book of My Life, 1576
ALFRED JENSEN Solar Energy Optics,
1975 oil on canvas, 86" x 153" viii
ALFRED JENSEN A Divine Mission,
1976 oil on canvas, 86" x 204"
[Goethe implied] that science or, rather, the life of the scientist was creative, too, and that the impulse working in him and especially the impulse to understand the relation of the parts to the whole in living things, the ruling impulse in Goethe's conception of science, was indistinguishable from the artistic impulse—Wie nah dieses wissenschaftliche Verlangen mit dem Kunst—und Nachahmungstriebe zusammenhänge, braucht wohl nicht urnständlich ausgeführt zu werden. This was obviously what he meant when he said in his Geschichte der Farbenlehre that we were compelled to think of science as an art, if we expected any sort of totality from it—so müssen wir uns die Wissenschaft notwendig als Kunst denken, wenn wir von ihr irgend eine Art von Ganzheit erwarten.
Barker Fairley, A Study of Goethe
Group E at Uaxactun has a pyramid facing east. Across the court, three temples stand upon a narrow north-south terrace. From the pyramid stairs the rising sun emerged over the northernmost temple on the equinox (21 March, 21 September) and over the southern temple on the December solstice. Such arrangements obeyed celestial relationships, and they reflected the order of the cosmos in the spatial design of the little courtyards surrounded by platforms and temples, keyed together by astronomical sight-lines.
George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America
As formulated by d'Alembert, the philosophy of science involved a distinction not easy to define clearly and maintain firmly: on the one hand, an avoidance of the "spirit of system"; on the other, a welcome of "the true system of the world" revealed by science and an extension of the revolutionary "new method of philosophizing" into all fields of thought.
Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Western World
Review of the Dia Center show Alfred Jensen: Concordance in the Brooklyn Rail by Chris Martin.
Born in 1903, Jensen belongs to the heroic generation of Barnett Newman (1905-1970), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Myron Stout (1908-1986) and Forrest Bess (1911-1977). Jensen is one of the greatest abstract painters of his or any other generation. It's a continuing mystery as to why he has never received anything like the attention he deserves. Now fourteen large paintings are on view at the Dia Foundation on west 22nd street until June of 2002, and an exhibit of smaller paintings is at Max Protetch Gallery November 13 to December 22nd. Do not miss these shows.
Alfred Jensen was an eccentric citizen of the world who had traveled everywhere, spoke five languages and personally knew many of the giants of modernism. He studied with Hans Hofmann in Germany and Despiau and Dufresne in France, had a studio upstairs from Mondrian in Paris, was friends with Dubuffet, Rothko, Miro, Duchamp, Breton, and Allan Kaprow. He was a Byzantine primitive, an anonymous Peruvian carpet maker, an Egyptian high priest, a Chinese sage, a crazy autodidact living in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
Actually, to call Alfred Jensen an abstract painter is misleading, because the paintings are so concrete. They don't just illustrate or describe ideas; they contain a tremendous amount of concrete information. The paintings may allude to a complex web of ideas, but they are almost absurdly specific. Nothing in these paintings is anything other than itself.
The mature paintings are flat patterns mapping a wide range of numerical and philosophical systems. Each square inch of the paintings is carefully plotted out and composed. Many paintings are actually covered with numbers including Arabic, Mayan, Chinese, and other ancient counting systems. Some paintings include symbols from the I-Ching, Mayan calendars, and scientific diagrams. Other paintings are completely abstract, subtle checkerboards structured with eccentric but absolutely particular logic. Many paintings include written notations, headings, titles, and quotations in large, loopy script. The paintings are dense, condensed and impacted with ideas, theories, symbols, and grand schemes.
They are painted with pure color oil paint squeezed straight out of the tube and spread over the surface with a palette knife. The paint is presented as actual colored dirt sitting on the surface. Jensen is never asking the paint to be something other than itself, like a nose, or the sky, or deep space, or atmosphere, or almost any kind of space. Jensen lays on the paint like a Byzantine artist setting mosaic tiles. Each square inch of paint is dabbed on thickly and the light glistens and bounces off the paint, revealing each tiny section distinctly and separately.
Jensen knew everyone, but remained alone, an outsider in the middle of the art world. He avoided attachments to any school or movement. He developed later as a mature artist than his contemporaries the Abstract Expressionists and was never fully accepted by many of them. He was a major influence on some conceptual and minimal artists, but declined to be included in their pivotal group shows in the early 1960's. He has been pigeonholed as a bridge between generations, as a "mystic," an eccentric, a difficult artist.
Why exactly is Jensen considered such a difficult artist? Because we feel that we are supposed to understand the complex and sometimes arcane traditions and logics underlying the paintings; we are supposed to think, and that is a burden. Perhaps we feel guilty just to sit back and look at the work and enjoy its eye popping color rhythms. Peter Schjeldahl, in his brilliant essay Jensen's Difficulty, calls it a pure difficulty, "The ultimate coherence, if any, of Jensen's teeming systems has eluded his most informed and patient students. This is not to say that studying those systems is pointless: pleasure and instruction reward any effort to understand Jensen, and great pleasure and instruction reward a great effort."1
I personally find myself drawn into the structure of the paintings, counting little color squares or following odd and even numbers along with the artist. Watching the paintings for any length of time I am aware of watching myself think as the mind courses along numbered pathways and around arcane symbols. Jensen paintings are not intellectual puzzles which need to be solved, and which, once solved, can then be digested or forgotten about. Their ideas reward one's interest, as Schjeldahl points out, but their deeper significance and pleasure are more complex, or perhaps much more simple than that.
The paintings literally blaze. The first time I walked into the Dia show and caught sight of the colors, I found myself saying "Holy Shit!" out loud. Jensen's color light is so fierce that it is almost abrasive. It seems so impersonal, yet a Jensen painting can be recognized a block away. This color light is intense not just because the paint is squeezed right out of the tube. Would that it were so easy! No, the light emerges as a result of the specific ordering of thought in mind. Jensen plugs his color theory into the rhythms of all these systems—counting systems, calendars, magic squares, temple proportions—and the result is light. Jensen is never putting a blue in the corner because he thinks it will look good. Color is never wielded as a matter of taste. If a section is colored blue, it's because that is its necessary placement as part of a larger conceptual reality. Jensen's light is the light of truth—not taste.
Jensen's story is incredible. Born and raised in Guatemala and nursed by Mayan Indian women, he is sent back to Denmark upon the death of his mother, at age seven, and at fourteen he ran away to sea and wandered the globe. He returned to Guatemala to run a chicken farm, and at age twenty he began studying painting in California and then Germany and France. In the twenties and thirties, he traveled with his patron and companion Sadie May, collecting art from the major artists of the day. He lived in New York in the forties and fifties, and finally, at age 54, he found his own voice as an artist; from then on the paintings poured from him one after another.
Mark Rothko stated that a major influence on his formal development was the childhood memory of huge rectangles in the earth—the mass graves of Jewish victims of Russian pogroms. Jensen stated that a major influence on his development was the childhood memory of his mother's orange coffin lowered into the earthen rectangle of her grave in Germany, the four silver angels at each corner of the coffin pointing in the four cardinal directions.
Jensen approached Rothko at the opening of the Fifteen Americans show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. They formed a close friendship, visiting each other's studios and exchanging criticisms. Five years later, in 1957, it was Rothko who encouraged Jensen to let go of his more derivative Abstract Expressionist work, and start painting the diagrams and notes that he had pinned up everywhere in his studio. "I got rid of my expressionist paintings entirely," Jensen states, "and became a diagram painter—that's the way it happened. I developed my study into a style. I considered these researches as studies. I had unconsciously done my style for ten years without using it."2
Jensen's paintings from the mid fifties on have the extraordinary quality of authentic revelation. Jensen knows he is breaking through to a deeper artistic identity. Squeezing the color directly onto the plotted forms, Jensen understands that he can paint the idea directly now—that paint is at the service of mind—that paint can be light. One is reminded of Paul Klee's famous statement from his diaries in North Africa in 1914, "Color and I are One, I am a painter."3
In his essay In Pursuit of the Invisible, John Yau writes,
"He understands light's non-material existence and paint's palpable presence to be interchangeable, that each can be transformed into the other. This understanding is for him visible evidence of one of the great, constant problems of metaphysics. He explains the invisible world in terms of the relationship of number and color, a most ambitious and ambiguous theory whose proof exists in this very painting, the accuracy of which, I might add, is not as important as the passion with which it was advanced."4
Polarities and dualities: Jensen understands that all life emerges from great dualities. He opposes White and Black, and sets complementary colors against each other, uses magnetic opposites, divides above and below. Forms are mirrored, repeated, and transposed. Paintings are organized according to positive or negative, female or male, hot or cold, warm and cool, unity and multiplicity, circle and square.
Jensen himself was a man of great dualities. He was an outsider who knew everyone. A school dropout at age 14 who became a tremendous autodidact, the most well read man in the art world. He was a lifelong connoisseur of painting (he spent years copying old masters in the Prado in Madrid), yet his mature work is described as "primitive" and "without taste". Jensen's paintings are considered on the one hand to be rigorous, difficult, conceptually complex, yet their physical presence is exuberant and shockingly direct, with crudely slathered on paint and childlike script.
In 1995, traveling with a friend in Ajiic, Mexico, I woke up in a living room painted by Mayan Indians. It was like waking up inside a Jensen painting. The ceiling was an intense blue-green, the eastern wall was a deep red, the western was black. To my right, the southern wall was bright yellow, and opposite that the northern wall was white. The owners of the house explained to us the ancient Maya mapped the four cardinal directions and the center with specific colors. Everything in the Maya universe was assigned to this sacred diamond.
Jensen's paintings are not illustrations of "mystical" ideas. He does not simply copy diagrams, the way in 1955 Jasper Johns "copied" the American flag. Nor is Jensen interested in the flatness or simple geometric properties of his paintings for their own sake, the way Frank Stella celebrated flatness and dumb design in his Black Paintings of 1959. (The interest in flatness for its own sake, championed by Clement Greenberg and many others, led to a vast desert of empty tasteful abstractions.) Jensen is actually figuring out his ideas in the process of diagramming them. He is capturing the essence of all these fantastic ideas, and his crude geometry of mapping is a transparent means to an end, never a formalist dead end.
The paintings blaze. The first time I walked into the Dia show I heard myself saying "Holy Shit!" out loud. The second time I walked into the Dia show and glanced at the paintings, I found myself saying "Holy Shit!" out loud. In fact this is not an inaccurate description of the work. Paint—colored dirt, actual stuff, just some 'shit'—has been transformed into light. The gross matter of paint turned into immaterial timeless presence.
Jensen read Goethe's Farbenlehre, his work on color theory, more than twenty times in the original German. Like Goethe, Jensen saw the metaphysical light inside of hard science. Matthew Deleget, in his unpublished thesis Alfred Jensen—Sacred Geometer, notes, "Goethe...needed nearly thirty years to research and write his book Farbenlehre and Jensen similarly spent the majority of his thirty years in New York continually researching new cultures and systems of information that he encountered."5
Much of what Jensen is doing seems to involve correlating different systems. Maria Reidelbach, in her essay Reading Alfred Jensen, defines this as Isomorphism, "the mapping of one system of symbols over another so that the structures of each system correspond."6 Jensen overlaps counting systems, for instance, with color ideas about oppositions and odd and even. Some colors are feminine, some colors are odd or even, black or white. In a similar way, Forrest Bess began assigning distinct meanings—masculine and feminine—to the different colors, lines, and forms that he was seeing inside his own eyelids. Bess believed that he was recovering archaic constants through his own unconscious. Jensen recovers universal truths through his own unconscious conjoining and combining of the archaic systems and scientific theories which obsessed him.
Jensen was omnivorous. He consumed ancient Chinese calendars, the I-Ching and magic squares, alchemy, astronomy, Mayan calendars and counting systems, Egyptian temple design, physics, Inca ruins, Greek philosophy and golden sections, Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci, Neil Armstrong, Goethe, Faraday... Jensen was wild and fancy-free in creating correlative systems. He mashes ideas together, transposes them, overlays them, cross-pollinates them, all to find common order, a deeper structure.
Ultimately these are paintings of Jensen himself in the process of thinking. Thought, filtered through the prism of Jensen's graphing process, equals light. The paintings blaze with the light of a living investigation—and it is the quality of that investigation that reveals the sacred.
Peter Schjeldahl, "Jensen's Difficulty", in Alfred Jensen Paintings and Works on Paper, (New York; Guggenheim Museum, 1985), p. 21
Alfred Jensen quoted by Linda Cathcart, in Alfred Jensen Paintings and Diagrams From the Years 1957 - 1977, (Buffalo; Albright-Knox Gallery, 1978) p.6
Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, (California; University of California Press, 1968) p. 297
John Yau, In Pursuit of the Invisible - Selections From the Collection of Janice and Mickey Cartin, p.15, 1995
Matthew Deleget, Alfred Jensen - Sacred Geometer, (unpublished manuscript, 1997) p.28
Maria Reidelbach, "Reading Alfred Jensen" in Alfred Jensen Paintings and Works on Paper, (New York; Guggenheim Museum, 1985), p. 9
Rememberance by Henry Luce III, Jensen's first major collector, after his death.
ALFRED JENSEN thought about very big ideas, and he expressed them in very loud tones. He believed in a universal order in the affairs of man, and in an eternal order in the affairs of God. He believed that scientists, political philosophers and artists would interact to identify a unity of truth. Jensen was a worldly, and yet highly spiritual, artist of his time.
His professional life began as it ended, in the presence of death. "It all began," he said, "when as a seven-year-old boy I faced death's tragic implications. My mother had died and on a sunny afternoon I stood before the orange colored oblong box ornamented with its kneeling silver angels, their praying hands each pointing toward the cardinal directions. I saw my mother's remains lowered into the darkness of the grave.... Preoccupied with my early encounter with the mystery of death, my painterly effort has centered around ... the light of life, the somberness of death, the color of art, the designated pattern of phenomenal existence."
My own twenty-three year friendship with Al Jensen began the same way, albeit figuratively. One day in 1958 I was wandering among some 57th Street galleries and at Bertha Schaefer came upon an exhibition of Jensen paintings. Their checkerboard patterns, their brilliant colors, their use of outlined images to intrude on the then all too familiar mode of pure abstractionism, made an instant impression on me. Among the many canvasses, which were smaller than his later major works, my preference settled on one, entitled "Forsaken," which in sombre brown and black checkers outlined the form of a crucified body. This image was against a background of violet, red, blue and yellow checkers, along with some white which increased proportionately from bottom to top as if to show the way clear toward resurrection in the sky. I was struck by the apparent symbolism in the colors of the emotions attendant on The Crucifixion, violet for sadness, red for blood-letting violence, blue for mystery, yellow for hope. It reminded me of Seurat's strong use of color symbolism, his dominant red for a noisy, tempestuous night club, his blue for ultimate mysteries of space beyond, his green for life and growth and tranquility, his yellow for the joy of his circus scenes.
I ordered the picture and asked the gallery attendant if he could tell me something about the artist, such as where he lived, for example. I was told that he lived in New York. So I asked if, by chance, they had his phone number, and they did. When I rang up Al Jensen, it was the only time I had ever called an artist on the strength of viewing his work for the first time.
Al asked me to stop by his tiny studio at 284 East 10th Street. Its front room was more than half consumed with stacks of canvasses. Al invited me to sit on his other chair and started to recount his color theories, and fragments of his life of world travels. I assumed that the apartment's back room was a slightly more habitable bedroom, but I never saw it. Al's discourse was engaging, if not hypnotic, as he ranged over subjects from his perceptions of ancient civilizations to Goethe's analysis of prismatic light to experiences in the studios and salons of Europe. I found the man fascinating. Whenever it later was that I decided there was much that he said that I didn't understand, I also decided that I wasn't going to let that bother me. And so a friendship developed, and I found myself inviting Al to my home and looking upon him as a man of judgment, someone to depend upon. I remember one evening I was depressed by a personal problem and it was Al that I called. He said come on over, apologizing for the fact that he had on hand only one bottle of bad Rye, knowing by then that I preferred Scotch. As I sat with him in that other chair, he reassured me greatly. It must be the only time in my life that I drowned any sorrows in bad Rye.
Six months after the acquisition of "Forsaken," and my meeting Al, he called me asking me to come by to look at a work. When I got to 10th Street, he set about laboriously pulling canvasses out of the stack, barely able to find space to line five of them up in a row for me. When he was done, I reacted with an immediate, compulsive "Wow," a monosyllabic critique which remained for long moments the only comment I could make of my first viewing of "The Golden Rule," so great was its impact.
"The Golden Rule" is an epic story in symbolic painting of the building of a Mayan pyramid. Along the way, it describes all the facets of Mayan culture, the king's authority, the surveying of the farm lands, the practices of sorcery, the constellation of divinities. Since Al was born it was only natural in Guatemala and had an Indian nurse in his childhood, for him to pick the Mayan as the first of the civilizations of antiquity which he would interpret.
At that time, I was building the Time & Life Building. I must have told Al many accounts of the complexities and difficulties of that project, for I have the impression from Al, never but casually alluded to, that it may have been part of his inspiration, by analogy, to do the Mayan pyramid builders.
After the first flush of emotion at my viewing of "The Golden Rule" had subsided, I thought about how most artists never make any sense in words of what they are trying to do in paint, and I thought of Dali's grandiose self-promotions, which in the long term had to detract from the virtuosity of his work. So I asked Al if he would write a paper explaining "The Golden Rule," and that he did, five typed pages worth, one section explaining his color theory and another outlining the legendary bases for his depiction of the Mayan civilization.
Al Jensen had spent fifty-five years kicking about the world, picking up experiences as a merchant sailor, studying with noted European painters, hobnobbing in the international art world, trying to paint. But it was not until his written statement about "The Golden Rule" that he articulated, as he put it, his "experience of the New Vision." This new vision, he said, told him that black and white checkers could describe "alternating rythms in light and darkness" and that this process "reflects the cycle of man's destiny: the vastness of my former fears of darkness were resolved as I read first the dark square, then the light square, meaning first night then day. I saw appearing as images the living followed by the dying in my checkerboard existence. Since every black is followed by a white, I found my place in eternity." It had taken Alfred half a century to summon up his Vision—his Muse. For me, it was an exciting feeling to be witness to its creation.
After I bought "The Golden Rule," it was exhibited at Martha Jackson in 1959, along with some works of the next civilization that Al had gone on to, the Spanish Renaissance and its conquistadores, arabesques and all. The following year, Martha Jackson told me that the Museum of Modern Art would be pleased if I were to donate a single-panel Jensen work entitled "Clockwork in The Sky" to the museum, and so I said I would be delighted.
I then approached Al with the proposition that I would like to commission him, on behalf of Time Inc., to do a mural which would reflect the several major books which Life at that time had published, "History of World War II," "World's Great Religions" and the like. Al threw himself into this assignment with gusto, and surprised me when he called me down to I Oth Street by displaying not one, but two versions of the proposed mural. I said there was nothing for it but that I would have to have the second version, which Al labeled "The Title Makers." Al's title for the panel on "World's Great Religions" is typical of his persistent hope. It was "Towards belief, clarity and order." Time Inc. decided that its mural, the first version, would go to its Paris building, a regrettable decision in view of the disastrous fire that occurred there in 1967 destroying the mural along with two people. As luck would have it, it fell to me as then London Bureau Chief to represent the company at the gracious observance of sympathy arranged by our Paris neighbors.
In 1960, I went up to Boston to look at the new Institute of Contemporary Art building which its then director, Thomas Messer, had just built, and to look at the first show which he had called "The Image Lost and Found." The show, which started with a Courbet, went through a lot of abstract expressionists, and ended (would you believe?) with a Jensen, one that had a figurative image emerging from all the checkers. I had developed a rapport with Tom when he was mounting a show at the Time & Life Building Reception Center.
I received a letter from Messer, now director at the Guggenheim, under date of August 28, 1961, saying, "Your original presentation of Alfred Jensen's work has borne fruit since I gradually warmed up to him to the extent of featuring him at the Guggenheim during September." This show consisted of 16 Jensen canvasses all done in the three-month period April to July, 1961. They were inspired by the flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. I also received a letter from Al Jensen dated the same day as the Messer letter, saying "I offered (The Guggenheim) in your name the loan of your mural The Title Makers. However, in view of the crowded condition at the museum at the present moment Mr. Arnason (the curator) asked me to thank you for your generous gesture!"
The following month the Guggenheim had a group show for which Arnason wrote in the catalogue, "The group of geometric abstractionists who are now attracting increasing attention, Kelly, Sander, Jensen, Stella, etc., many of whom have actually been working in this direction for a long time, object to being associated with the school of Mondrian or other pioneer purists or constructivists. The reason for this is simply that they insist their motivation is not a pure analysis of abstract form. Their concern is with an abstract content or subject matter, with an expressive end rather than a formal one. This raises the entire historic question of the relation of content to abstract form; and in a sense this is the central question of the present exhibition."
In response to this formulation, Al wrote me, "I think this wording of my interest and purpose of painting is a good one. It applies to all my work and leads me inevitably to my capacity to combine the language form of painting with the expressive sign of meaning, and that accomplished will carry me forward to take on a leading exponent's position of the art of our time! It is not an easy task. However, for me it is a marvelous challenge. So I continue my work and I fight against odds for honesty and truth in painting."
The following April, Al wrote me to report on a telephone conversation. "The Modern Art Museum yesterday called me up to inquire whether I own a similar picture to the "Clockwork in The Sky" owned by the museum and given to them by your generous good will. The senator from New York, Mr. Javits, wanted to borrow this picture to ornate (sic) his office in Washington, D.C. However, the museum thinks this picture so beautiful that they'll not deprive themselves of its presence for a year's term loan. Therefore, the museum has requested of me to lend to the senator's office a similar picture. And I have suggested they can pick one up from my studio. It's fun to see how the acceptance of my work spreads more and more and it does me good to be admired a bit, which is to say that the reward comes to one by trying and trying again."
While Al's mind probed wide and deep to interpret great civilizations of antiquity, he was disarmingly in awe of the trappings of the present one. The simplicity of his lifestyle belied his drive for fame and fortune. In this period, Al was beginning to achieve visibility in Europe, particularly in Switzerland where the Kornfeld Gallery of Bern and Zurich took the lead in giving him exhibitions. The crowning accolade came on the last evening of January, 1964. From Basel, Al wrote me: "Last night the American ambassador to Switzerland, William True Davies, the American cultural attaché, the finance minister and the health minister of the Swiss government, the president of the Basel Art Association, museum directors and the trustees and collectors of Basel attended a dinner given in Franz Kline's and Alfred Jensen's joint exhibitions. 700 invited artists and friends of art all over Switzerland gave me a real ovation and the museum's director Arnold Rüdlinger presented Mrs. Regina Jensen with a large bouquet of yellow tea roses and it was a very important introduction for me because now I am regarded as an international artist."
Although Al identified with some established contemporaries, notably Mark Rothko and Sam Francis, the former died early and the latter drifted away. Al operated as a loner, showing no interest in most other contemporary art, and cultivating an acute suspicion of art dealers, particularly those in New York, which is why he bounced from one to another. More important to the definition of an artist than his identity with any movement or school is his clarity of purpose and strength of commitment, and these Al certainly had in spades. That Al has a place in art 's mainstream, I have no doubt. It is a stream which has many tributaries, of course. I think it is possible to hypothecate that part of Al's aesthetic lineage came down a tributary whose fountainhead is the sixteenth century dramatic colorist (and loner) Matthias Grünewald, and which leads to Die Brucke (The Bridge) group of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, and on to Paul Klee, to Robert Delaunay's Orphism and its American offshoot the Synchronism of Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Many younger artists in America and abroad have been influenced by Jensen's work. Among the younger generation, one who may have no conscious reference to Jensen, but who is certainly a kindred spirit, is the leading Australian painter Leonard French, who also extracts images from geometric forms and turns them into powerful statements of spiritual conceptions.
Of his commitment to the evocation of ancient civilizations, Al wrote for a Kornfeld catalogue four years ago, "The artist in me is not only seeking a renewal of worn out visual representations, but is as well engaged in the reestablishment of man's lost ties with the universal laws of nature. Today, forgotten and ignored, these values of former times, now misunderstood, must come back. I for one lend all my energy in dedication to attain this quest."
That year, the retrospective show, 1957-1977, went to the São Paulo Bienal as the sole U.S. representative, a selection in which Messer was instrumental (and from there to Buffalo's Albright-Knox, to New York's New Museum and points west). Al's postcard from São Paulo said, "The top man of the Bienal feels that my show is the most beautiful creation seen in all the artists' work shown at São Paulo." I went to the opening in Buffalo (in January) and was surprised, but honored, that Seymour Knox, the museum's chairman and leading benefactor, asked me to speak. I used the occasion to reminisce about my two decades with Al, those decades which coincided with his development of the New Vision.
The last letter came three weeks before the end. The mind was wandering from months of illness, but The Vision was clear. "We live now in an epoch of revelation. The invisible forms are visible. We must extend our horizon. Progress will be made in the future." Alfred Jensen has found his eternity, here and in the hereafter. He has extended his horizon.
In an imaginative merging of abstraction and personalized iconography, Alfred Jensen's bright paintings elaborate his cosmological speculations, drawing on astronomy, physics and mathematics, and frequently implicating Mayan and Chinese calendrical systems. Included in Concordance are large-scale multi-faceted paintings that span the artist's mature career from 1960 onwards. Concordance includes many rarely seen works from the artist's estate as well as a late 12-panel work, "The Great Pyramid," executed in 1979 and never before published.
Hardcover, 2003, Published by Dia Center for the Arts, New York
Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly.
Essays by Lynne Cooke, David Anfam, Michael Newman, and Maria Reidelbach.
ISBN 9780944521434
Alfred Jensen's statement for his Albright-Knox museum show in 1977.
One afternoon during the year 1921, I was walking down a street in San Diego, California. I suddenly saw the edge of a young man's face, a nose. I called out to the owner of the profile, "Karl, remember that I drew your portrait in 1915, when we were children in school?" "Of course, I remember, Alfred," he answered, "and I still keep the portrait as a remembrance of our school days. That was 6000 miles away and six years ago, in Horsholm, Denmark."
The edge of things, a profile, coupled with a past event, has always made me leap like an inspired diver off a board.
Edge events have occupied me for years - the edge of color as it is observed in a prism. Goethe wrote in Beitrage zur Optik, 1791, paragraph 33:
The prism as an instrument, was looked upon with submissive awe and humility in the Eastern lands; so that the Chinese emperor gave himself the right to be the unique owner, as he insisted, by divine right of Majesty, to behold these beautiful appearances for himself alone. We in all ages from youth to old age look with wonder on the prismatic instrument because upon its use depends most of the color theories: therefore, to begin the study of color we must concentrate on this object.
While the study of Goethe's color theory has engaged me over a twenty-year period, it is in the past three years that I returned to it, as well as new readings in contemporary physics and electro-magnetism and constructed the prism machine.
As a space pilot approaches earth from outer darkness, a blue luminous atmosphere meets his eyes. The cool color hues are stalled in the proton-filled outer shell, not able to penetrate inward to the surface of the earth. Instead the protons create an electro-magnetic field. Areas around the turning globe oscillate until the protons are absorbed by the negative south polarity.
When the earth's night shadow dominates its own atmosphere, the electrons in the electric field produce the hot color hues. The atmosphere turns from blue to orange.
The dark of the universe and the light of the sun are both sources of energy.
In exploring the prism a similar phenomenon takes place.
A total prism is a circular unit of 360°. This unit is split in two half circles, each 180°. One part is the black prism, the other part is the white prism.
On a large piece of window glass, I glued twenty-two prisms on both sides, creating a prism sandwich. This made an opposition of eleven black and eleven white prisms.
I placed the prism machine facing a north skylight through which came the reflected light of the sun and the dark dome of the universe.
I looked at the prism machine through another prism, held in front of my eyes. The color hues appeared: black traveling towards the white showed the blue or cool color hues, the protons .: - . White traveling towards black showed orange or the hot color hues, the electrons The dark spectrum hues are six and the light spectrum hues are six, to be seen in the paintings and diagrams of 1975-1977.
The ancient Chinese labeled Heavenly 1-3-5-7-9, the odd numbers, and designated Earthly 2-4-6-8-10, the even numbers. in my two diagrams of 1977, 1 express the dark prism's six spectral color hues as the placement for areas 0-1-3-5-7-9, brought to a completion of twenty, with the aid of a reversed area placement of 0- 19-17-15-13-11. The result is a balanced computation of 5 x 20 = 100.
I harmonize the white prism's six spectral color hues by the use of 10 twice. I build by 0-2-4-6-8-10, and place in the reverse area the number sequence 0-18-16-14-12-10. I arrive at an even number composition of 5 x 20 = 100.
Thus, I demonstrate a unifying method characteristic of the vigesimal system first created by the ancient people of China and the Maya.
Modern number abstractions have not meant much to me, nor have mystical associations of number. Ancient calendar systems, the edge of the sun reappearing, have been a source of my concrete and symbolic number structures. I follow Pythagoras, who said, "Let the true principle be known, the beginning is the half of the whole."
My use of numbers is governed by the duality and opposition of odd and even number structures.
Besides, I am still attentive to the revelations of the four comer edges of a square and the rectangular picture plane.
The edges of invisible shapes at the threshold of my awareness - the monuments and objects left by the ancient people, for example, are all in my mind together with an education in modern art in Germany, France, and the United States. What to make of it, but an allegory, in a new pictorial structure.
In a school story about his family, six-year old Peter wrote, "My father is strong and good because he paints solar energy."
Alfred Jensen
Alfred Jensen's statement at the beginning of his mature style in 1957.
Here I sit, alone in my studio. My thoughts travel to Paris. There three teachers, all Fauve artists, taught me: Despiau, Friesz and Dufresne.
Despiau’s method of teaching sculpture made me look simultaneously at my work in progress and its relation to the model. He would guide my eyes by sweeping his sculptor’s tool across the model’s body, relating it to my sculpture. His gesture made me realize that what I had seen as an average, common looking Montparnasse girl could be perceived as an enchanting and a most perfect Greek statue. Despiau, by the mere twist of his hand, vitalized my dull response. I began to see in her form something of the rich and the simple that underlie the most chaotic appearances in nature. Despiau, by that penetrating gesture of his little hand, made me aware that my own sculpture had been put together by thousands of details which were unimportant in their meaning.
Friesz taught me the significance of what the Impressionists had attempted to create. He taught me the what, the how and the way Fauve expression as a movement in art had come about. He taught me about Cézanne. Since Friesz had known Pissarro and Renoir personally, I was made cognizant of the language of the French art tradition by my contact with this spokesman and active member.
Dufresne stressed the human aspect of an artist’s nature. He encouraged me with his most friendly concern, and appeased the confusion that I suffered in having to face a French tradition of 400 years of painting. As an outsider I needed human warmth, encouragement and clarification, and Dufresne satisfied that need in me by adopting me as his painter-disciple-son. He gave me the most helpful support.
Each time I paint a picture today, my former teachers’criticisms filter cohesively through my imagery. Each image flows into the other, criticism upon criticism, painting lesson upon painting lesson, creating the living image. Each image in sequence must filter through the interstices of my memory before I can paint a picture.
Before Europe, in San Diego, there was my teacher Mr. Schneider’s flowing brush stroke. He is way back in my memory. He was a technical master of the Impressionist and French way of applying crude color marks, which be taught to me. He painted on my sketch in front of the most intense green pepper trees that loomed above us. He painted the feathery foliage which fluttered its delicate and light-filled leaves against the California blue sky. That foliage was supported by massive and snake-like tree trunks, which were covered with loose-textured and warm, orange-tinted, peeling bark which absorbed the sunlight. He also made me paint the deep, dark-hued blue and purple shadows, shadows that Mr. Schneider insisted must be part of my picture. I painted these brush strokes once long ago, and therefore today, before I can begin to conceive a painting, those impressionistic and crudely-conceived color spots fleetingly reappear.
Then, in their place, the image of the Sahara desert’s yellow-ochred sands imposes itself on my memory. That memory of those wind-swept clouds flying above the oasis of Tozeur in Tunisia brings forth images that glitter in the burning desert air. There stand the tall broken-stemmed, climbing, mast-erect, broad-crowned, dark-green-leaved palms swaying gently, making a noise in the quiet. Way above the earth, hanging down in large, heavy paunches, the ripening fruit is turning from yellow to brown, warning their owners that date-harvest time is near. Precious water is flowing from a spring into a stream which flows into that Sahara oasis where its water mirrors the Arab houses and walls, reflecting their earthen brick facades which are constructed in geometric patterns. I find all these images remirrored in my fluid paint, which is developing into my as-yet unrealized work.
My work suggests memories of Madrid, Spain, where I copied Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride, and I imagine her in the traces of my paint. She was dressed in a white robe that blended into the light, shining out of the picture’s depth. Her golden locks surrounded her stubby, fleshy face. She sat in a chair, her generously warm and giving arms resting solidly upon the material wealth spread out on the table in front of her. Titian, Rubens, Velasquez, Tintoretto and Goya —I also copied these masters’ works. Two winters long I copied the Prado Museum’s collection and today every time I paint a picture, I posit layer upon layer of all those memories, and I posit those copy-conversations that I so long ago enjoyed with these great masters’, who even though their works were mute, spoke to me with advice. Because their pictures gave me counsel by trial and error, each time I did not do what their intentions had been, their pictures would mutely admonish me for my inability to do what the masters had done and even today those copy lessons help me to establish my form.
Yes, each time I paint a picture, the superimpositions of the many years of nude studies goes through each of my paintings’ development. While I remain passive, those memories push me, and hem me in, and again move away from me.
In Paris I remember the atelier models, with their bloated bellies standing on the platform. They were nude, full of bread and wine-stuffed intestines, showing off their rosy-blond or olive-yellow or coarse, ochre skins. The somber, skylighted darkness brought out their opaque and lustered flesh, their tones luminously contrasted against the variously colored draped backgrounds. The sweet flesh of the Montparnasse girls filled me with desire and, teasingly, they boldly exhibited their most intimate parts. That kind of sensation even today interferes with the progress of my work.
The buck beer poured into the steins from large-barreled casks standing around in that Munich kellar. Here, the jugendstil pictures hung on the walls of the hall and the American Students of Hans Hofmann sat at several tables to argue art theory way into the night. I felt them to be fanatics because my own leanings were toward French art. That made me flee the German conceptions of art which still persist in my memory. Traces of Hofmann’s repetitive and monotonous style of teaching still blocks me in my attempt to start a painting.
Here I am desperately trying to destroy these accumulated concepts to get to something that I look for but instead I see those explosive color splotches on my canvas. They remind me of an almost forgotten period of my art studies, when I, along with many others, imitated Soutine’s stylizations. As I paint today, I find signs of tilted houses, rolling hills, bleary eyed portraits and those tormented corpses of chickens, characteristic of Soutine’s expression with which I once long ago identified as my assumed painter’s temperament. Those kinds of references from my past assert their power in my work, hindering me from what I experience now.
As these influences are erased they are immediately replaced by relational factors, the kind that I had learned to work with after my conversations with my friend Mr. Kahnweiler. He interpreted the way Juan Gris chose his emblems. For example, specifying a circle on a white ground, the white became a fruit bowl; or, specifying a square with an outline on the same white, it became a book; or, specifying the ace of diamonds on the same white, it became a playing card; or, specifying by the use of many parallel lines drawn on the same white, it became a musical composition; or, specifying a printed famous name on the same white, it became a newspaper. That kind of relational concept in painting obsessed me for many years, and in that time I painted thousands of planes until I arrived at their abstract resolutions.
Later on I became a friend of Andre Masson whose paintings stressed literary syntax which amounted to bringing all the images together in their suggestibilities to represent the dreams, the passions and the struggles of existence. After my encounter with Masson’s art, I also began to let color and plane specify the bizarre, the myth, the dream and the dislocations of time and place.
Today, those Surrealist images visit my work in their guise of ghostly apparitions. Those shades of yesteryear enter my work insistently and since I regard the magic presence as a hindrance to my work’s growth, I always see to it that I expel the unwanted images from my picture and its four edges, and with that cleared and freed surface I go ahead and paint, as I am still intent upon finding an image of my own.
However, before I am free to start, I have to remove Constructivist associations. I spent half a year fighting metal, letting metal transform itself by forging it into a poetic image that came to a birth suggested by the substance of its own matter. Out of that metal, so hard and unyielding, I forged five cast-iron sculptures now placed in the Baltimore Museum garden. I worked under Naum Gabo’s friendly advice, and he found my work good. Today, those metal bands inevitably affirm their presence in my memory and I must expel them in the development of my painting concept. That concept consists of my picture’s total identity, composed of its materiality and of the self that I am. When those opposing forces meet and become one will, one action and one thought, the involvement between painting and artist produces the future spectator’s experience. When the artist steps aside from his canvas, the spectator steps into that vacant place and with his appreciative response he repeats the sensation that the artist had, becoming one with the picture. An enjoyment that has merit.
Alfred Jensen
New York, c. 1957
Born on a farm in Guatemala in 1903, and culminating in 1981 amongst the most important artists of his time, Alfred Jensen had one of the most remarkable lives in a century filled with them.
by Laura Justice Fleischmann
(with later additions)
Alfred Julio Jensen born December 11 in Guatemala City, the third of four children. His Danish father, Peter, had begun a building construction and furniture-manufacturing business in Guatemala after abandoning plans to join the California Gold Rush. His mother, Anna, a German-Pole, settled in Guatemala having traveled there as governess to a French family.
Mother dies and children are sent to school in Horsholm, Denmark, under their uncle's guardianship. Jensen begins drawing portraits of his classmates.
After graduation from school, Jensen is employed as cabin boy on a ship. He travels extensively and works as a seaman intermittently until 1926. He draws portraits of crews and passengers.
I listened to the wind and looked at the natural phenomena of life which is necessary to the development of an artist.1
Learning his father is dying, Jensen leaves ship in San Francisco and begins to walk to Guatemala. He is prevented from entering Mexico and works in California as a cowboy and chicken farmer.
I was a chicken farmer and I was doing murals of my chickens ... I drew in hundreds of chickens. I found that every chicken had its particular character...2
Arriving in Guatemala after his father's death, Jensen buys a farm with his brother. A small inheritance from his father augments Jensen's income.
Jensen sells his business interests and travels to California. Attends San Diego High School at night and works as a lumber salesman during the day. Receives a scholarship to the San Diego Fine Arts School at Balboa Park and attends under the direction of Eugene De Vol. Learning of Hans Hofmann's school in Munich and determined to enroll, he hires on a German ship.
Jensen mistakenly attends Heymann's school in Munich.
I worked my way across as a sailor...when I arrived in Munich I couldn't remember the name...it was an "H" man, but I didn't know who it was...3
He meets the Americans Carl Holty and Vaclav Vytlacil who are students of Hofmann.
Heymann's class was being repainted...the whole of Heymann's students went to the Hofmann school to take drawing... There I found myself drawing between Vytlacil and Holty...4
After conversing with them, Jensen decides to join the Hofmann school. His work at this time concentrates on drawing after the old masters, particularly Bruegel and Durer.
I had a big library of the old masters and I went to the Neue Pinakothek every Sunday religiously so I was schooling myself in the old masters.5
In the fall of 1927 Jensen breaks with Hofmann who he feels is restricting his growth as an artist. Saidie Adler May, a wealthy art collector and student of Hofmann, offers her patronage to Jensen enabling him to continue his studies. At first reluctant, Jensen is encouraged by Vytlacil and subsequently enrolls at the Academie Scandinave in Paris in 1929. He studies modern sculpture with Charles Despiau and painting with Othon Friesz and Charles Dufresne, who becomes Jensen's "spiritual and painter-father." Saidie May enrolls at the Academie Scandinave in the same year. Jensen becomes her traveling companion and advisor to her collection. In 1929, they travel and paint in North Africa and Spain. In the early 1930s they begin travel throughout the major cities of Europe.
We copied two years in the Prado and brought our copies to be criticized by our French teachers, so we had the background-free copying, conversations with the old masters.6
Mrs. May begins to collect modern French art.
I got in contact with all the great artists, Matisse, Giacometti, Miró, and we collected all these people and we visited the studios and bought right there...7
Jensen establishes permanent residence in the United States in 1934; thereafter, he and Mrs. May travel from there to Europe.
In 1938, Jensen visits Andre Masson at Lyon-la-Foret
We visited him...that was very important for me...He was one of the new spirits...8
While in France, Jensen becomes acquainted with the work and writing of Auguste Herbin; Herbin's interest in Goethe's color theory reinforces Jensen's thinking. Later that year he returns to the United States with May and they begin collecting contemporary American painting through dealers Rose Fried, Sidney Janis and Leo Castelli. During the war years Jensen and May travel to North Carolina, California and Chicago visiting artists' studios; they acquire little at this time however. After 1945 they begin to collect again - works by Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, Naum Gabo and Fritz Glarner are added to the collection. Jensen is in the process of reading Goethe's Zür Farbenlehre, a study of color theory, which will occupy him for the next twenty years. He begins making diagrams from his Goethean studies which he considers researches into light and color rather than art. In 1946 Castelli introduces Jensen to Gabo and under his influence Jensen experiments briefly with constructivist sculpture.
Saidie May dies and Jensen travels briefly to California. Her collection (a promised gift) goes to the Baltimore Museum of Art. He settles in New York and begins to concentrate exclusively on painting. Jensen's studio is in the Lincoln Arcade where his neighbor is Ulfert Wilke. Wilke introduces Jensen to James Johnson Sweeney, Director of the Guggenheim Museum; Sweeney visits Jensen's studio. Jensen executes a number of portraits and also paints representational landscapes, still lifes and figures in an abstract expressionist manner.
Jensen meets Mark Rothko and a long-lasting friendship develops. Has first one-artist show at John Heller Gallery, New York, an exhibition of twelve canvases. These paintings are based on his study of Goethe's color theory which resulted in a change of palette to prismatic colors (the artist's term for those colors found in the light and dark spectrums of the prism). Exhibition receives favorable critical attention.
...one can appreciate these paintings for their strong, substantial composition and the glowing effect of primary color combinations ... Jensen's canvases show his positive qualities as a painter.9
Jensen meets Lil Picard, art critic, painter and sculptor, and a ten-year friendship begins. In 1953, he moves to a studio on East 10th Street.
In 1954 Jensen is included in a three-artist show at the Tanager Gallery with sculptor Robert Becker and painter Sally Hazelet. Jensen meets Sam Francis in 1955 and a mutual exchange of ideas develops between them. Jensen is invited to participate in the Stable Gallery, New York, annual group shows with artists such as Franz Kline, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. These groups exhibitions are important to Jensen's development and his understanding of his contemporaries' work. First one-artist show is at Tanager Gallery in 1955; in 1956 Jensen joins the Bertha Schaefer Gallery for a brief period.
Jensen begins to paint murals incorporating checkerboards and prismatic colors. He develops the idea of his diagrams into paintings on paper which investigate the logic for his compositions on canvas. The diagrams become works of art in themselves.
I was unconsciously doing my style for ten years but didn't know a painting could look that way.10
Calligraphy, previously used in the diagrams, begins to appear in the paintings. He is extremely prolific during this time. Henry Luce III acquires Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me from the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, beginning a friendship which continues through Jensen's lifetime. The painting is executed in the artist's newly matured style.
I knew that the prism held the clue that would enable me to arrive at an understanding of the genesis of color...the black and white mirror process in the prism paralleled that in the atmospheric dome and this led to the idea of the checkerboard image.11
Sam Francis brings Arnold Rüdlinger, Director of the Kunsthalle, Basel, to Jensen's studio on 10th Street. Rüdlinger later organizes an exhibition in Winterthur, Switzerland and includes Jensen's work. Jensen sells his first work from this show. He destroys a number of sketches and diagrams but is restrained by Rothko's protest. With the breakthrough to the checkerboard image a very active period in Jensen's career begins.
Jensen teaches summer session at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore.
Martha Jackson visits his studio and invites Jensen to join her gallery. He meets Gerome Goodman who becomes an important collector and friend. Luce commissions Jensen to paint a mural for the Time/Life building in Paris; called The Title Makers, the mural was destroyed by fire in 1967.
Jensen begins to exhibit in important group shows throughout the country. Although he retains an individual style, his work is exhibited with the abstract expressionists and geometric abstractionists. He reads J. Eric S. Thompson's Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in 1960 which recalls to him his childhood in Guatemala and provides additional thematic interests for his work. There is much artistic production at this time. In 1961 he has his first major one-artist show at the Guggenheim Museum. Through the introduction of Rüdlinger, he joins the Kornfeld & Klipstein gallery, Bern.
Jensen marries the painter Regina Bogat in New York. Has his first European exhibition at Kornfeld & Klipstein gallery, Bern, in October. Executes a series of paintings superimposing figurative elements of prismatic colors on checkerboards of black and white or, reversely, figurative elements in black and white against a prismatic colored checkerboard.
A two-artist exhibition with Franz Kline at Kunsthalle, Basel, is organized by Rüdlinger. A retrospective selection of sixty of his works is shown. The Jensens travel for six months to Italy, Egypt, Greece, and France. At the end of the trip, they spend six weeks in Switzerland painting in a loft above Kornfeld's exhibition area.
First child, Anna, born. Spends summer as Tamarind fellow making twenty lithographs. The set, A Pythagorean Notebook, explores ancient architectural structures to which the artist applies Pythagorean number structures. The prints are grid patterns with writing and numbers at the borders. Also executes a series of gouaches entitled Hekatompedon. These drawings are based on an ancient Grecian ritual which was of a religious and thanks-giving nature.
Jensen's paintings at this time are inspired by his previous trips to Europe and Greece.
The Jensens make a trip to Guatemala, Yucatan and Mexico, where much travel is done by airplane. Paintings inspired by aerial vision are comprised of concentric bands of small checkerboards. One-artist exhibition at Cordier Ekstrom, New York, presents canvases executed in this motif. Jensen's interests turn to physics and astronomy. Reads the I Ching and J. Needham's Science and Civilization in China which has strong influence on his personal philosophy and provides thematic material for many paintings. Son, Peter, born in 1970.
Family moves to Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Beginning his two-year association with The Pace Gallery, New York, Jensen has a one-artist exhibition there during this year. Theme of the canvases exhibited centers on Jensen's interest in the I Ching and in the teachings of the Delphic Oracle.
That they convey, in any case, a definite sense of conviction, beautifully exemplifying the principles they purport to expound, attests to their success as modern abstract paintings, scarcely needing the prop of a comparison to, say, Hindu yantras or Moorish mosaics, let alone a concordance of old lore. Jensen is, simply, a painter of wonderful skill and intensity.12
Wieland Schmied, Director of the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, organizes a traveling exhibition of Jensen's work from the period 1957-1972. In 1973, Jensen writes of his paintings:
The idea of correspondence has great significance and replaces the idea of causality, for things are connected rather than caused. Thus lovely things summon others among the class of lovely things, repulsive things summon others among the class of repulsive things. This arises from the complementary way in which a thing of the same class responds. This idea that things belonging to the same class resonate or energize each other has guided me in producing my 1973 paintings.13
One-artist exhibition at The Pace Gallery, New York.
During this year Jensen is preoccupied with the ancient quinary number system and the seasonal effects of the planets.
Jensen's interest in number structures and dualities provides themes for numerous canvases.
Studies the theory of paramagnetic phenomena vs. the diamagnetic approach as espoused by Michael Faraday, a 19th century physicist and chemist who discovered electromagnetic induction. Exhibition of Jensen's work from 1961 to 1974 at The Pace Gallery, New York, 1976.
Jensen paints the diagrams, The Sum of the Heavenly Numbers is Twenty-Five and The Sum of the Earthly Numbers is Thirty, which attempt a solution to The Great Mystery II, a work painted thirteen years earlier. The Great Mystery II is an irregular ground grid of black and white with superimposed Chinese numbers derived from Shang oracle bone forms of the 14th to 11th centuries B.C. The diagrams are mathematical explorations of the position and function of the "invisible 20" as realized through the working of The Great Mystery II.
His insight and his work have steadily grown; and there continue in him yearly floods of new thoughts, new discoveries, new connections for old thoughts that have been left dangling, and always with the enthusiasm and conviction we associate with youth.14
Mural Changes and Communication installed in Lister-Hill Center, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
Dies April 4 in Livingston, New Jersey, near his home.
Major retrospective exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut
American Republic Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
Baltimore Museum of Art
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Chase Manhattan Bank, New York
Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Dallas Museum of Art
The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio
Deutsche Bank, New York
Dia Center for the Arts, New York
Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Health and Hospital Corporation, New York
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
I.B.M., Armonk, New York
Insel Hambroich Museum, Neuss, Germany
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha
The Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth, Western Australia
Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland
Kunsthalle, Basel
Kunsthaus, Zurich
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Neue Galerie-Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood, New Jersey
Public Service Electric and Gas Company, Newark, New Jersey
Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, Netherlands
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
The Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Time, Inc., New York
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
John Heller Gallery, New York. Alfred Jensen: Experiments in Color.
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York. Alfred Jensen: Works of 1958-1959. Text by the artist.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Alfred Jensen.
Kornfeld & Klipstein, Bern. Alfred Jensen. Texts by the artist and E. W. Kornfeld.
Kunsthalle, Basel. Alfred Jensen.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Alfred Jensen.
Galerie Renée Ziegler, Zurich. Alfred Jensen. Texts by Max Bill and E. W. Kornfeld.
Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York. Alfred Jensen: The Aperspective Structure of a Square. Text by the artist.
The Pace Gallery, New York. Alfred Jensen: Recent Paintings. Text by the artist.
Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover. Alfred Jensen. Texts by the artist, Max Bill, Allan Kaprow and Wieland Schmied.
Kunsthalle, Basel. Alfred Jensen.
Kornfeld & Klipstein, Basel. Alfred Jensen.
Sao Paulo, Brazil. XIV International Bienal of Sao Paulo. Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Diagrams from the Years 1957-1977. Texts by the artist, Linda L. Cathcart and Marcia Tucker.
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City. Segunda Bienal Interamericana de Mexico, 1960.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists. Text by H. H. Arnason.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
One Hundred Paintings from the G. David Thompson Collection. Introduction by G. David Thompson.
The Art Institute of Chicago. 65th Annual American Exhibition.
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. New Accessions USA. Introduction by Fred Bartlett.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Geometric Abstraction in America.
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The 28th Biennial Exhibition 1963. Introduction by Hermann Williams, Jr.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Painting, from The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Texts by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., René d'Harnoncourt, and John Walker.
San Francisco Museum of Art. Recent Trends.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Annual Exhibition 1963: Contemporary American Painting.
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Highlights of the 1964-1965 Art Season. Preface by Larry Aldrich.
Museum Fridericianum, Kassel. documenta III:
Internationale Ausstellung. Texts by Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Post Painterly Abstraction. Texts by James Elliott and Clement Greenberg.
Venice. XXXII Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte Venezia, Selections from the Collection oi The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Introduction by Thomas M. Messer.
San Francisco Museum of Art. Colorists 1960-1965. Introduction by Anita Ventura.
San Francisco Museum of Art. Highlights of 1964-65
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Plus by Minu, Today's Half-Century. Essay by Douglas MacAgy.
Museum Fridericianum, Kassel. 4. documenta. Internationale Ausstellung.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Tamarind: Homage to Lithography. Texts by Virginia Allen and William S. Lieberman.
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Highlights of 1969-1970 Art Season. Preface by Larry Aldrich.
Indianapolis Museum of Art. Painting and Sculpture Today. Texts by Richard L. Warrum and Carl J. Weinhardt, Jr.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. American Painting 1970. Text by Peter Selz.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Structure of Color. Texts by the artists and Marcia Tucker.
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids.
Museum Fridericianum, Kassel. documenta 5: Internationale Ausstellung.
University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park. The Private Collection of Martha Jackson. Texts by David Anderson, Adelyn Breeskin, Richard Klank, George Levitine and Elayne Varian.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. The Martha Jackson Collection at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Text by Linda L. Cathcart.
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. Color. Introduction by Kynaston McShine.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Acquisition Priorities: Aspects of Postwar Painting in America. Text by Thomas M. Messer.
Philadelphia College of Art. Time. Text by Janet Kardon.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Collectors, Collecting, Collection: American Abstract Art since 1945. Introduction by Henry Hopkins.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Biennial Exhibition: Contemporary American Art. Texts by Barbara Haskell, Patterson Sims and Marcia Tucker.
Delirious--Art at the Limits of Reason, curated by Kelly Baum. Met Breuer, New York, NY
Herbert, Martin. “Alternate Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, London, UK” (exhibition review). Frieze, no. 157 (September 2013): 148–149, illustrated.
Nelson, Max. “The Machinery of the Universe” (Pace Gallery exhibition review). The Paris Review, 1 July 2015. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/01/the-machinery-of-the-universe/
Rosboch, Lili. “LeWitt and Jensen” (The Pace Gallery exhibition review). Bloomberg Businessweek, 7 February 2012. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-07/genoves-sells-out-lewitt-and-jensen-italian-photos-midtown-galleries.html
Heinrich, Will. “The Offal Truth” (David Zwirner exhibition review). New York Observer, 28 March 2011: 44, illustrated.
Smith, Roberta. “Art in Review: Katherine Bernhardt, Alfred Jensen, Chris Johanson, Chris Martin, Andrew Masullo, and Judith Scott” (Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition review). The New York Times, 15 July 2011: C23, illustrated.
Hargreaves, Gayle. “Ahead of the Curve: For Seven Decades, Collector and Patron Betty Blake has Championed Each Succeeding Generation’s Best Artists.” Art and Antiques (July 2008): 88–93, illustrated.
Conley, Kevin, ed. “Galleries–Chelsea: Cosmologies” (James Cohan Gallery exhibition review). New Yorker, 12 February 2007.
Gennochio, Benjamin. “There’s Beauty in Numbers” (Heckscher Museum of Art exhibition review). The New York Times, 8 June 2008.
Holliday, Frank. “Order Out of Chaos” (James Cohan Gallery exhibition review). Gay City News, 1 February 2007.
Jasper, Adam. “Signs of the Times: Cosmologies” (James Cohan Gallery exhibition review). Art Review (January 2007).
Jensen, Alfred. “My Oneness, A Universe of Colours, 1957.” Artforum (December 2007): 132, illustrated.
Saltz, Jerry. “The Biggest Picture” (James Cohan Gallery exhibition review). Village Voice, 1 February 2007.
Smith, Roberta. “Art in Review: Cosmologies” (James Cohan Gallery exhibition review). The New York Times, 2 February 2007: E35.
“Alfred Jensen” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). The New Yorker, 30 October 2006: 18.
Baker, R.C. “Best in Show: Recommendations by R.C. Baker” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). Village Voice, 18–24 October 2006: 146.
Cohen, David. “Arts & Letters-Gallery Going: Paint By Numbers” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). New York Sun, 12 October 2006: 18, illustrated.
“Galleries: PaceWildenstein [Alfred Jensen: The Number Paintings]” (exhibition review). Trump Magazine (Fall 2006): NYC16.
La Rocco, Ben. “Artseen: Alfred Jensen” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). The Brooklyn Rail (November 2006): 40.
“On the Town: Calendar.” The New York Sun, 24 August 2006: 12, illustrated.
Cohen, David. “Arts & Letters-Gallery Going: When the Rule Ruled” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). New York Sun, 3 March 2005: 19+.
Cotter, Holland. “Art in Review: ‘Logical Conclusions’” (exhibition review). The New York Times, 18 March 2005: E42.
Harris, Jane. “The ruling class: Seeking the poetic potential of neutral signs” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). New York Village Voice, 16–22 March 2005: Voice Choices, 8.
Johnson, Patricia Ann. “Arts Review: An Explosion of Color: Alfred Jensen Paintings from the 70s, Texas Gallery” (exhibition review). Houston Chronicle, 2 October 2004, Arts and Entertainment: E3.
MacAdam. Barbara A. “Reviews: New York-Logical Conclusions, PaceWildenstein” (exhibition review). Art News 104 (June 2005): 119.
Morgan, Robert C. “Reviews: Logical Conclusions, PaceWildenstein, New York” (exhibition review). tema celeste 110 (July–August 2005): 69.
Johnson, Patricia Ann. “An Explosion of Color / Jensen’s Orderly Grids Hold Hypnotic Power” (Texas Gallery exhibition review). Houston Chronicle, 2 October 2004, Section Star: E3, discussed.
Harvey, Doug. “Cracked Abstraction.” LA Weekly, 7–13 February 2003: 45.
Pagel, David. “Crazy-Quilt Dynamism” (Santa Monica Museum of Art exhibition review). Los Angeles Times, 10 February 2003: E11, illustrated.
Adam, Alfred Mac. “Alfred Jensen: Dia Center for the Arts” (exhibition review). Art News (February 2002): 124.
“Alfred Jensen: Concordance at Dia Center for the Arts.” Gallery Guide (January 2002): 15.
Cooper, Harry. “Alfred Jensen: Dia Center for the Arts” (exhibition review). Artforum (January 2002): 133.
Kuspit, Donald. “Report from New York. Aspiring to the Absolute through Art: Alfred Jensen” (Dia Center for the Arts exhibition preview). Art New England (December/January 2002): 12–13.
Sheets, Hilarie M. “Strange Comfort. What art is comforting? What art calms and soothes? The answers vary with the beholder.” Art News (September 2002): 140–143.
“Alfred Jensen: Dia Center for the Arts.” New York, 10 September 2001: 88, illustrated.
Camhi, Leslie. “Systems Analyst” (Dia Center for the Arts exhibition review). Village Voice, 9 October 2001: 63.
Glueck, Grace. “Overpowering Colors and Dizzying Theories” (Dia Center for the Arts and PaceWildenstein exhibition reviews). The New York Times, 28 September 2001: E34.
Plagens, Peter. “Alfred Jensen: Concordance. Dia Center for the Arts” (exhibition review). Artforum (September 2001): 65, illustrated.
Stevens, Mark. “New Art-World Order” (Dia Center for the Arts exhibition review). New York, 1 October 2001: 58–59, illustrated.
Sheets, Hilarie M. “Alfred Jensen: Malca Fine Art.” Art News (April 2000): 166.
“Basilico Fine Arts: Alfred Jensen.” New Yorker, 11 January 1999: 14.
Doran, Anne. “Alfred Jensen ‘Selected Paintings.’” Time Out New York, 7 January 1999: 54.
Merlin, James. “Alfred Jensen: Basilico Fine Arts” (exhibition review). Burlington Magazine (February 1999): 134.
Pagel, David. “Life’s Complex Geometries: Where Order and Chaos Collide” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). Los Angeles Times, 9 April 1999, Arts and Entertainment: F22.
Skestos, Stephanie. “Modern and Contemporary Art: The Lannan Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago: Alfred Jensen.” Jeremy Strick, ed. Museum Studies 25 (1999): 32–33.
Johnson, Ken. “Alfred Jensen.” The New York Times, 25 December 1998: E42.
Glueck, Grace. “Geometry, Man’s and Nature’s.” The New York Times, 9 May 1997: C36.
Murdock, Robert M. “Alfred Jensen & Tony Smith” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). Review, 15 May 1997: 10–11.
Karmel, Pepe. “Art in Review: Alfred Jensen.” The New York Times, 9 February 1996: C26.
Zellen, Jody. “Alfred Jensen” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). Art Scene 15, no. 6 (February 1996).
Cotter, Holland. “Art in Review: Alfred Jensen” (PaceWildenstein exhibition review). The New York Times, 10 February 1995: C27.
Diehl, Carol. “Alfred Jensen PaceWildenstein” (exhibition review). Art News (May 1995): 149.
Smith, Roberta. “It’s All Semi-Permanent (Just Passing Through).” The New York Times, 13 October 1995: C30.
Roemmele, Russell. “Alfred Jensen of Glen Ridge, Artist’s Soul in God’s Cosmos.” Glen Ridge Paper, 15 September 1994: 1, 2.
Smith, Roberta. “Geometry With Echoes of the Mystic” (Newark Museum exhibition review). The New York Times, 25 March 1994: C25.
Zwez, Annelise. “Gestaltung Und Form Als Wandlung Von Zahl Und Prinzip.” Artis (April/May 1994): 20–25.
Baumer, Dorthea. “Massages of a Color Mystic.” Feuilleton, Süddeutsche Zeitung, no. 22, 28 January 1993: 15.
Franzke, Andreas. “Portrait: Alfred Jensen (1903–1981).” Kritik (Munich) (January 1993): 42–48.
Sachs, Brita. “Visions of His Own Cosmos.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 25, 30 January 1993: 33,
Saltz, Jerry. “Let Us Now Praise Artist's Artists.” Art + Auction (April 1993): 74–79, 115.
Tully, Judd. “Downe Collection in Doubt.” Art + Auction (September 1992): 18–22.
“Alfred Jensen” (The Pace Gallery exhibition review). The New Yorker, 11 February 1991.
D'Amato, Brian. “Reviews: Al Jensen” (The Pace Gallery exhibition review). Flash Art (May/June 1991): 137–138, illustrated.
Johnson, Ken. “Alfred Jensen at Pace Downtown” (exhibition review). Art in America (June 1991): 146, illustrated.
Kuspit, Donald. “Reviews: Alfred Jensen” (The Pace Gallery exhibition review). Artforum (April 1991): 121–122, illustrated.
Anderson, Michael. “Galleries: Alfred Jensen” (Linda Cathcart Gallery exhibition review). L.A. Style (April 1990): 30, illustrated.
Clothier, Peter. “Living with Art.” Art News (May 1990).
Curtis, Cathy. “The Harmonious Universe of Alfred Jensen” (Linda Cathcart Gallery exhibition review). Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1990.
Curtis, Cathy. “Making Some Sense Out of the Universe with Alfred Jensen.” Los Angeles Times (Orange County Edition), 21 May 1990.
Marschall, Laurence A. “Books In Brief: Measures of Our Days.” Sciences (September/October 1990): 51–52.
Tarantino, Michael. “The Machine and the Wheels.” The Bulletin, 24 May 1990.
Addams Allen, Jane. “Nine `Different Drummers' come up from underground.” Washington Times, 19 May 1988.
Beaumont, Mary Rose. “Review.” Arts Review, 8 April 1988: 226–227.
Burr, James. “The Rise of Abstract Expressionism.” Apollo (April 1988).
Cyphers, Peggy. “New York in Review.” Arts Magazine (October 1988).
“Review.” London Times, 5 April 1988.
Rubenfeld, Florence. “Different Drummers.” Arts Magazine (November 1988).
Tucker, Marcia. “The Painted Equation.” Sciences (March/April 1988): 50, 51.
“Review.” West Hollywood Paper, 6 February 1986.
“Alfred Jensen: Guggenheim Museum” (exhibition review). The New York Times, 13 September 1985.
“Alfred Jensen Exhibit Opens at the Guggenheim” (exhibition review). Antiques and The Arts Weekly, 19 September 1985.
“Alfred Jensen: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum” (exhibition review). Artforum (December 1985): 91.
“El Guatemalteco Alfred Jensen, sus pinturas y trabajos en papel en el Museo Guggenheim” (exhibition review). Impacto (New York), 3–9 October 1985: 1, illustrated.
Wolff, Theodore. “Everything Was Distilled, Coded, Modified” (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition review). Christian Science Monitor, 17 October 1985: 3.
Levin, Kim. “The Day Before” (Pace Gallery exhibition review). Village Voice, 3 January 1984: 74.
“Album: Alfred Jensen.” Arts Magazine (December 1983): 50–51.
“Alfred Jensen, The Late Works” (exhibition review). The New York Times, 16 December 1983: C30.
Cooper, James F. “Galleries: Jensen’s Numbers Reflect a Peculiar Internal Sinderity” (The Pace Gallery exhibition review). Herald Tribune, 23 December 1983: 6B.
Larson, Kay. “Encoding the Cosmos” (exhibition review). New York, 19 December 1983: 82.
Glueck, Grace. “Alfred Jensen, Painter of Patterned Abstracts, Dies.” The New York Times, 8 April 1981.
Herrera, Philip. “Alfred Jensen 1903–1981.” Art in America (Summer 1981).
Perrin, Peter. “All the Beautiful Systems; Alfred Jensen” (Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition review). Arts Canada (May/June 1979): 40–49.
Bannon, Anthony. “A Slice of American Paintings From the 1970s.” Baltimore Evening News, 26 November 1978.
Brach, Paul. “Alfred Jensen and the Abstract Absolute” (Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition review). Art in America (May/June 1978): 73–75.
Kramer, Hilton. “A Brave Attempt to Encapsulate a Decade.” The New York Times, 17 December 1978: 39, 55.
Cavaliere, Barbara. “Group Exhibitions.” Arts Magazine (October 1977): 22–23.
Ferretti, Fred. "Sending 'the best of America' abroad." Art News, vol. 76, no. 6 (Summer 1977), pp. 62-65.
Glueck, Grace. "Art People." New York Times (24 January 1977), p. 22.
Kuh, Katharine. "Art." Saturday Review, vol. 4, no. 22 (20 August 1977), pp. 52-54.
Hess, Thomas B. "Alfred Jensen." New York, vol. 9, no. 5 (2 February 1976), p. 57.
Kramer, Hilton. "Alfred Jensen." New York Times (17 January 1976), p. 21.
Lorber, Richard. "Alfred Jensen." Arts Magazine, vol. 50, no. 7 (March 1976), p. 21.
Daval, Jean-Luc. "Lettre de Suisse: Alfred Jensen." Art International, vol. 19, no. 7 (September 1975), p. 68.
Goldin, Amy. "Patterns, Grids and Painting." Artforum, vol. XIV, no. I (September 1975), pp. 50-54.
Stitelman, Paul. "Alfred Jensen." Arts Magazine, vol. 48, no. 4 (January 1974), p. 73.
Jürgen-Fischer, Klaus. "Alfred Jensen." Das Kunstwerk, vol. XXVI, no. 4 (July 1973), p. 38.
Loring, John. "Checkers with the Right Man." Arts Magazine, vol. 47, no. 5 (March 1973), pp. 60-62.
Perreault, John. "Painting by Mystical Numbers." The Village Voice (8 November 1973), p. 19.
Winter, Peter. "Alfred Jensen." Das Kunstwerk, vol. XXVI, no. 2 (March 1973), pp. 79-80.
Zemel, Carol. "New York; Alfred Jensen." Artscanada, vol. XXX, nos. 5-6, issue nos. 184, 185, 186, 187 (December 1973-January 1974), p. 205.
Brunelle, Al. “Pace Gallery, New York: Alfred Jensen” (exhibition review). Art News (December 1973): 99.
Matthais, Rosemary. "Alfred Jensen." Arts Magazine, vol. 48, no. 8 (Summer 1972), p. 60.
Schjeldahl, Peter. "Ever Intimidated by a Painting?" New York Times (28 May 1972), p. 17.
Bishop, James. "Alfred Jensen: Cordier & Ekstrom." Art News, vol. 69, no. 3 (May 1970), p. 68.
Domingo, Willis. "Alfred Jensen at Cordier & Ekstrom." Arts Magazine, vol. 44, no. 6 (April 1970), p. 59.
Glueck, Grace. "Something for Every Appetite: New York Gallery Notes." Art in America, vol. 58, no. 2 (March-April 1970), p. 150.
Jensen, Alfred. "The Reciprocal Relation of Unity 20, 1969." Art Now: New York, vol. 2, no. 4 (1970), n.p.
Moore, Ethel, ed. "Letters from 31 Artists to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery." Gallery Notes, vols. XXXI and XXXII, no. 2 (Spring 1970), p. 17.
Vinklers, Bitite. "New York: Alfred Jensen." Art International, vol. XIV, no. 5 (May 1970), pp. 85-86.
Dienst, R. G. "Ausstellungen in New York." Das Kunstwerk, vol. 21, nos. 6-7 (April 1968), p. 24.
Nemser, Cindy. "Treasures from Inventory III." Arts Magazine, vol. 42, no. 3 (December 1967-January 1968), p. 52.
Bochner, Mel. "The Serial Attitude." Artforum, vol. VI, no. 4 (December 1967), pp. 28-33.
"Ausstellung in Zürich." Werk, vol. 53, no. 6 (June 1966), p. 142.
Coplans, John. "Los Angeles: Object Lesson: Prints by Alfred Jensen." Art News, vol. 64, no. 9 (January 1966), p. 67.
Factor, Don. "Alfred Jensen: Rolf Nelson Gallery." Artforum, vol. IV, no. 5 January 1966), p. 15.
Hoene, Anne. "Alfred Jensen." Arts Magazine, vol. 39, nos. 8-9 (May-June 1965), pp. 57-58.
Levine, Neil A. "Alfred Jensen." Art News, vol. 64, no. 3 (May 1965), p. 10.
Ashton, Dore. "Alfred Jensen: Graham Gallery." Studio International, vol. 167, no. 849 (January 1964), pp. 42-43.
Danieli, Fidel A. "Alfred Jensen: Rolf Nelson Gallery." Artforum, vol. II, no. 10 (April 1964), p. 45.
"Fifty-Six Painters and Sculptors." Art in America, vol. 52, no. 4 (August 1964), p. 40.
Harrison, Jane. "Alfred Jensen. " Arts Magazine, vol. 38, no. 4 (January 1964), p. 35.
Margules, De Hirsh. "Reply to 'World View of Alfred Jensen'. " Art News, vol. 62, no. 9 January 1964), p. 6.
Art and Architecture (July 1964): 7.
Art International (Christmas 1964): 51.
Coplans, John. "Los Angeles: Object Lesson" (Rolfe Nelson Gallery exhibition review). Art News 64, no.9 (January 1966): 40, 67.
Judd, Donald. "Al Jensen." Arts Magazine, vol. 37, no. 7 (April 1963), p. 53.
Kaprow, Allan. "The World View of Alfred Jensen." Art News, vol. 62, no. 7 (December 1963), pp. 28-31; 64-66.
Sandler, Irving H. "Reviews and Previews: Alfred Jensen." Art News, vol. 62, no. I (March 1963), p. 15.
Staber, Margit. "Schweizer Notizen: Alfred Jensen." Art International, vol. VII, no. 10 (Christmas 1963-New Year 1964), p. 51.
Crehan, Hubert. "Alfred Jensen: Jackson." Art News, vol. 59, no. 9 (January 1961), pp. 11-12.
Sandler, Irving H. "In the Art Galleries." New York Post (1 October 1961), p. 12.
Sawin, Martica. "Alfred Jensen." Arts, vol. 35, no. 4 (January 1961), p. 61.
"Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists." Das Kunstwerk, vol. 15, no. 4 (November 1961), p. 59.
Jensen, Alfred. "The Promise." The Hasty Papers: A One-Shot Review (1960), pp. 49-50.
Dennison, George. "Alfred Jensen." Arts, vol. 34, no. 3 ~December 1959), pp. 57-58.
Jensen, Alfred, "Statement." It Is, no. 4 (Autumn 1959), p. 15.
Sandler, Irving H. "Alfred Jensen: Jackson." Art News, vol. 58, no. 4 (Summer 1959), p. 17.
Sawin, Martica. "Alfred Jensen." Arts, vol. 33, no. 9 ~June 1959), pp. 62-63.
Schuyler, James. "Alfred Jensen: Jackson." Art News, vol. 58, no. 8 (December 1959), p. 17.
Schuyler, James. "Alfred Jensen: Schaefer." Art News, vol. 56, no. 7 (November 1957), p. 14.
Seckler, Dorothy. "Alfred Jensen." Arts, vol. 32, no. 2 (November 1957), p. 60.
C. L. F. "Alfred Jensen. " Arts, vol. 30, no. 2 (November 1955), p. 53.
Schuyler, James. "Alfred Jensen: Tanager." Art News, vol. 54, no. 8 (December 1955), p. 57.
LaFarge, Henry. "Alfred J. Jensen." Art News, vol. 51, no. I (March 1952), p. 54.
Zwart, Kartin. "Alfred Jensen." Art Digest, vol. 26, no. 11 (March 1952), p. 22.
Musham, Leila Hadley. "Alfred Jensen: Metaphysical and Primitive" (1975, New York), unpublished.
Sandler, Irving H. and Torlen, Michael. Interview with Alfred Jensen (Glen Ridge, New Jersey, 15 May 1975), unpublished.
Cathcart, Linda L. and Tucker, Marcia. Interview with Alfred Jensen (Glen Ridge, New Jersey, 30-31 March 1977), unpublished.
Crosman, Christopher and Miller, Nancy. Interview with Alfred Jensen (Glen Ridge, New Jersey, 6 April 1977), videotape.
Jensen, Regina Bogat. Interview with Alfred Jensen (Glen Ridge, New Jersey, August 1977), unpublished.
Current Alfred Jensen exhibiitons will be listed here.
Upcoming Alfred Jensen exhibiitons will be listed here.
Recent Alfred Jensen exhibiitons will be listed here.
Alfred Jensen has exhibited extensively worldwide, including the entire Guggenheim NY in 1985, and the Dia Arts Center in 2001.
one-artist exhibitions group exhibitions
Alfred Jensen: Works from Swiss Collection, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, April 25–July 26, 2015. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen, Pace Prints, New York, January 5–February 5, 2011
Alfred Jensen, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, March 26–May 19, 2010. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: The Number Paintings, PaceWildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, New York, September 29–October 28, 2006. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: Paintings from the 1970s, Texas Gallery, Houston, September 14–October 23, 2004.
Alfred Jensen, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, November 13–December 5, 2001.
Alfred Jensen: Concordance, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, September 20, 2001–June 16, 2002. Traveled to: Santa Monica Museum of Art, January 23–April 19, 2003. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen, PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, New York, September 15–October 13, 2001.
Alfred Jensen: Crossing the Equator, PaceWildenstein, Los Angeles, March 25–May 1, 1999.
Alfred Jensen “Selected Paintings,” Basilico Fine Arts, New York, December 4, 1998–January 9, 1999.
Alfred Jensen: The Relationships Between Structure and Function, Buchmann Galerie, Cologne, November 7–December 20, 1997.
Alfred Jensen Paintings and Drawings: A Survey, PaceWildenstein, Los Angeles, February 9–March 9, 1996.
Alfred Jensen, Max Protech, New York, closed February 17, New York, 1996.
Alfred Jensen: Paintings, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich, December 7, 1995–February 10, 1996.
Alfred Jensen: “Where the Gods Reside,” Paintings 1963–1968, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, January 13–February 11, 1995. (Brochure)
Arts New Jersey 2: Alfred Jensen—The New Jersey Years, 1972–1981, Newark Museum, New Jersey, January 15–April 24, 1994.
Alfred Jensen: The Pythagorean, Werke 1957–1973, Galerie Rigassi, Bern, November 3–December 31, 1993. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: Bilder und Arbeiten auf Papier von 1952 bis 1978, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich, November 26, 1992–February 1993. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: Paintings, The Pace Gallery, 142 Greene Street, New York, January 19–February 23, 1991. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Works on Paper, Linda Cathcart Gallery, Santa Monica, April 28–May 26, 1990.
Alfred Jensen, Blancpain Stepczynski, Geneva, September 14–October 28, 1989.
Alfred Jensen, Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan, April 4–May 2, 1989.
Alfred Jensen, Waddington Galleries, London, March 30–April 23, 1988. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: Major Paintings, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, March 20–April 18, 1987.
Alfred Jensen, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, January 18–February 15, 1986.
Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Works on Paper, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 13–November 3, 1985. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: The Late Works, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, December 2, 1983–January 7, 1984. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen “The Great Pyramid” and other paintings of 1979 and 1980, Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, March 19–April 26, 1981.
Alfred Jensen, Wenger Gallery, La Jolla, July–August 1978.
Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Diagrams from the Years 1957–1977, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, January 15–February 26, 1978. Traveled to: New Museum, New York, March 10–April 21, 1978; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, May 5–June 23, 1978; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California, July 3–August 6, 1978; Department of Fine Arts Gallery, University of Colorado Museum, Boulder, July 3–August 6, 1978; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, August 18–October 1, 1978. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen, Galerie Kornfeld, Zurich, October 1–December 18, 1977.
Alfred Jensen (with Sam Francis), Kornfeld & Klipstein, Basel, October 1–December 18, 1977. (Brochure)
Alfred Jensen: Selected Works 1961–74, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, January 10–February 7, 1976.
Alfred Jensen, Kornfeld & Klipstein, Basel, June 19–August 10, 1975. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen, Kunsthalle, Basel, June 19–August 10, 1975. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: Recent Paintings, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, October 27–November 24, 1973. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, January 12–February 11, 1973. Traveled to: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, February 17–March 18, 1973; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, June 22–July 29, 1973; Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, August–September 1973; Kunsthalle Bern, October 20–December 2, 1973. (Catalogues)
Alfred Jensen, Paintings, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, May 6–June 7, 1972.
Alfred Jensen, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, 1970.
Alfred Jensen, Galerie Kornfeld, Zurich, 1970.
Alfred Jensen: The Aperspective Structure of a Square, Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York, March–April 4, 1970. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: The Acroatic Rectangle, J.L. Hudson Gallery, Detroit, May 14–June 8. 1968.
Alfred Jensen, Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York, February 13–March 16, 1968.
Works of Graphic/Alfred Jensen, Royal Marks Gallery, New York, April 19–May 4, 1966.
Alfred Jensen, Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, March 31–April 30, 1966. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: The Acroatic Rectangle, Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York, February 6–March 2, 1966.
Alfred Jensen: A Pythagorean Notebook, Rolf Nelson Gallery, Los Angeles, October 25–November 20, 1965.
Alfred Jensen, Graham Gallery, New York, March 30–April 24, 1965.
Alfred Jensen, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, May 15–April 24, 1964. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen, Rolf Nelson Gallery, Los Angeles, February 10–March 7, 1964.
Alfred Jensen (with Franz Kline), Kunsthalle, Basel, January 31–March 1, 1964. (Catalogue)
An Exhibition of Five Murals by Alfred Jensen, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey, 1963.
Alfred Jensen: Divine Analogy and Time Reckoning, Graham Gallery, New York, November 5–December 7, 1963.
Alfred Jensen, Kornfeld & Klipstein, Bern, October–November, 1963. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: Duality Triumphant, Graham Gallery, New York, March 5–30, 1963.
Alfred Jensen, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, August 30–October 8, 1961. (Pamphlet)
Alfred Jensen: Magic Square, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, January 18–February 14, 1961.
Alfred Jensen and the Image of the Prism, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, November 24–December 12, 1959. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen: First Exhibition of Murals, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, April 22–May 18, 1959. (Catalogue)
Recent Oils by Alfred Jensen, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, November 11–30, 1957.
Al Jensen: Paintings, Tanager Gallery, New York, October 21–November 10, 1955
Alfred Jensen: Experiments in Color, John Heller Gallery, New York, March 17–29, 1952. (Brochure)
True Colors, Nassau County Museum of Art, Rosalyn Harbor, New York, July 21–November 2, 2018.
Principia Mathematica, Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, February 8–March 17, 2018.
Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason 1950–1980, Met Breuer, New York, September 13, 2017–January 14, 2018. (Catalogue).
Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, January 10–April 1, 2017. Traveled to: NYUAD Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi, October 4, 2017–January 13, 2018. (Catalogue)
Talking on Paper, Pace Beijing, April 16–June 11, 2016.
On the Square Part II, Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, October 1–29, 2015.
Eureka, Pace Gallery, 508 West 25th Street, New York, May 2–June 27 (extended through August 28), 2015.
Some Artists: David Diao, Mary Beth Edelson, Alfred Jensen, Loren Munk, Ward Shelley, John Zinsser, Minus Space, Brooklyn, New York, November 1–December 20, 2014.
THERE WAS A BAD TREE: N. Dash, John Giorno, Alfred Jensen, Pace London, 6–10 Lexington Street, October 13–November 15, 2014. (Catalogue)
Summer Group Show, Pace Hong Kong, 15C Entertainment Building, 30 Queens Road Central, July 24–September 4, 2014.
Pop Abstraction, Fredericks & Freizer, New York, January 18–February 15, 2014.
System/Repetition, Russell Bowman Art Advisory, Chicago, September 6–October 26, 2013.
Image and Abstraction, Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York, July 19–August 16, 2013.
The Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, June 11–September 1, 2013. (Catalogue)
Winter Group Show, Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, January 7–26, 2013.
Alfred Jensen/Sol LeWitt: Systems and Transformation, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, January 13–February 11, 2012.
Happenings: New York, 1958–1963, The Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, February 10–March 17, 2012. (Catalogue)
The Long Curve: 150 Years of Visionary Collection at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, November 4, 2011–March 4, 2012. (Catalogue)
Katherine Bernhardt, Alfred Jensen, Chris Johanson, Chris Martin, Andrew Masullo, and Judith Scott, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, June 30–August 6, 2011.
Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, David Zwirner, New York, March 11–April 30, 2011.
50 Years at Pace, The Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, September 17–October 23, 2010. (Catalogue)
The Alchemy of Things Unknown (and a Visual Meditation on Transformation), Khastoo Gallery, Los Angeles, June 10–July 31, 2010.
Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection, Acquavella Galleries, New York, April 13–May 27, 2010. (Catalogue)
On the Square, PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, New York, January 8–February 13, 2010.
Back to the Future: Alfred Jensen, Charmion Von Weigand, and Simon Gouverneur, and the Cosmic Conversation, Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, September 18–December 23, 2009. (Catalogue)
Exile on Main Street, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands, February 15–August 16, 2009. (Catalogue)
Geometry as Image, Russell Bowman Art Advisory, Chicago, January 16–March 21, 2009.
Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art, Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, September 21, 2008–January 4, 2009. (Catalogue)
Sparks! The William T. Kemper Collection Initiative, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, May 3–July 20, 2008.
To Infinity and Beyond: Mathematics in Contemporary Art, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, April 19–June 22, 2008.
Collecting Collections: Highlights of the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, February 10–May 19, 2008. (Catalogue)
PEEP: Glimpses of the Last 4 Decades from the Kerry Stokes Collection, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, Australia, November 25, 2007–April 6, 2008. Traveled to: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, May 29–August 25, 2008. (Catalogue)
Anywhere Out of This World: Postwar Works from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, November 18, 2007–January 21, 2008.
Cosmologies, James Cohan Gallery, New York, January 11–February 10, 2007.
Mel Bochner/Alfred Jensen: Homage to Pythagoras, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, October 21–November 30, 2006.
Plane/Figure: Amerikanische Kunst aus Schweizer Privatsammlungen und aus dem Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, August 26–November 19, 2006.
Summer group show, PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, New York, June 27–August 25, 2006.
Math Counts, Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Storrs, February 27–April 14, 2006.
Looking At Words: The Formal Use of Text in Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, November 2, 2005–January, 2006.
Long-term installation, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, September 2005–September 2006.
Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule Based Art, PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, New York, February 18–March 26, 2005. (Catalogue)
Summer 2004, PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, New York, July 8–September 10, 2004.
The Privilege of Solitude: Forrest Bess, Alfred Jensen, Nielsen Gallery, Boston, April 10–May 15, 2004.
Inaugural Exhibition, Bentley Projects, Phoenix, February 7–April 30, 2004.
Endless Love, DC Moore Gallery, New York, January 7–February 7, 2004.
In Sequence: Lee Bontecou, Jay DeFeo, Burgoyne Diller, Alfred Jensen, Anne Ryan, Charles Seliger and Charmion von Wiegand, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, November 6, 2003–January 10, 2004.
A Way With Words, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, June 5–July 12, 2003.
Structures of Difference: Painting, Sculpture, and Photography of Past 50 Years, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, October 12, 2002–April 13, 2003.
Happy New Year! PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, New York, January 19–February 9, 2002.
Noncomposition: 15 Case Studies, 1955–1980, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, December 22, 2001–June 23, 2002.
Patterns: Between Object and Arabesque, Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark, September 22–December 17, 2001. Traveled.
Works on Paper, Neuhoff Gallery, New York, September 11–October 1, 2001.
Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Société des Expositions, Bruxelles, June 29–September 16, 2001. Traveled to: Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, October 18, 2001–January 7, 2002.
Masters of Contemporary Art from the Chase Manhattan Collection, Queens Museum of Art, Flushing Meadows, May 21–September 15, 2000.
Kunstwelten im Dialog: von Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart, Museum Ludwig, Köln, November 5, 1999–March 19, 2000.
Summer ‘99, PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, New York, July 9–August 13, 1999.
Art at Work: Forty Years of The Chase Manhattan Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, March 3–May 2, 1999.
60s in the 70s, Ubu Gallery, New York, May 23–June 27, 1998
Group Show, PaceWildenstein, Los Angeles, May 15–June 13, 1998
A Selection of Works from the Edward R. Broida Collection, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida, March 12–June 21, 1998. (Catalogue)
Group Show, PaceWildenstein, Los Angeles, March 12–April 4, 1998
{Defining Structures}, LaSalle Partners at NationsBank Plaza, Charlotte, North Carolina, January 12–October 31, 1998. (Catalogue)
Homemade Champagne, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, January12–February 13, 1998.
Inaugural Exhibition Ace Gallery Mexico, Ace Gallery, Mexico, 1997.
Perfect Being, Roland Gibson Art Gallery, State University of New York, Potsdam, September 5–October 15, 1997. Traveled to: Gallery 400, University of Chicago, November 10–December 12, 1997. (Catalogue)
Alfred Jensen & Tony Smith: Personal Geometry, PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, New York, May 2–June 20, 1997. (Catalogue)
Magie der Zahl in der Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts / The Magic Number in 20th Century Art, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, February 1–May 19, 1997.
Signs & Symbols, Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York, November 2–December 21, 1996.
The Geometric Tradition in America, Meyerson & Nowinski Art Associates, Seattle, September 5–November 3, 1996.
Summer group show, PaceWildenstein, Los Angeles, June 27–July 20, 1996.
Summer group show, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, June 28–September 10, 1993.
Pittsburgh Collects, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, February 20–April 25, 1993.
Arte Americana 1930–1970, Lingotto, S.r.l., Turin, Italy, 1992.
Paint, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, April 4–May 9, 1992.
Compulsion, Jamison Thomas Gallery, New York, March 28–April 27, 1991.
Post-War Geometric Concepts 1945–1990, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York, March 6–April 6, 1991.
El Sueño de Egipto, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo AC, Mexico City, January 13––March 1 (extended through May 26), 1991. (Catalogue)
Contemporary American Artists, Residence of Ambassador, United States Emabassy, Mexico City, 1990–1993. (Catalogue)
Color in Art: American Expressions from the Mid-twentieth Century to the Present, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, September 22–December 2, 1990.
Portrait of an American Gallery: The Pace Gallery, Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels, April 19–June 23, 1990. (Catalogue)
Bilderstreit: Die International Kunst von 1960 bis Heute, Museum Ludwig, Cologne Fair Center, April 8–June 28, 1989.
American Exploration in Geometry, Color and Surface, 1950s and the 1960s, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York, June 7–July 1, 1988.
Arakawa, Alfred Jensen, Sol LeWitt, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, June 4–July 15, 1988.
Generations of Geometry, Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center, New York, June 27–August 26, 1987. (Catalogue)
Hans Hofmann and His Legacy, Lever/Meyerson Galleries, Ltd., New York, October 15–December 12, 1986. (Catalogue)
Acquisitions, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, January 4–February 8, 1986.
Between Science and Fiction, 18th Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil, October 4–December 15, l985.
American Abstract Painting: 1960–1980, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, June 19–August 24, 1985.
Group exhibition, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, April 7–April 21, 1984.
I Knew It To Be So! Forrest Bess, Alfred Jensen, Myron Stout, Theory and the Visionary, New York Studio School, March 30–May 2, 1984. Traveled to: Center for the Arts, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, May 18–June 29, 1984. (Catalogue)
Aspects of the 70s: Mavericks, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, May 22–June 29, 1980. (Catalogue)
American Painting of the 1970s, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York, December 9, 1978–January 14, 1979. Traveled to: Newport Harbor Art Museum, California, February 3–March 18 1979; Oakland Museum, California, April 10–May 20, 1979; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, July 6–August 26, 1979; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, September 9–October 21, 1979; Krannert Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, November 11, 1979–January 22, 1980. (Catalogue)
Late Twentieth Century Art: The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation, Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, December 5, 1978–January 8, 1979. (Catalogue)
Numerals: 1924–1977, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, January 7–28, 1978. Traveled to: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, February 14–March 26, 1978; University Art Gallery, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, August 29–September 26, 1978; Minneapolis College of Art and Design, October 4–November 1, 1978; Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, November 10–December 10, 1978; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, January 5–February 4, 1979; Center for the Visual Arts Gallery, Illinois State University, Normal, February 17–March 16, 1979; New Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, May 15–June 15, 1979. (Catalogue)
1st Biennial of New Jersey Artists, Newark Museum, October 26–December 11, 1977.
XIV International Biennial of São Paulo. Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, October 1–December 18, 1977.
Time, Philadelphia College of Art, April 24–May 21, 1977. (Catalogue)
Collectors, Collecting, Collection: American Abstract Art Since 1945, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, April 22–June 5, 1977. (Catalogue)
1977 Biennial Exhibition, Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, January 10–March 18, 1977. (Catalogue)
Acquisition Priorities: Aspects of Postwar Painting in America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 15, 1976–January 16, 1977.
The Martha Jackson Collection at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, November 21, 1975–January 4, 1976. (Catalogue)
Color, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; in collaboration with the International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October–November 1975. (Catalogue)
Selections from the Martha Jackson Gallery Collection, University Art Gallery, State University of New York, Albany, February 1975. (Catalogue)
The Private Collection of Martha Jackson, University of Maryland Department of Art, University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, June 22–September 30, 1973. Traveled to: Finch College Museum of Art, New York, October 16–November 25, 1973; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, January 8–February 10, 1974. (Catalogue)
1973 Biennial Exhibition, Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, January 10–March 18, 1973. (Catalogue)
Exhibition of Works by Contemporary Artists Who Are Not Members of the Institute, Gallery of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, 1972.
Recent American Painting and Sculpture in the Albright-Knox Gallery, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NewYork, November 17–December 31, 1972. (Catalogue)
Fall Exhibitions 1972: Selections from the Aldrich Museum Collection and the Invitational Showing of Paintings on Paper, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, September 17–December 17, 1972. (Catalogue)
Documenta 5: Internationale Ausstellung, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, June 30–October 8, 1972. (Catalogue)
Seventieth American Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago, June 24–August 20, 1972. (Catalogue)
Grids, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, January 27–March 1, 1972. (Catalogue)
The Structure of Color, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 25–April 18, 1971. (Catalogue)
Highlights of the 1969–70 Art Season, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, June 21–September 13, 1970.
American Painting 1970, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, May 4–June 7, 1970.
Painting and Sculpture Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art, April 1970.
109 obras de Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 1969.
Black White, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, October 12–27, 1969.
Tamarind: Homage to Lithography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 29–June 30, 1969. Traveled.
Neue Kunst U.S.A. Barock-Minimal, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich, 1968.
Art of the 60s: Selections from the Collection of Hanford Yang, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, September 29–December 22, 1968. (Catalogue)
Documenta 4: Internationale Ausstellung, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, June 7–October 6, 1968. (Catalogue)
Plus by Minus: Today's Half Century, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, March 3–April 4, 1968. (Catalogue)
Treasures from Inventory III, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, January 16–31, 1968.
The Rainbow Room, Graham Gallery, New York, 1967.
Sammlung Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, Kunstmuseum, Basel, November 4, 1967–January 7, 1968.
Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Which Were Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed As Art, School of Visual Arts Gallery, New York, December 2–23, 1966.
The 8th Annual Art Exhibition of Japan, Metropolitan Art Gallery, Tokyo. Traveled, 1965–1966.
Highlights of 1964–65, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1965.
Colorists 1950–1965, San Francisco Museum of Art, October 15–November 21, 1965.
Highlights of the 1964–1965 Art Season, Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, July 11–September 19, 1965. (Catalogue)
Kane Memorial Exhibition, Brown University, Providence, March 31–April 24, 1965.
A Decade of New Talent, American Federation of Arts Gallery, New York. Traveled, 1964.
“Old hundred” Selections from The Larry Aldrich Contemporary Collection, 1951–1964, The Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, October 1964. (Catalogue)
Documenta III: Internationale Ausstellung, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, August–October 1964.
32nd Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte Venezia: Selections from the Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Venice, June 20–October 18, 1964.
Post-Painterly Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 23–June 7, 1964. Traveled to: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, July 13–August 16, 1964, Art Gallery of Toronto, November 2–December 20, 1964. (Catalogue)
Banners, Graham Gallery, New York, 1963.
Recent Trends, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1963.
Paintings from The Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., December 17, 1963–March 1, 1964.
Annual Exhibition 1963: Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, December 11, 1963–February 2, 1964. (Catalogue)
The 28th Biennial Exhibition 1963, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., January 18–March 3, 1963.
Painting International, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, December 18, 1962–January 5, 1963.
New Accessions U.S.A., 1962, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, June 27–September 12, 1962.
Geometric Abstraction in America, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 20–May 13, 1962. (Catalogue)
65th American Exhibition: Some Directions in Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago, January 5–February 18, 1962 (Catalogue)
American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October–December 1961.
The Private Myth, Tanager Gallery, New York, October 6–26, 1961.
100 Paintings from the G. David Thompson Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May–August 1961. (Catalogue)
Jensen and Schwitters, Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, 1960.
Segunda Bienal Interamericana de Mexico, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 1960. (Catalogue)
Collector’s Choice IV, City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, December 2–11, 1960.
Konkrete Kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung, Helmhaus, Zurich, June 8–August 14, 1960. (Catalogue)
Paintings, Reuben Gallery, New York, January 29–February 18, 1960.
The Image Lost and Found, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, January 1960. (Catalogue)
Third Annual Exhibition, Lower Eastside Independent Artists, New York, 1958.
Painters and Sculptors on 10th Street, Tanager Gallery, New York, 1956.
Fifth Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, Stable Gallery, New York, Nay 22–June 16, 1956.
Fourth Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, Stable Gallery, New York, April 26–May 21, 1955.
Third Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, Stable Gallery, New York, January 26–February 20, 1954.
Alfred Jensen is represented by
Pace Gallery
540 West 25th Street,
New York, NY 10001
Tel: (+1) 212 421-3292
