Plaid Puzzlement ...The Paintings of Dan Christensen

Lisa N. Peters
When we were helping the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, in organizing the retrospective of the work of Dan Christensen that opened there last May, it emerged that a group of paintings Christensen created from 1969 to 1971 stood out and were different, or so it seemed. . . .

These large (many wall-size) geometrically conceived canvases with discreet flat areas of color, appeared a departure in Christensen’s oeuvre from the freeform spray gun works that preceded them as well as from his later work, in which he pushed automatist methods with the spray gun to their limits in blurred circles, infinite lozenges, swirling ribbons, and rich drizzle marks that seem to ricochet off the surface. The paintings with their clean horizontal and vertical stripes drew the attention of everyone who saw them, maybe because instead of having the stillness of so much hard-edged geometric painting, they seemed to project a glowing energy.

Those who knew the artist referred to these works as “Dan’s plaids,” but we were unclear about their origins and how they fit into the context of his art and time. We decided to find out by devoting an exhibition to them. We were able to hang sixteen of them in our current show, which along with the four in the exhibition organized by the Kemper (opening October 23 at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln), enables these works to receive a spotlight they haven’t been given before, while allowing us to find the answers to the questions that had been raised.

We were lucky in moving forward that the artist’s widow Elaine Grove was able to not only speak to us about these works, but to be the subject of an interview that we included in our catalogue. A sculptor and painter herself, Elaine met Dan in 1967 at the famous New York City artists’ haunt, Max’s Kansas City. Her recollections of this heady time when artists were at the forefront of the radical transformation taking place in American life have a freshness only possible for someone who has lived through this time from its midst. In the interview contained in the catalogue, Elaine not only answered our questions about the plaids, but provided a sense of the richness of the context from which they emerged.

As Elaine explains, the plaids were less a departure from the sprays, but an evolution. She states:

“The spray gun paintings have a more airy feeling to them, whereas there is more tightness and solidity to the plaids, but both are still a matter of paint interacting with other areas of paint. The later calligraphic stain period of Dan's work speaks similarly to the spread of paint as does the paint in his plaid paintings. He's dealing with the same issues in all the periods of his work, but they are handled and addressed in different ways within each period.”

As to why Dan seemed to leave the plaids behind, Elaine responded:

“He stopped painting them for the same reason that he stopped painting other kinds of paintings. He did them until he felt that he had said all that he could about that type of picture making. Once he figured out how to make a certain type of painting really well, it ceased to be, for him, as interesting to paint. He would then move forward to something else he could explore.”

Elaine also pointed out an especially interesting factor in the art world of the time that was key to Dan’s development, which has not previously been given much recognition in scholarship on the era. That is that the period that Dan moved forward was one in which different innovations in acrylic paints were becoming available at the time. Elaine notes: “Sam Golden, (later the founder of Golden Paints) was a chemist for and partner with Leonard Bocour at Bocour Paints. He developed and introduced new gels and mediums that could be used to thicken paints and extend the pigment. One could paint and produce impasto effects without having to use up so much expensive pigment. Some mediums were transparent, and Dan began exploring how you could add pigment to a gel and put that over straight bands of color. This led into his white and dark slab paintings, which were also squeegeed.”

Grove thus explained how the plaids, rather than a departure in Christensen’s art, can instead be seen as a natural stepping stone along the way for this artist for whom painting was a constant adventure that he seems to have had almost no choice but to pursue.

The full interview provides a true sense of this extremely exciting time in the history of painting.

It seems a rare occurrence for a show to provide such a satisfactory and fascinating answer to the question around which it was organized, but this is truly a show one needs to see to get the full impact of what these works are about.

Dan Christensen: The Plaid Paintings