[3] Hansen came from a farming background in Denmark and originally trained at a technical school to become a painting contractor, later taking evening classes at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

An admirer of Edvard Munch, he became part of the De Tretten (The Thirteen) group, modernist painters who rebelled against the academic style and expressed great interest in Expressionism and Cubism.

Examples of these include the mural for the newly completed post office building in Lovelock, Nevada, commissioned in 1939 by the Federal Works Agency as part of the New Deal program.

For this, Hansen chose "The Uncovering of the Comstock Lode" as a suitable local subject, treating it in the style of simplified realism favored by the Agency.

Bram Dijkstra, discussing this aspect of Hansen's work in his 1996 article on Early Modernism in Southern California, describes him as painting "startling character studies of tormented or eccentric men and world-weary young women on the edge of disintegration.