This September, at Independent 20th Century, Galerie Gmurzynska will show the work of Dan Basen, a New York avant-garde artist who died in 1970 at the age of 30. A monograph on the artist is being published by Galerie Gmurzynska in collaboration with SKIRA to coincide with the exhibition. Below is an excerpt from the text contributed to this publication by Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, Associate Professor of Practice, History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at University of Pennsylvania

Dan Basen didn’t have the time to let the dust settle and for his career to thus emerge in broad strokes as an exercise in intentionality. He looks like what he was when he killed himself at age 30, a talented artist struggling with an art world that was slow to recognize his gifts, and a struggling artist with severe mental illness who made work not because of this challenge, but in spite of it.

Basen’s art is ripe for rediscovery because the very identity constructs that would have counted against him in his day—bisexual, mentally ill, Jewish—are no longer conceived as burdens. More significantly still, his work rounds out a picture of the 60s which has focused on a few genre-defining artists to the exclusion of the manifold experimental art developments at this time. Basen was responsible for more than his share of those developments, not least in terms of happenings and the novel performative tendency in 1960s art. But the real qualitative index of Basen’s career is his fluency in multiple mediums not generally combined in the work of one artist. He was a remarkably fecund and inventive sculptor, and assemblagist, as well as an early creator of installations/environments, but he was also a painter and conceptual artist, producing key works in each of these mediums. 

His masterful and gorgeous Hershey’s from 1963 takes the then-period fashion for grids, visible in works by say Agnes Martin, the German Peter Roehr, Andy Warhol (of such works as Ethel Scull 36 Times) or of much of Minimalist sculpture, especially Carl Andre’s floor pieces, and undercuts its defining quality of regularity, uniformity and predictability. In Basen’s hands, the grid is instead haphazard, multidirectional, and decidedly unpredictable. While using the collaged candy bar labels to create a remarkably sensitive register of alternating tones, shapes and color reminiscent of a master such as Matisse, Basen’s Hershey’s labels also undercut art’s high seriousness in a remarkably early, inventive variation on Pop Art.

In some sense, Basen signals his self-consciously oppositional credo in a series of “hobo” pictures such as Alfred the Hobo from 1968 or Hobo Rose of the same year. Hobos are, of course, our culture’s outsiders, those who have chosen to live in a state of antagonism to the imperatives of the capitalist system. Basen even opened an art gallery called The Hobo Gallery with his long-term partner, Jolie Kelter. In addition to showing professional artists, The Hobo Gallery also exhibited so-called “Tramp art,” works produced by hobos, initially during the Depression, as a means of barter or exchange for food or lodging. Basen, I think, romanticized such outsiderness—his Hobo Rose has more than a whiff of that empyrean, yet ur-outsider, Vincent Van Gogh and his celebrated sunflowers—but he was caught in the contradiction that such a romanticized view entailed. To open a gallery for Outsider artists is to of course to try to bring them in, putting an end to their long sojourn outside the artworld. There was more than little autobiography to this endeavor, and Basen was repeatedly caught up in that career-defining paradox, that his celebrated outsiderness was at once a challenge to the safe, acceptable art world parameters and a plea for inclusion in the very system he reviled.