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 maturAmerican Abstract Art of the 1930s and 1940s: The J. Donald Nichols Collection, Wake Forest University, 1998...