The artist Dan Flavin (1933-1996) is so closely identified with his signature medium, the fluorescent light sculpture, that a show of his drawings is bound to surprise. And it’s particularly exciting to find in “Dan Flavin: Drawing,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, that Flavin was not only a devoted draftsman but also a freewheeling polymath on paper.
Drawing was “my holy compulsion,” he said, and he drew constantly throughout his career, filling six-ring notebooks with sketches of people and landscapes and studies for sculptures and installations. He made more “finished” drawings, too, including early Abstract Expressionist watercolors and later documents of his light installations.
The Morgan’s show has a little bit of everything, including a revealing glimpse of drawings from Flavin’s personal collection, which encompasses Hokusai, Mondrian and the Hudson River School. It will completely change the way you see his art — an effect that can be measured by putting the exhibition’s two light installations, “Untitled (to the Real Dan Hill)” and “Untitled (in Honor of Harold Joachim),” to the before-and-after test.
The idea of a Minimalist with a regular drawing practice isn’t, in itself, news. But Flavin’s jumpy, impassioned mark-making has little in common with the grids and serial notations of an Agnes Martin or a Sol LeWitt. And the connection between his drawings and sculptures is much less obvious than it is in, say, Richard Serra’s oeuvre (as seen in a recent survey of Mr. Serra’s thick smears of oil stick on paper).
Organized by Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan’s curator of modern and contemporary drawings, “Dan Flavin: Drawing” emphasizes the many different, sometimes contradictory, uses to which Flavin put pencil and paper. His drawings could be rambling, confessional diaries or coolheaded inventories, trial runs or elegant summations.
The earliest works here, mainly Abstract Expressionist watercolors sometimes annotated with snippets of poetry, display a youthful romanticism that verges on the embarrassing. But they reveal some formative influences, besides the obvious de Kooning: Cézanne and Brancusi, who appear in quick, muscular pencil portraits, and James Joyce, whose poetry collection “Chamber Music” is the subject of a pen-and-ink and watercolor series.
Here, too, is a hallmark of Flavin’s mature work: the formal dedication. In “To Those Who Suffer in the Congo” (1961), he addresses victims of political upheaval; in “Apollinaire Wounded (to Ward Jackson)” he name-checks both a French Surrealist poet and a contemporary acquaintance.
These are, mostly, finished works. But the show’s next section finds Flavin in brainstorming mode, fine-tuning his first set of light sculptures (the “Icons”). Inspired by Malevich, who called his own art “the icon of my time,” these pieces consist of painted wooden squares with attached lamps. The related sketches show Flavin thinking through every detail, from construction to installation.
Especially fascinating are the many ideas from this period (1961-63) that, for one reason or another, were never realized; some promising, like an architectural piece dedicated to the filmmaker Antonioni, others laughable (a rocking chair outfitted with a seatbelt). By 1963 he had hit on the light installations, made from commercially available fluorescent tubes, that would come to define his career. And his drawings evolved to suit the stark simplicity of these works, with simple lines of colored pencil on black or gray paper standing in for the electrified tubes.
In notebook pages from 1967, some of Flavin’s best-known works, the “Monuments for V. Tatlin,” appear as cuneiformlike clusters of parallel marks. Other famous pieces, dedicated to Alexander Calder and Donald Judd, turn up in meticulous drawings on graph paper. (Flavin called these “final finished diagrams,” and outsourced the actual drafting to his wife, son and assistants.)
Here it’s tempting to assume that Flavin abandoned traditional drawing for more conceptual processes. But that simply wasn’t the case, as a group of landscape and portrait sketches from the 1960s through the 1990s reveals. All along, he continued to draw from life — “for intense leisure, for refreshing returns to observation and reorientation in form,” he wrote.
In a confident and impetuous hand, he captured Hudson River traffic and Hamptons beachcombers, often working in series and with an eye to changing weather conditions. (“You are an Impressionist a hundred years too late,” the art critic Bruce Glaser told him.) A group of astonishingly responsive pencil drawings from 1960 place a small tugboat at the center of a pinwheeling cloud mass. Later charcoal-and-pastel works, from the 1980s, are animated by the strong diagonal of a heeling sailboat. (These also recall one of Flavin’s earliest light installations, a single tube set at a 45-degree angle from the floor.)
It’s clear from some of these works that Flavin felt a kinship with the artists of the Hudson River School. And as can be seen in the show’s final gallery, he collected their drawings in depth. They featured prominently in his never-realized plan for a Dan Flavin Art Institute in Garrison, N.Y., where drawings by Aaron Draper Shattuck, John Frederick Kensett and others were to have been displayed close to his light installations.
He also admired the lively but economical lines of Hokusai and Hiroshige, to judge from the selections on view. And he seems to have identified with Mondrian’s habit of mapping out paintings on cigarette wrappers, purchasing a couple of these slight sketches.
There’s as much of Flavin’s hand, so to speak, in his collection as there is in his own drawings. And in everything, there is a deeply satisfying commitment to the ritual of working on paper. In 1962, recording an afternoon of drawing near his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he wrote: “With a dashing pencil I have such a rousing sense of freedom. The drawing grows out rapidly and I follow it to the final touch. I know that this work requires much feeling and knowing all at once but I am not conscious of it. I know that I am on top of my pencil — (probably all I need to know).”