Alfred Julio Jensen

Alfred Julio Jensen (11 December 1903 – 4 April 1981) was an abstract painter. His paintings are often characterized by grids of brightly colored triangles, circles or squares, painted in thick impasto. Conveying a complex web of ideas, often incorporating calligraphy or numerical systems, they are frequently referred to as "concrete" abstract art. After his death in 1981, the Guggenheim organized a major retrospective of his work, having held his solo exhibition there in 1961.

Biography Alfred Jensen was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on December 11, 1903. His father Peter was a Danish entrepreneur, and his mother Anna a German-Polish governess working for a French family. Upon his mother's death in 1910, the seven-year-old was sent to Hørsholm, Denmark, to live with his uncle. After graduating from elementary school in Denmark in 1917, Jensen traveled extensively working as a ship's cabin boy—drawing portraits of the passengers and crew. Between 1921 and 1923, he worked as a cowboy and chicken farmer between San Diego and then Guatemala, before returning to San Diego. There he worked as a lumber salesman, while attending San Diego High School at night and then receiving a scholarship to the San Diego Fine Arts School at Balboa Park.

In 1926, he traveled to Munich, Germany, to study under Hans Hofmann, an abstract expressionist painter who trained numerous well-known artists at his schools in Germany and the United States. There he met fellow student Saidie Adler May, a wealthy art collector. For the next 34 years, she was a patron of his work, and he accompanied her in extensive travels, together studying the masters throughout Europe and collecting works by artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Naum Gabo and Fritz Glarner. In 1951, upon her death, the collection was divided among the Baltimore Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1963, at the age of 60, he married fellow abstract painter Regina Bogat. They traveled and painted together for six months in Italy, Egypt, Greece, France and Switzerland, then had a daughter, Anna in 1965, and son Peter in 1970, finally moving to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1972. Alfred Jensen died on April 4, 1981, in Livingston, New Jersey.

Works

Upon the death of Saidie May in 1951, Jensen settled in New York and began to focus exclusively on painting, out of his Lincoln Arcade studio. Here he first gained the attention of James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim Museum. His first solo exhibition of twelve canvases was held in 1952 at the John Heller Gallery, Around this time, he began what would be long friendships with painter Mark Rothko and art critic Lil Picard. This was followed by his first solo show at the Tanager Gallery in 1955, the same year he began to exchange ideas with Sam Francis.

By the mid 1970s, he became interested in ancient number systems, magnetism and planetary effects on seasons, which became themes of his subsequent paintings.

"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 the show encompassed." -Peter Perrin, Arts Canada. "(This show) is devoted to an artist whose following is only beginning to emerge and whose true importance for twentieth-century painting seems to us to be no more than foreshadowed." -Thomas M. Messer, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation "Jensen's highly respected but rarely seen paintings elaborate his comsological theories, drawing on the sciences of astronomy, physics, and mathematics, and frequently involving Mayan and Chinese calendrical systems. Included are large-scale multi-part paintings that span the artist's mature career beginning in 1960. Among the highlights of the exhibition is Great Pyramid (1980), a key late work never before exhibited publicly." "Active since the early 1950s, Jensen discovered his mature artistic voice in 1960, after repudiating abstract expressionist form and color in favor of an art based exclusively on the diagram. In such key works as Cycle Ending, Per I-V (1960) and Parthenon (1962), Jensen developed the parameters of a vision that would define his work over the next twenty years: signs from Mayan calendrical and numerical systems, palette from Goethian color theory, and patterns echoing Guatemala’s landscape, architecture, and textiles." -from the exhibition overview Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Baltimore Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Dia Center for the Arts, the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution and Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Alfred Jensen Estate is represented by the Pace Gallery, New York.