Daniel Massen was born in 1896 in Bornholm, Denmark. He was influenced by Charles Biederman, whom, according to Massen's family, Massen knew when Biederman was in Chicago. Many of Massen's severely geometric paintings and constructions show evidence of an affiliation with Biederman. Massen taught color theory, painting and design at the School of Design intermittently throughout the 1940s. He began teaching in 1940 and it was roughly during this time that his art became based in geometry. Moholy-Nagy's influence can also be credited for affecting Massen's choice of geometric forms. Among all the nonobjective work produced in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, Massen's paintings and constructions are clearly the most severe and mature. Massen exhibited regularly in the Art Institute of Chicago annual exhibitions and was included in the 'Abstract and Surrealist American Art' exhibition at the same museum. He does not appear to have exhibited much outside Chicago, with the exception of a masterful, large geometric construction with Lucite and copper elements at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts around 1940. Massen continued to paint and teach in Chicago until 1962 when he moved to Washington D.C., where he died in 1971.