Reception: March 2, 5:30-7:30

“Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American Art depends.” --Clement Greenberg, 1990

Santa Fe, NM—Beginning March 2 and continuing through April 25 at LewAllen Contemporary, Dan Christensen:Pure Painting surveys the career of an artist Clement Greenberg considered one of the guiding lights of “post-painterly abstraction.” In the view of this hugely influential critic and champion of American modernism, all art had been leading to an ultimate “pure art” that would eschew subject matter, attempts to create spatial illusion, and connection with an artist’s expressive persona or even a distinctive brush stroke, in favor of revealing the “truthfulness of the canvas.” Dan Christensen, who died early this year, exemplified this ability to put aside the ego of the artist to create pure visual honesty.

Christensen produced exemplars of many of the most important developments, innovations and currents in American abstract painting of the past 40 years. Even when fashionistas sniffed about the death of painting and, later, when artistic interest was seen in potatoes at the bottom of stretched pantyhose, Christensen was constant in his commitment to exploring the possibilities of paint on canvas.

Christensen achieved spectacular success at an early age—he was in two Whitney Biennials before the age of 26—and each turn in his singular creative path drew the attention of reviewers such as Peter Plagens in Artforum, Grace Glueck and Lily Wei in Art in America, Carter Ratcliff in ARTnews and Phyllis Braff, Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter in The New York Times.

The acquisition of his work by virtually all the major American art museums testifies to the esteem he earned in the art world. His work is in the collections of such premier institutions as the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH; the Chicago Art Institute; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Seattle Art Museum; and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Christensen has been compared to the Color Field painters Jules Olitsky and Kenneth Noland, yet his work is unique and has value added through his exquisite refinement of painting technique. Driven by curiosity, Christensen was among the earliest to try spray painting and later also experimented with a squeegee; and with each technique he produced distinctive paintings of the very finest quality.

In 2001, at the time of a major museum retrospective of Christensen’s career at the Butler Institute of American Art, museum director Louis A. Zona opined that Christensen “stands as a reminder of what great and timeless art has been and will remain.”

Christensen’s earliest work was of a minimalist geometric style, which he later abandoned due to its constrictiveness. In 1967 he began his sprayed “loop” or “ribbon” paintings, using large, sweeping gestures to lay multi-colored stacks, loops and arabesques on bare canvas or on richly colored fields. These colorful, lyrical “sprayed loop” paintings were among the most original abstract paintings of the decade and brought him both critical recognition and commercial success.

Nevertheless, in 1969 he abruptly changed course, put down the spray gun and began a group of squeegeed paintings that have been referred to as his “plaid” paintings—loosely geometric color abstractions with irregularly shaped rectangles and bars set at right angles to one another.

Two years later, still using a squeegee, he experimented with largely monochromatic, “allover” paintings of surprising transparency and depth—the “white” paintings of 1971-73 and “brown” paintings of 1974-75, which together are known as his “slab” paintings.

In the late 1970s, color patches, loose calligraphy and other linear markings returned to his paintings. More varied in texture and application, these works began to include arrangements of shape and line that approached symbolic figuration in the 1980s, with some reviewers describing them as sailing ships, other-worldly creatures and shields, for example.

In 1985, Christensen returned to spray-painting, now combining sprayed areas with other techniques in his expansive repertoire. By 1991, he had settled on a circular or centering motif, with brightly colored circles whose sprayed edges melted into the surrounding space. These “circle” paintings were among the most celebrated of his career and brought fresh critical acclaim. Phyllis Braff wrote in The New York Times, “The most extraordinary physical response to light and color occurs in three very successful paintings … each circle vibrates according to the degree of luminosity and built-in radiance” (16 June 1991). For Art in America, Lily Wei described the best of these paintings as “handsome, adept, resplendently colored variations on a theme: the ’60s hold their own into the ’90s as Christensen attempts to put the aura back into painting in this age of electronic reproduction” (July 1993).

New York Times’ reviewer Holland Cotter described one painting in 1994 as “a little poem of hazy planetlike globes floating in what looks like galactic space” and summed up the viewer’s experience as “pure pleasure, rare these days” (22 July 1994). Katherine Crum, formerly of the Parrish Museum in Southampton, NY, wrote recently of the playful spirit in Christensen’s art, saying: “Joy has rarely been chic in twentieth-century art. Yet these paintings seem to say, ‘What if?’ What if we just let the picture be gorgeous? Can a painting be satisfying, intriguing, successful, stimulating, with color and paint like this?” She answers, “Yes.”

Christensen was born in Cozad, Nebraska, in 1942. He received his BFA in 1964 from the Kansas City Art Institute, and in 1966 began exhibiting his paintings in New York. His work has appeared in more than 60 solo exhibitions and in group shows all over the world. He won numerous awards including the National Endowment Grant in 1968 and the Guggenheim Fellowship Theodora Award in 1969. His paintings are in more than two dozen of the finest public collections of American art. A lion of the art world was lost when Christensen died at home in East Hampton, New York, on January 20, 2007.