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Registered in the American minimalist current, Dan Flavin is an artist recognized for having developed his works using only commercially available fluorescent lamps; from a single lamp placed at an angle on the floor of a room to extensive installations displayed in public places.
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin was born in Queens, New York, United States, into a Catholic family and since he was a child he was enthusiastic about drawing, especially war scenes. Flavin entered Immaculate Conception Preparatory Seminary in Brooklyn in 1947 to study for the priesthood. He left the seminary six years later with his twin brother David, and joined the United States Air Force. There he trained as a meteorology technician and studied art while serving in Korea, participating in an extension program at the University of Maryland.
Flavin left the Air Force when he returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University to study art history, painting, and drawing. He dropped out of college before graduating and got a job at the Guggenheim Museum post office and as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art as a way to break into the New York art scene.
The artistic development of Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin’s early drawings and paintings show a strong influence of Abstract Expressionism. He also created mixed media sculptures expressing movement. Some argue that the inclusion of lamps and flashes in the works of Jasper Johns may have influenced Flavin’s early light work.
Flavin began designing his first works with his wife, Sonja Severdija. He first exhibited the light sculptures in 1964. They consisted of boxes illuminated by incandescent and fluorescent lights. He stopped working on canvas in 1963; since then he used only fluorescent lamps combined with very simple objects. One of the first works of his mature style was La Diagonal del éxtasis personal (La Diagonal of May 25, 1963) . It consisted of a yellow fluorescent light mounted on the wall at a 45-degree angle to the floor; Flavin dedicated the piece to the sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
The conception of fluorescent lamps as a form of artistic expression emerged in Flavin when he analyzed Marcel Duchamp’s prefabricated sculptures and realized that lamps were objects that had a basic shape that could be used in infinite ways.
Many of Flavin’s most important works were dedicated to fellow artists and art gallery owners. One of them, Untitled (To Don Judd, Colorist), is a nod to another artist who, along with Dan Flavin, helped develop minimalist art. The two were close friends and Judd even named his son Flavin. In a creative reference to another of the foremost minimalists of the 20th century, Dan Flavin created Greens Crossing Greens ( to Piet Mondrian Who Lacked Green) . Mondrian worked almost exclusively with primary colors, black and white, without using secondary colors such as green.
In the course of his career Dan Flavin concentrated on developing extensive installations displayed in public places using colored fluorescent lighting. One of his works, Untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) ( Untitled (for Jan and Ron Greenberg) ), was created for a one-time exhibit, at the St. Louis Museum of Art in 1973.
Flavin designed sculptures but didn’t build them until someone bought them or provided a place for them to be installed. When he died in 1966 he left behind drawings and designs for more than a thousand sculptures. The last work that Dan Flavin designed before his death was the lighting for the church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Milan, Italy. The church is a 1932 Romanesque Revival building. Flavin finished designing the project two days before his death, and the church completed installation a year later.
Using only fluorescent lamps in his work made Dan Flavin unique among the major artists of the 20th century. He contributed to the development of minimalism by limiting the use of materials to the extreme, and he introduced the idea of the ephemeral in his works of art. Flavin’s works only exist until the lights are turned off, and light itself is the analogous element to other sculptors’ use of concrete, glass, or steel. He had a great influence on the current of light artists, such as Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell.
Fountain
- Fuchs, Rainier. Dan Flavin. Hatje Cantz, 2013.
