The Brooklyn Rail

Alfred Jensen (b. 1903, d. 1981) is like one of those unsolvable puzzles. Just when you think you may have cracked his code, you find there’s either a piece missing or a piece extra. Whatever Jensen’s relationship with numbers and color was, that relationship died with him. In fact, the numbers, arrows, vector markers, and color patterns in Jensen’s drawings and paintings may constitute a private language. Ludwig Wittgenstein argues, in Philosophical Investigations (1953), that a language understandable only to the person who invented it is an impossibility, because it could not be learned by anyone else or translated into another language. Jensen’s numbers and signs mean something only to himself.

Not to worry. The utter pleasure Jensen’s work produces transcends iconography or decipherment. Viewers must let go of the concept of meaning and focus instead on the concrete image before them. The twenty-one pieces assembled in Diagrammatic Mysteries—the earliest from 1959, the latest from 1980—may not constitute a full retrospective, but they most certainly provide a valid sample of Jensen’s artistic production. Jensen’s output, while incredibly varied, does not evolve from stage to stage, so that if we were to hang Egypt’s Magic V (ca. 1959), next to A Visit at the Outside and Inside of the Great Pyramid (1980), we would not hesitate to attribute both to Jensen but be unable to explain how the one relates to the other, except insofar as both relate to Egypt. Egypt’s Magic V looks like a geometrically shaped floor- or wall-tile design carefully isolated from any context, while A Visit seems to be a visual meditation on the Great Pyramid, “eternal abode of Cheops and his Queen,” as Jensen suggests in the title he inscribed on the drawing. What the magic of Egypt might be or if Jensen’s drawing is an accurate schematic plan of the Great Pyramid is anyone’s guess.

There is a humorous or ironic germ lurking in the huge, four-panel A Glorious Circle (1959). First, there are no circles in the work, which looks like a formal dinner, with geometric guests wearing white bow ties posed on both sides of an imaginary table. It is as if we are looking down on a Busby Berkeley dance arrangement frozen in time and transformed into myriad, astoundingly arranged triangles. If such a thing as a horizontal kaleidoscope were imaginable, its images would define this splendid piece.

Jensen’s interest in ancient cultures goes far beyond ancient Egypt. Twin Children of the Sun VI (1974), a two-panel oil on canvas, takes its title from the Mayan mythology of the Popol Vuh, the sacred text of the Quiché’ peoples of Guatemala. It relates to heroic twins, who perform great feats and metamorphose into the sun and moon. Jensen frames the left panel with dark paint, moving from green to orange to blue, while the right panel is framed in white, with blue rectangles shading into orange and green. At the center of both panels are bright orange shapes: both the sun and the moon bring light into the world according to the Mayas. Jensen returns to his architectural concerns in Rectangular Base = One Katun Pyramid Temple (Plate XII) (ca. 1965). We know Jensen was born in Guatemala and returned there to work as a young man: did he actually visit Tikal, see the twin pyramids that commemorate the passing of a k’atun, a twenty-year period, and pace out the structure? We will never know, just as we will never decipher the meaning of the numbers inscribed on the Twin Children of the Sun. That Jensen may have conceived a relationship between marking time and sacred architecture is entirely possible, but we cannot follow him along that path.

A final enigma: the magnificent Physical Optics (1975), an 86 by 153 inch oil on canvas. The title refers to what happens when waves of light hit objects and diffract or polarize. Fine, but what we see is a conjunction of color—wonderful color—vectors, and varicolored circles. Forget the science and enjoy the show.