Dan Flavin and Drawing: sounds like an oxymoron. After all, Flavin’s best known works on paper are diagrams, records of ownership, juvenilia, attempts at being a wannabe abstract expressionist, sketches of sailboats and bathers, and hastily rendered portraits of friends and colleagues. Much of this is so unassuming, it looks like the art of a Sunday painter, not a world-class Minimalist.

It seemed as if it would be a stretch to exhibit this material at New York City’s renowned Morgan Library & Museum. Be that as it may, Flavin’s works on paper, as well as his collections of drawings by American and European modernists, 19th century Hudson River painters and Japanese artists were on view there through July 1. artes fine arts magazine

Many of Flavin’s graphic renderings, as he called them, were made after his constructions had been installed. As it was, his first wife, Sonja, executed a fair share of them. And those drawings where he seems to have been working out ideas for future demonstrations, another term he liked, were nothing but tenuous guides. He only discovered how the fluorescent tubes and the containing pans interacted after they were lit. “You learn that green is very demonstrative and red isn’t,” he told me in 1972. “Some things that should contrast…tend to complement each other, and they even tend to fuse.” Blue and pink or yellow and green might look like promising pairings when conceived as narrow pencil lines. On display in an art gallery or museum, they might create an unexpected effect. In other words, Flavin’s drawings left him in the dark.

Daniel Nicholas Flavin Jr. was born in Queens, New York on April Fools Day, 1933 and died in Riverhead, Long Island from complications of diabetes at the age of 63. His fraternal twin, David John, succumbed to polio when they were 29. Flavin’s Irish Catholic father was a truant officer who briefly played professional baseball; his mother was an executive secretary. In 1965, he described his dad as “a remote ascetic;” and his mom, as “a stupid, fleshly [sic.] tyrant.”

Flavin wasn’t much kinder when he recalled his formative years studying at a parochial school in Queens and a seminary in Brooklyn. After enlisting in the Air Force in 1953, he served in Korea and then, on a base on Long Island. As a civilian, he studied art and art history at Columbia University for three semesters while holding various low-level jobs. At one point, he worked in the mailroom of the Guggenheim Museum. At the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an elevator operator and a guard, he met his first wife, Sonja Severdija, as well as Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, and Lucy Lippard. Shortly before his first solo show, held at the Judson Gallery, he operated an elevator and stood guard at the American Museum of Natural History.

Flavin always felt he had a knack for drawing. “While a young boy,” the 32-year-old declared, “I began drawing by myself.” In 1938, at the tender age of five, he claimed he’d “made a vivid, if naive record of hurricane damage” that his mother “destroyed along with almost every other drawing from my childhood.” That would have encompassed a sizable amount of work. One group included scenes sketched along the East River where “Uncle” Artie, a family friend “showed me how to put down pencil water around a ship by lightly dappling just some of the surrounding space with the tiniest ‘half moons.’ His cosmic touch for space is in my drawings even now.” At 10, he also made “hundreds of pencil and pen-and-ink drawings after the ‘Horrors of War’ picture cards of Gum, Incorporated, and sundry other war-time illustrations.”

Father Fogerty, Flavin’s Latin teacher, was similarly unimpressed by his drawings. These were doodles made “in the margins of my textbooks….battered profiles of bloodied boxers with broken noses and Dido’s pyre on a wall in Carthage…”

Years later, another authority figure also failed to encourage Flavin’s nascent efforts. An Army major suspended a life drawing class the young soldier co-organized while serving as an Air Weather Service Observer in Korea in 1955.

Flavin was not discouraged.

The show at the Morgan was well-worth the trip. You wouldn’t have ooh’d and aah’d over the 200-plus works as if they were chef d’oeuvres from Chatsworth. But, from the outset, you’ll learn a lot about Flavin and a tad bit about Minimalism. For starters, at 25, he was a frustrated expressionist with a pedestrian sense of color. Early on, he already possessed a pronounced sentimental streak, adding dedications to the titles of works on paper the way he later would append them to his icons and fluorescent light pieces. And, as if performing party tricks, he captured friend’s likenesses while sitting with them in restaurants and the like. Many of these portraits as well as records of work he’d executed were recorded in pocket-sized, 6-ring notebooks.

Ironically, Flavin’s show at an institution home to many exquisite Rembrandt drawings, opens with a small work by Flavin, the minimalist, from 1957, based on a post card of Study of an Old Man, then attributed to Rembrandt. He already was interested in atmospheric qualities, managing with conte crayon, charcoal, and graphite pencil to transform the Dutch master’s sfumato into a beguiling haze of light and dark. Unbeknownst to him, future friends were also copying old masters. Sol LeWitt, for one, was making drawings, at the same moment, after Piero, Velazquez, and Goya that he referred to as “transcriptions.”

There are also a number of pseudo-Ab Ex works. A black and white brush and ink abstraction from 1959 that looks like a bad Franz Kline is subtitled, Tenements in the Rain. A series of colored brush and ink and watercolor sheets is labeled, the act of love I-V. Huh? Seven works, also from 1959, remind us that Flavin, like Judd, LeWitt, and Morris, originally planned to be a painter. These sheets, however, presage his fluorescent corner pieces in that color swirls around their edges. Where he later would leave the centers hollow, he floridly inscribed the insides of these with chamber music verses dedicated to James Joyce. (Carl Andre always had a fondness for executing and exhibiting poetry-based work, too.)

Flavin’s future—as it was for Andre, Judd, LeWitt, and Morris—was tied to schmutz, not the heroic years of Abstract Expressionist or their aftermath. All of them scavenged material from the streets of NYC. Featuring a crushed tin can, Apollinaire wounded (to Ward Jackson), 1959-60, makes a star turn in Dan Flavin Drawings. The charcoal version displayed next to the collage-like painting is far less dynamic.

The two dozen plus works on paper that relate to icons I-VIII are practically bumps in the road. While Flavin hewed closely to these preparatory studies when he constructed the series of wall boxes that incorporated incandescent light bulbs and his first fluorescent lights, they hindered rather than helped him. As he admitted in 1972, “ …I’m such a compulsive carpenter and finisher. It took three years for me to do eight of them….They slowed me down. They weren’t worth the time.”

If you’re near Bridgehampton, you might want to check out the 5-foot-5-inches square drawing that’s a to-scale rendering of icon IV that’s on view at The Dan Flavin Art Institute. It would have been a showstopper at the Morgan, and would have added perspective to Flavin’s efforts as a draftsman.

It’s the section devoted to landscapes, sails, and bathers that will bring smiles to your lips. Flavin wasn’t particularly confident in 1960 when he drew a half dozen or so works in the show, including several made from the Gansevoort Street Pier in which he summarily rendered tugboats, river traffic, clouds in the sky. They’re a bit scattershot. However, the ones done on beaches in Quogue in 1966 and in the Hamptons in 1976 need only a few marks to evoke the joy of walking barefoot on sand while watching waves lap the shore and boats bobbing in the distance. You’ll see Flavin in a new light when you come upon the six pastels of sails from 1986-90. At one and the same time, they’re dramatic, sensual, carefree. They’re metaphors for Flavin’s many renunciations.

By Phyllis Tuchman, Contributing Writer

 End Notes:

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1. Dan Flavin, blue trees in wind, 1957

Grease pencil on ledger paper

7 7/8 x 10 1/2 inches (20 x 26.7 cm)

Collection of Stephen Flavin

© 2012 Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photography: Graham S. Haber, 2011

2. untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1a, 1978

pink, yellow, green, and blue fluorescent light

8 ft. (244 cm) high, leaning

© 2012 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photo by Billy Jim, New York

Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York

3. Paul Cézanne, 1959

Charcoal

8 7/8 x 12 inches (22.6 x 30.5 cm)

Collection of Stephen Flavin

© 2012 Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photography: Graham S. Haber, 2011

4. the diagonal of May 25, 1963, 1964

Colored pencil on black paper

9 5/8 x 12 3/4 inches (24.4 x 32.4 cm)

Collection of Stephen Flavin

© 2012 Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photography: Graham S. Haber, 2011

5. a carefully rendered and detailed sketch toward a lithograph of the proposed fountain in memory of Pablo Picasso, 1974

Ballpoint pen on loose-leaf notebook page

3 x 5 inches (7.6 x 12.7 cm)

Collection of Stephen Flavin

© 2012 Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 Photography: Graham S. Haber, 2011

6. proposals for (in memory of “Sandy” Calder), 1977

 Graphite pencil and colored pencil on graph paper

 17 x 21 7/8 inches (43.2 x 55.6 cm)

 Collection of Stephen Flavin

© 2012 Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 Photography: Graham S. Haber, 2011

 7. sails, 1986

 Pastel

 11 x 14 inches (35.6 x 28 cm)

 Collection of Stephen Flavin

 © 2012 Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photography: Graham S. Haber, 2011