Jensen’s Difficulty

There are all sorts of difficulty in modern art, some of them easier than others. Alfred Jensen’s difficulty—a plexus of subject and method remarkably esoteric, gnarled and obscure—is among the easiest of all. It is pure difficulty, in a way. It is generous: perplexity galore. The ultimate coherence, if any, of Jensen’s teeming systems has eluded his most informed and patient students. This is not to say that studying those systems is pointless: Pleasure and instruction reward any effort to understand Jensen, and great pleasure and instruction reward a great effort. He could be far-fetched, but he was not frivolous. By saying that his difficulty is easy, I mean that it is not in the least bit coercive or overbearing. There is about Jensen’s night-journeys into the arcane an ebullience that enchants and reassures. He was the most companion- able of sphinxes.

On the occasion of this catalogue, I will make no exegesis of Jensen’s difficulty, leaving that to Maria Reidelbach (whose expert guidance through the Jensen labyrinth I gratefully acknowledge). I will be interested in it less as a phenomenon than as a metaphor: difficulty as such, and specifically the difficulty—the ordeal—of the modern mind, of which Jensen’s seems to me more and more a paradigmatic case. I am also concerned to confront Jensen’s paintings as paintings, as units of sensuous experience. There is a notably awkward gap in Jensen’s art between the matter-of-fact physicality of its means and the speculative ethereality of its ends. To leap this gap is to enjoy a sensation practically unique, Jensen’s definitive contribution to the range of art’s possibilities. But a firm footing in the empirical is required first, if the leap is to be made.

Autodidact and polymath, willful and self-inventing, amateur in the best sense, Jensen’s mind simmered for half a century in a rich stew of experience and learning before reaching mature expression in the late fifties. The form of the expression, when it came, had the completely uncalled-for quality of the true—even the absolute—original. Its mixture of quirkiness and erudition suggested the norm of some other era, if not of another planet. In fact, however, Jensen continued and extended several deep themes of modernism. He was, perhaps, the last hero of a tradition that may be approximated by making an intersection of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Vasily Kandinsky’s transcendental geometries: the mystique of lost civilizations and the mystique of pure mentality. Ironically, this tradition—generalist, synthetical, grandiose—was being destroyed at the exact moment of Jensen’s first public impact, making way for the specialized, analytical, laconic zeitgeist of the sixties. Moribund, the tradition could not assimilate him, and Jensen thus appears far more isolated in history than the facts warrant.

The irony is Jensenesque. To advance a tradition in the moment of its eclipse was the fitting gesture of an artist whose life was a chronicle of paradox and exile, the stuff of modern myth. All writers on Jensen compulsively retell his biography, whether they make anything of it or not. It’s irresistible, a great yarn. (By all accounts, Jensen told no more than the truth, but in a way it doesn’t matter: his stories function as legends.) There is a dated, even discomfiting aspect to some elements of Jensen’s tale, such as the colonial-era exoticism of a Northern European born in steamy Central America and nursed by an Indian woman. And a slight mustiness has clouded the glamour, spattered with Great Names, of Jensen’s cosmopolitan travels and associations in the thirties and forties. But the stories retain appeal because they are redeemed by Jensen’s mature art, which telescoped the fascinations of a life and certain meanings of the century into a jerrybuilt but brilliant portmanteau. Indeed, it is possible to conceive of the totality of Jensen’s art as a modernist portmanteau work, akin to The Cantos or Finnegans Wake.

By yet another Jensenesque irony, this one posthumous, Jensen’s very quality of lateness and disinheritance guarantees his contemporaneity and makes this exhibition a timely one. Many of his tropes are still freshly relevant. For example, his linkage of himself to Goethe and early Romanticism—a conjunction that brackets the modern era—is a pattern being followed by some of the present’s most compelling artists. (Think of Anselm Kiefer and Caspar David Friedrich, and of Francesco Clemente and William Blake.) Few intelligent people today can believe in the kind of magic Jensen ascribed to Mayan counting and the like—the implied patronization of alien cultures makes us uncomfortable, for one thing—and fewer still could support the afflatus of Jensen’s claim that he was “engaged in the reestablishment of man’s lost ties with the universal laws of nature.” Today, forgotten and ignored, these values of former times, now misunderstood, must come back. If, however, we substitute for “universal laws of nature” the phrase “particular truths of history,” the statement will meet with plenty of agreement. And the form of it—the metaphor of a yearning—is a template of feelings well known to contemporary hearts. The “difficulty” of Alfred Jensen continues to mirror our civilization. We are nearly all Byzantines now.