Dan Flavin, Jill's Red Red and Gold of December 9, 1965, 1965

This 1965 drawing by Flavin is representative of the graphic work he did in the mid-sixties, and by extension, the range of his formal experiments with fluorescent lighting at the time. Among his best-known works is a sculpture composed of seven stepped, vertical fluorescent tubes, which he called his Monument for V. Tatlin (1964).

After the Tatlin piece, Flavin began to reduce the number of tubes in his works and vary their organization slightly. In the Monument for David series of the same year, dedicated to his twin brother, who had died in 1962, a short tube of light is sandwiched between two longer verticals.¹

The color-pencil drawing Jill’s Red Red and Gold of December 9, 1965 is compositionally related to this earlier work, with the notable exception that the middle light is equidistant from the two that frame it. The ground, a vertical piece of yellowish paper, serves to attenuate the narrowness of the projected sculpture. With the left and center tubes in red and the tube on the right colored gold, the image is distinctly weighted toward the left, despite its symmetry of form.

Notes:

1. Reproduced in Drawings and Diagrams by Dan Flavin, 1963-72, St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, 1973), 36-37.

Citation:
Text by Pamela M. Lee, from "Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection (Harvard University Art Museums, in association with Daco-Verlag Gunter Bläse, 1997; reprinted 1998). ©1997 President and Fellows of Harvard College.