Dan Flavin’s holy compulsion

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Stephen Bury sheds light on a lesser-known aspect of Dan Flavin’s work, now on show at the Morgan Library, New York

Dan Flavin (1933–96), a largely self-taught artist, is best known for his fluorescent light installations. Significantly, the current exhibition is entitled ‘Dan Flavin Drawing’ and not ‘Drawings’, putting the emphasis on the activity rather than the product. The works come largely from the collection of Stephen Flavin.

For Flavin, drawing was ‘my holy compulsion’:

I have found that drawing is always important to me – for intense leisure, for refreshing returns to observation and reorientation in form. Simply I love to draw again and again…

and he drew throughout his career, as did many Minimalist and Conceptualist artists, contrary to received opinion. The early drawings on show here cover the period 1957–61 and some of them are gathered in Japanese folding sketchbooks. They reveal a debt to Abstract Expressionism, with Flavin sometimes applying watercolour with his bare hands. Some are accompanied by handwritten texts from the Bible, Chinese poetry and, a particular favourite, James Joyce. There is something naive and faintly embarrassing about these.

There are also portraits of artists, such as Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Lovis Corinth, and Constantin Brancusi. But from this period dates a trademark titling convention of referencing an historical figure and a contemporary friend, as in ‘Apollinaire Wounded (to Ward Jackson)’.

Flavin’s series of sculptures, conceived as a group, using electric light (1961–3) of which eight were fabricated, generated studies in graphite and coloured pencil. Some were carefully finished in coloured pencil or pastel, such as ‘final study for Coran’s Broadway Flesh (large version), 1962’. These Flavin called ‘icons’ after Kazimir Malevich’s description of his own work as ‘the icon of my time’.

From 1963, Flavin focused on fluorescent light installations, accompanied by drawings in a fine ballpoint pen in (mainly) 3 x 5 inch notebooks but some on the more ephemeral typing paper. Where is the boundary between diagram and drawing? This is an issue that is not really addressed by the exhibition or the catalogue and the answer probably lies in reception: where and when the diagrams of the artist become drawings changes as the artist’s oeuvre becomes an historical or economic commodity. Flavin himself elided the difference between two: ‘For me, drawing and diagramming are mainly what little it takes to keep a record of thought’. All were precisely dated and often numbered to preserve the sequence in which they were made.

A further complication is that from 1971 he kept ‘final finished diagrams’ of his fluorescent light installations on graph paper in coloured pencil. Many of these – in the tradition of Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Telephone Pictures’ (1922) or of Minimalist/Conceptual artists – were done by others: his wife Sonja, his son Stephen and other assistants. On show here is the wonderful pen and ink and coloured pencil on graph paper drawing for ‘in honor of Harold Joachim in pink, yellow, blue and green fluorescent light 8’ high and wide, 1984’ – done by Helene Geary. Others were made primarily for the art market.

The Joachim installation is on show downstairs at the Morgan Library and Museum and it reveals why Flavin was confident enough to abandon his own fully worked drawings, in his familiarity with the effects of light and perhaps with his grasp of the fact that you cannot depict light, as Cézanne had also maintained. Flavin is drawing with light, articulating the space (especially corners) with colour: the fluorescent light installations are drawing.

Not that Flavin gave up traditional drawing. On the contrary, he produced more drawings in this period than ever before – landscapes, riverscapes and seascapes along the Hudson River or Long Island. These were largely made in traditional artists’ sketchbooks using graphite pencil, charcoal or ballpoint pen. Building on his interest in atmospheric conditions that dated back to his work as a meteorological technician in the US Air Force, Flavin drew a series on sails and trawlers from observation but later from memory.

The exhibition concludes with a selection of the drawings collected by Flavin – and again Minimalist and Conceptualist artists were not meant to be interested in such things. There are drawings by his contemporaries, perhaps obtained by exchange: Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Wallace Tang, who introduced Flavin to sumi ink. Flavin preferred sketches and studies to finished drawings – there is a wonderful graphite pencil on a sketchbook sheet, ‘Pier and Ocean: Starry Night, 1914’ by Mondrian besides hastily jotted-down plans for paintings on the back of a cigarette pack or a torn milk tablet pack. 

Flavin also became interested in the Hudson River School – Aaron Draper Shattuck, John Frederick Kensett, Samuel Colman and Sanford Robinson Gifford – after he moved to Cold Spring in the Hudson River Valley in 1965. He acquired many drawings, 1979­–81, for his abortive project for the Dan Flavin Institute in Garrison, New York State.

The collection also includes Japanese drawings, mainly from the first half of the 19th century, purchased in the mid 1980s from the Galerie Janette Ostler in Paris. These are mainly by artists associated with the floating world (ukiyo-e): Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Kuniyoshi. Flavin probably prized their economy and expressivity. The brush and ink Sparrows in Flight by Hokusai almost seems to presage futurist studies of movement. An exhibition of drawings owned by artists would make a very interesting exhibition.

This exhibition, which remains at the Morgan until 1 July, will also travel to the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany in December 2012. It is much more extensive (at least chronologically) than the drawings show at the Forth Worth Art Museum in 1975, which only covered Flavin’s work from 1972 to 1975.

The catalogue  Dan Flavin Drawing  by Isabelle Dervaux with contributions by Tiffany Bell & Jennifer Raab is published by the Morgan Library & Museum, New York. 219 pp., Illustrated in colour, US $ 40.00. ISBN 978 0 87598 162 8