Dan Flavin

Biography

One yellow fluorescent tube fixed to the wall at an angle of forty-five degrees. Flavin called it “The Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the Diagonal of May 25, 1963)” and dedicated it to Brancusi; from it he dated the beginning of his mature work. The same year brought “The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham)”: six white tubes on a wall, one on the left, two in the middle, three on the right.

Daniel Nicholas Flavin Jr. was born on 1 April 1933 in Jamaica, Queens, New York, into an Irish Catholic family, and went to Catholic schools. From 1947 to 1952 he trained for the priesthood at a preparatory seminary in Brooklyn, then left and followed his twin brother David into the Air Force.

In 1954–55 he was trained as a weather technician, and in Korea he studied art through the evening programme of the University of Maryland. Back in New York in 1956, he briefly attended the Hans Hofmann School, studied with Albert Urban, took art history at the New School for Social Research and painting and drawing at Columbia University. From 1959 he sorted mail at the Guggenheim Museum and then worked as a guard and lift operator at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard and Robert Ryman. His first drawings and paintings came out of Abstract Expressionism; in 1959 he was making assemblages from things found in the street, crushed cans above all. In the summer of 1961, working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History, he began sketching sculptures with electric light; that year he had his first solo exhibition, at the Judson Gallery. The “Icons” series consists of eight shallow square boxes of wood, Formica and Masonite with fluorescent tubes and bulbs along their edges; one of the “icons” is dedicated to his twin brother David, who died in 1962.

After the “Diagonal” he limited himself to a set of factory tubes: red, blue, green, pink, yellow, ultraviolet, four whites; two, four, six and eight feet long, and from 1972 circles as well. He called the works “situations” or “proposals”, gave up the studio for the specific site, and left almost everything untitled, adding a dedication in brackets: to friends, artists, critics. The best-known series is the “Monuments to V. Tatlin”, fifty stepped wall compositions of white tubes in honour of the Russian Constructivist, made between 1964 and 1990. His first exhibition of fluorescent light alone was held in 1964 at the Green Gallery; that year, on Marcel Duchamp’s recommendation, he received an award from the Copley Foundation. In 1966 at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven he built his first complete installation, “greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green)”, the same year he showed for the first time in Europe at Rudolf Zwirner’s in Cologne, and in 1967 he had his first museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, with a pink room and a “gold” one. In 1968 at Documenta 4 in Kassel he outlined an entire gallery in ultraviolet, and the installation “Two primary series and one secondary” for Heiner Friedrich’s gallery in Munich was bought by Karl Ströher; it is now in Frankfurt. The first large retrospective was organised in 1969 by Brydon Smith at the National Gallery of Canada. Then came the “corner pieces”, the “barriers” and the “corridors”; the first corridor, “untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg)”, green and yellow, was built in 1973 for an exhibition in St Louis, and in one bay a tube was missing so that the colour from the far side seeped through the gap. He conceived the works in editions of three or five but assembled them only after sale; until then they existed as a drawing and a certificate with diagram, title and signature. That is why more than a thousand unrealised sculptures remained after his death; how many of them have been assembled since, I cannot say.

He also drew landscapes: the Hudson Valley and the waters off Long Island, where he lived in Wainscott and Garrison, and he kept some twenty volumes of journals.

From 1975 he made permanent installations: “untitled (in memory of Urs Graf)” at the Kunstmuseum Basel, conceived in 1972 and assembled in 1975 as the Dia foundation’s first permanent work; Grand Central Station in New York in 1976; the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in 1977; the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers in 1979; the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 1989; the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum for its reopening after restoration in 1992, where a conception of 1971 was at last realised in full; seven lampposts outside the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1994; the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 1996. In 1983 Dia opened the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton on Long Island, a former firehouse where nine of his fluorescent pieces stand in windowless rooms. For six buildings of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, he began work in the early 1980s, delivered the final plans in 1996, and the work opened in 2000.

His last two designs he finished two days before his death: the light for the Milan church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, built in the 1930s by Giovanni Muzio, and the installation for Richmond Hall at the Menil Collection in Houston, which Dominique de Menil had asked him for as early as 1990. Dan Flavin died on 29 November 1996 in Riverhead on Long Island. The Milan work was assembled a year later with the help of Dia and the Fondazione Prada; the Houston one was completed by his studio. On 23 January 1997 a memorial evening was held for him at Dia.