Untitled
Dan Flavin American
Not on view
Dan Flavin, a founder of Minimalist art, first made sculptures with fluorescent light tubes in the early 1960s. One of the earliest examples is The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (To Robert Rosenblum), now in the collection of The Met. His use of a mass-produced product as medium follows Marcel Duchamp’s early twentieth century proposal that utilitarian objects can become "readymade" works of art by virtue of an artistic concept. Flavin’s light sculptures respond to abstract paintings by Barnett Newman, whose vertical "zips" of color mirror Flavin’s spans of light, and the Abstract Expressionists, whose use of luminous colors to create pictorial space and generate an emotional response is extended by the ambient light emitted from Flavin’s work. The references to painting are especially evident in this stacked, tri-colored structure, produced one year before Flavin’s death and exhibited in solo exhibitions the following year in New York and London.
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