Dan Christensen (1942-2007)Dan Christensen was a major American abstract painter whose innovative approach to color, gesture, and paint application placed him at the forefront of Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction in the late 1960s and 1970s. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Christensen continually experimented with the physical possibilities of paint, developing a distinctive body of work that combined the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the saturated color and expansive surfaces of postwar abstraction.

Born in Cozad, Nebraska, in 1942, Christensen became interested in painting as a teenager after encountering the work of Jackson Pollock. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, receiving his B.F.A. in 1964, and moved to New York City the following year. There he entered a rapidly changing art world in which Minimalism, Color Field painting, and new forms of abstraction were redefining American painting.

Christensen gained particular attention for the innovative spray paintings he began creating during the late 1960s. Using a spray gun rather than a conventional brush, he laid sweeping ribbons, loops, and arcs of brilliant color across his canvases. These works combined an almost calligraphic freedom of line with luminous fields of color and became among the most recognizable paintings of his career. Influential critic Clement Greenberg became an early supporter of Christensen’s work, and Christensen emerged as an important figure in the generation that extended Color Field painting beyond its initial development.

Yet Christensen resisted being confined to a single technique or style. Throughout his career he moved between sprayed lines, stains, geometric structures, grids, scraped surfaces, dense impastos, and freely gestural passages. He frequently revisited earlier ideas from entirely new directions. This persistent experimentation—with spray guns, squeegees and other unconventional tools—became one of the defining characteristics of his work.

Christensen began exhibiting in New York in the late 1960s and was represented by the influential André Emmerich Gallery, which was closely associated with some of the leading Color Field painters of the period. His work appeared in important museum exhibitions, including Whitney Annuals and the first Whitney Biennial in 1973. Over the course of his career, he had more than seventy-five solo exhibitions and participated in hundreds of group exhibitions in the United States and abroad.

Christensen received numerous honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. A major survey of his work was presented at the Butler Institute of American Art in 2001, and his career was later examined in the retrospective Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting.

His paintings are held in many prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Seattle Art Museum, High Museum of Art, and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others.

Christensen spent his later years in East Hampton, New York, continuing to paint and experiment until his death in 2007. Today his work occupies an important position in the history of postwar American abstraction. His paintings are distinguished by their extraordinary command of color and by a continual tension between control and spontaneity between the deliberate construction of a painting and the unpredictable beauty of paint in motion.

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