The Rose Art Museum is often closed at the start of classes to prepare for a fall semester slate of exhibitions. This year, however, the Rose is greeting incoming and returning students with an exhibit of paintings from the permanent collection on the theme of "Numbers, Color and Text." The show, open until Sept. 25, takes as its starting point a group of paintings by Alfred Jensen. Roy Dawes, curator of the show and director of museum operations, says the show is "a small exhibit to get us started again." Due to the University's ongoing legal controversy over the Rose and its collection, the museum cannot receive touring exhibitions or loans from other museums; nonetheless, the Rose's own collection of 20th century art is a rich source to draw from."These Jensens are works we own but haven't shown recently," says Dawes. "I took off with the idea of 'numbers, color, text' for obvious reasons." The five Jensen paintings along the back wall of the Rose's main gallery, which were recently on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum, display brightly colored numbers in contrastingly painted shapes. These five inspired Dawes to assemble a group of works by other artists, hanging in the downstairs portion of the Rose's main gallery, that support the Jensen works on the main level.

Jensen, who, incidentally, studied with Hans Hofmann, an artist featured last semester in a show in the Rose's Foster Gallery, was known for his complex and personal theories on numerology and color theory-something highly evident in these paintings on display at the Rose. The artist experimented with ideas about prisms, the breaking of light, the ancient Chinese calendar and Goethe's writings on numerology. "Jensen had so many complicated theories that one can get hung up in the theories and not experience the paintings themselves," says Dawes. "Joe Ketner, [a previous Rose director], once had some of the mathematicians here at Brandeis take a look [at the paintings] to see if they could make heads or tails of the numerology, and they could not."

Downstairs, Dawes has assembled works by modern and contemporary artists that continue in the theme of color theory, numerology and text. A few prints in the show have never been shown before, including a version of Josef Albers' Homage to the Square in green, yellow and blue and a work by Jasper Johns.

The textual works in the show range from funny to serious-a work by Boston artist Todd McKie that reads "I will not make fun of conceptual art" hangs only a few feet away from a small plaque by Jenny Holzer, an artist known for making provocative statements whose latest work focuses on Abu Ghraib.

On Sept. 25, the Rose will be closed for about a month as Dawes and former Rose curatorial fellow Adelina Jedrzejczak work together to curate a fall show that will open Oct. 28. The opening will take place in conjunction with the publication of the new Rose catalogue, a collection of writings about the Rose collection.