Alfred Jensen
Conveying a complex web of ideas, often incorporating calligraphy or numerical systems, they are frequently referred to as "concrete" abstract art.
[3] Throughout his life, Jensen met and collaborated with many already or subsequently influential artists, most notably Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró, and Allan Kaprow,[2] and held exhibitions with contemporaries including Ulfert Wilke, Robert Becker, Sally Hazelet, Franz Kline, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg.
[3] A well traveled citizen of the world, he spoke five languages and similarly refused to settle into any one artistic movement, remaining a challenge to categorize—as noted by Peter Schjeldahl in his essay "Jensen’s Difficulty".
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.
Henry Luce III, son of the founder of Time magazine, first collected his work, eventually commissioning a mural for the Time/Life building in Paris in 1959.
[3] Around 1960 Jensen read Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, by J. Eric S. Thompson, which linked to his childhood in Guatemala, and would prove to be a theme in much of his subsequent work.
[8] Museum exhibitions after his death include major retrospectives by: "(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[9] "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.
"[10] "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.
