Strongly influenced by Guatemalan textiles and pre-Columbian art, Jensen also drew inspiration from sources ranging from the intuitive to the theoretical and scientific. James Clerk Maxwell’s formulation of electromagnetism and foundational texts like the I Ching, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Color (Zur Farbenlehre) (1810), and J. Eric S. Thompson’s Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (1960) were key to his art. The Mayan calendar and the Chinese alphabet held special meaning for Jensen and appear in many of his paintings. Though Jensen’s grids often take on the familiar appearance of games secreting solutions, these works do not serve as maps toward any unified meaning or objective endpoint. While many of the works in Diagrammatic Mysteries have titles that point to their origins, like The Pythagorean Theorem (1964), or symbols with recognizable meanings, as with the arrows in Physical Optics (1975), these psychic footholds only go so far in orienting us within the compositions, which are ultimately guided by essential mystery. As Donald Judd, who himself was inspired by Jensen, observed in 1963, “The theories are important to him and completely irrelevant to the viewer.” Diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in the late 1970s, Jensen, then one of the stars of the contemporary art world, went into seclusion, and his work disappeared from the scene for decades after his death. Jensen has been the subject of various museum retrospectives, including those at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1985, Dia Center for the Arts in 2001, and 1978’s traveling retrospective at institutions including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work is held in numerous collections throughout the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Kunsthaus Zürich and Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Works

Magic 14
Magic 14
1960
Warp and Woof
Warp and Woof
c. 1955

Public Collections

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas
Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss-Holzheim, Germany
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Neue Galerie, Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany
The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, Netherlands
Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York