| Alfred Jensen | ||
| Birth Date: December 11, 1903 |
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| Death Date: April 4, 1981 Artist Gallery |
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| Alfred Julio Jensen used rich color and thick paint in geometric designs that ranged from suggestions of symbolism and Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. Jensen was an American painter and printmaker of Guatemalan birth, of Polish and Danish heritage; he started school in Denmark and completed high school in San Diego, California. He eventually decided to train as a painter, studying at the San Diego Fine Arts School in 1925 and with Hans Hofmann in Munich in 1926/27. Jensen settled permanently in the United States only in 1934.
The patronage of Saidie Alder May, a wealthy woman whom he met in 1927 as a fellow student of Hofmann, made it possible for him to dedicate himself to the study of color theory, Mayan and Inca cultures, science, mathematics and philosophy. They remained together until her death in 1951. His twenty-year study of Goethe’s color theory resulted in diagrammatic canvases exhibited in his first one-man show in 1953, at the relatively late age of fifty. Much of this knowledge was later transposed into complex, diagrammatic pictures which are characterized by grid structures of tiny squares in bright opaque colors
Although there is sometimes a superficial resemblance between works by Jensen and Jasper Johns – Jensen’s purpose in using such forms and symbols was personal, bordering on the metaphysical. The complexity of the relationships of color was paralleled by mathematical sequences which reflected Jensen’s interest in magical numerical systems.
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