Dan Christensen: The Stain Paintings - Spanierman Modern

It was works such as this to which the poet and
critic John Ashbery referred in a review of an
exhibition of Christensen’s art in 1979. In a day
when artists had either taken the Minimal into the
purely conceptual or had returned to representational
forms of image-making, Ashbery found it
“sobering and refreshing to turn to a number of
artists who are extending the language of modernism
in a more traditional and serious way.” He
went on to note that “one younger artist who has
renewed the tradition [of Color Field painting]
honorably is Dan Christensen. His pale, vaporous
washes of light are delectable. Often they are
loosely organized along a white line which serves
as an axis for vague blotches of color to relate to—
sometimes like petals on a stem, or laundry on a
clothesline, or clouds bisected by a telephone wire,
though such comparisons are considered odious
in discussions of this kind of work.” Ashbery
found Christensen’s color occasionally “smoldering
and sensuous,” but observed that the artist
was “mainly interested in articulating the nuances
separating patches of close-keyed dull pastel tones,
and he does it masterfully. He forces the eye to
recognize distinctions among areas of color which
at Wrst have strong family resemblances and only
somewhat later turn out to be mavericks who
could just as easily be at odds with each other.”
Referencing the universal metaphor of the Tree
of Life, Ridge has an iconic quality, yet its freshness
and simplicity make this work Wrst and foremost
a sensuous optical experience, the product of an
artist in love with the interaction of paint and
surface and the inWnite ways of exploring their
convergence.
Lisa N. Peters
1. Notable sources on Christensen include Sharon L.
Kennedy, Douglas Drake, and Karen Wilkin, Dan Christensen:
Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat. (Kansas City, Mo.: Kemper
Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009); Dan Christensen: The
Plaid Paintings, exh. cat. (including an interview with
Elaine Grove) (New York: Spanierman Modern, 2009); and
Stephen Westfall, Dan Christensen, exh. cat. (New York:
Spanierman Modern, 2007).
2. These paintings were the subject of Dan Christensen:
The Plaid Paintings (2009).
3. Grace Glueck, “A Happy New Year?” Art in America 59
(January–February 1971), 27.
4. Cited in Sharon L. Kennedy, “Charting His Course:
Dan Christensen’s Early Years,” in Kennedy, Drake, and
Wilkin, 2009, 10.
5. Valentin Tatransky, “Dan Christensen,” Arts Magazine
(May 1982), 11.
6. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Show of New Works Sets
Example at Modern,” New York Times, February 13, 1981.
7. John Ashbery, “Pleasures of Paperwork,” Newsweek,
March 16, 1981, 94.
8. John ElderWeld, New Work on Paper 1, exh. cat.
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 12.
9. James Monte, Dan Christensen: The Circular Paintings,
exh. cat. (New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc., 1991).
10. James Monte, “A Note on Dan Christensen’s
Paintings,” in Dan Christensen: A Survey, 1966–1990, exh. cat.
(East Hampton, N.Y.: Vered Gallery, 1990). See also Barbara
Rose, Miró in America, exh. cat. (Houston, Tex.: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1982).
11. On this term and Greenberg’s conception of it, see
Karen Wilkin, “Notes on Color Field Painting,” in Wilkin,
Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975, exh. cat. (New
York: American Federation of Arts in association with Yale
University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2007), 11–75.
12. Clement Greenberg’s statement appears in Dan
Christensen: A Survey, 1966–1990, exh. cat. (East Hampton,
N.Y.: Vered Gallery, 1990).
13. Unpublished typescript, “Interview with Dan
Christensen by R. Phillips and W. Hamilton,” November 2,
1974, part 1, 2.
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