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Lot Essay
The seven panel painting Taj Mahal is widely considered to be one of Alfred Jensen’s most important paintings masterpiece and illustrates his intentions to “invent, arrange, dispose and organize color into a form worthy of a work of art” (A. Jensen quoted by L. Cathcart, “Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Diagrams from the Years 1957-1977, p. 4). Interlocking rings alternate between black-and-white and prismatic color, connecting three panels across nearly fifteen feet. Encircled by black, the white cross-like center of the black-and-white bands appear to pierce the composition with light and give it the quality of lace. The rainbow-like color wheels arranged atop this already complex patterning, repeat in a regular system that heightens the correspondence between individual colors that pulse across the canvas as one’s eye takes note of them, only to disappear when another color comes to prominence. Two, slightly taller panels intercept the pattern’s span with one another. Not only loftier, but darker, these two panels, themselves composed of four parts, feature rows of chevron bands. Here the multihued shapes punctuate their surrounding darkness like faceted jewels or panes stained glass windows. In fact, the artist applied paint thickly, in a dense impasto that curls off the surface of the canvas because, he believed, that over time the surface would take on a glass-like quality.
Alfred Jensen was born in 1903 to a Danish father and German-Polish mother living in Guatemala City. Though he would move to Denmark at age 10, the Mayan ruins and the colors of Guatemala would imprint themselves in Jensen’s mind to reappear as the source of paintings in his adulthood. The artist’s first interactions with color came during his training under the Fauvist painters Charles Despiau, Othon Friesz, and Charles Dufresne, who stressed bold engagement with color for its expressive potential, breaking free of its relationship to reality. After completing his studies Jensen would combine this painterly interest in dense coloration and the lush materiality, with his interested in understanding and diagramming systems belonging to the realms of the spiritual, mathematical, astronomical, and scientific aspects of ancient cultures. While seemingly disparate, Jensen saw these pursuits as irrevocably intertwined.
In addition to Mayan pyramids, the iconic architecture of Ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Aztec culture would inspire Jensen’s abstract paintings. In Taj Mahal, Jensen pays homage to another iconic architectural monument from a non-Western culture. Jensen would abstract the architectural structure of these monuments, as he did when he painted the temple of Palenque from an aerial view that flattened its dimensionality into a jigsaw puzzle of color piece on the surface of the canvas. Echoing the patterns found on Persian rugs, Byzantine mosaics and Arabic and Islamic tiles, Taj Mahal reproduces the effects found in the interiors of these iconic architectures, rather than their structures themselves. In the catalogue accompanying Jensen’s 1978 retrospective exhibition shown at the New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues, curator Marcia Tucker elaborates, “…Jensen’s use of motif is incidental to his intent which is clearly spiritual and philosophical… Taj Mahal utilizes the repeated motif of a shape from an Indian screen, in which figure and ground repeatedly reverse themselves. … Although the use of clear, prismatic colors and repeated motifs are characteristic of his work, the underlying structure is densely complex, and his intentions are always to reveal meanings with more than a visual dimension” (M. Tucker, “Mythic Vision: The Work of Alfred Jensen,” Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Diagrams from the years 1957-1977, New York, 1978, p. 14).
The most significant influence on Jensen's painting throughout his career was his understanding of Goethe's Theory of Colors. He read the text in 1938 and would returned to it many times over the course of his life. Jensen was drawn to Goethe's concept of the duality of color as it springs from the basic contest between black and white. He saw colors not as a sequence but an engagement between opposition. Such an understanding of color led itself naturally to the spiritual dimension sought after by the artist though painting. In fact, Jensen’s interest in the color-based pattern of Taj Mahal connects beyond mere decoration to a belief that patterns replicate the structure of the universe and express spiritual truths.
Alfred Jensen was born in 1903 to a Danish father and German-Polish mother living in Guatemala City. Though he would move to Denmark at age 10, the Mayan ruins and the colors of Guatemala would imprint themselves in Jensen’s mind to reappear as the source of paintings in his adulthood. The artist’s first interactions with color came during his training under the Fauvist painters Charles Despiau, Othon Friesz, and Charles Dufresne, who stressed bold engagement with color for its expressive potential, breaking free of its relationship to reality. After completing his studies Jensen would combine this painterly interest in dense coloration and the lush materiality, with his interested in understanding and diagramming systems belonging to the realms of the spiritual, mathematical, astronomical, and scientific aspects of ancient cultures. While seemingly disparate, Jensen saw these pursuits as irrevocably intertwined.
In addition to Mayan pyramids, the iconic architecture of Ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Aztec culture would inspire Jensen’s abstract paintings. In Taj Mahal, Jensen pays homage to another iconic architectural monument from a non-Western culture. Jensen would abstract the architectural structure of these monuments, as he did when he painted the temple of Palenque from an aerial view that flattened its dimensionality into a jigsaw puzzle of color piece on the surface of the canvas. Echoing the patterns found on Persian rugs, Byzantine mosaics and Arabic and Islamic tiles, Taj Mahal reproduces the effects found in the interiors of these iconic architectures, rather than their structures themselves. In the catalogue accompanying Jensen’s 1978 retrospective exhibition shown at the New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues, curator Marcia Tucker elaborates, “…Jensen’s use of motif is incidental to his intent which is clearly spiritual and philosophical… Taj Mahal utilizes the repeated motif of a shape from an Indian screen, in which figure and ground repeatedly reverse themselves. … Although the use of clear, prismatic colors and repeated motifs are characteristic of his work, the underlying structure is densely complex, and his intentions are always to reveal meanings with more than a visual dimension” (M. Tucker, “Mythic Vision: The Work of Alfred Jensen,” Alfred Jensen: Paintings and Diagrams from the years 1957-1977, New York, 1978, p. 14).
The most significant influence on Jensen's painting throughout his career was his understanding of Goethe's Theory of Colors. He read the text in 1938 and would returned to it many times over the course of his life. Jensen was drawn to Goethe's concept of the duality of color as it springs from the basic contest between black and white. He saw colors not as a sequence but an engagement between opposition. Such an understanding of color led itself naturally to the spiritual dimension sought after by the artist though painting. In fact, Jensen’s interest in the color-based pattern of Taj Mahal connects beyond mere decoration to a belief that patterns replicate the structure of the universe and express spiritual truths.