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Lot Essay
A late work by the Minimalist artist Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) is an evocative sculpture which celebrates the medium of light with its atmospheric glowing blue, red, and yellow hues. Standing at eight feet tall, the neon sculpture combines Flavin’s iconic style with a fascinating story of his relationship to an icon of modernism. Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, recalls that Flavin once “jokingly organized a mock committee” to create a memorial for Mondrian and re-bury his body (M. Govan, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2004, p. 27, note 8). Flavin’s gesture undoubtedly came from admiration, and therefore Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) becomes a monument of sorts to the artist’s reverence for the Dutch master.
The vibrating primary colors of Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) are rigorously ordered, yet there is still a sense that they could be reconfigured like a Rubik’s Cube. The neon tubes seem to float, adding an airiness to the solidity normally expected of sculpture. Its light reflects throughout the viewing space, like the heavenly rays emitted by Christ in Giotto’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1295-1300). For Flavin, his neons are self-portraits in their melding of the artist and his materials. He wrote in 1966, “The lamps will go out (as they should, no doubt). Somehow I believe that the changing standard lighting system should support my idea within it. I will try to maintain myself this way. It may work out. The medium bears the artist…” (D. Flavin, “Some Remarks,” Artforum, December 1966). The neon tubes in Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) bear both artists, Flavin and Mondrian, and in retrospect the present work is a memorial to them both. Even with this meditation on death and legacy, a certain whimsicality cannot be denied in Flavin’s neons, especially those like the present work that use only primary colors. A 1985 review of his solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York recalls the “children that were crawling ecstatically around the floor during the reviewer’s visit, supplying the ‘performance’ that the lights seem to promise” (V. Raynor, “Art: The Colorful Fluorescent Bars of Dan Flavin,” The New York Times, June 28, 1985). Even within the deepest questions of art and life, there can also be moments of quotidian joy.
Untitled (for Piet Mondrian) could be considered a companion piece to Flavin’s earlier greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) (1966). Mondrian never used green, and famously hated it, so Flavin created a fencelike structure in that fraught hue. Whether ironic or sincere in his engagement with the past, Flavin was “rediscovering, via a hardware store’s fluorescent spectrum, the three primary colors once sanctified by Piet Mondrian (and reinvented in the 1960s by [Barnett] Newman and Roy Lichtenstein)” (R. Rosenblum, “Passages: Dan Flavin,” Artforum, March 1997). Flavin takes the transcendental aims of Mondrian’s paintings and pays tribute to them, while also recreating them with every day, functional materials, not unlike the Pop artists.
Like a noirish sign in a dark city, Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) illuminates space without fully denuding it, thereby encouraging mystery and speculation. In this sculpture, Flavin, an American pioneer of Minimalism, meets Mondrian, the Dutch luminary of De Stijl. Two of the most important artists of the 20th century, though they never met, have much to say to each other across time and space. Mondrian enabled the innovations of Minimalism, while Minimalists like Flavin further extended Mondrian’s vision into three-dimensional space. Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) elegantly reveals the interconnectedness of art history, just as its neon components fit seamlessly together.
The vibrating primary colors of Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) are rigorously ordered, yet there is still a sense that they could be reconfigured like a Rubik’s Cube. The neon tubes seem to float, adding an airiness to the solidity normally expected of sculpture. Its light reflects throughout the viewing space, like the heavenly rays emitted by Christ in Giotto’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1295-1300). For Flavin, his neons are self-portraits in their melding of the artist and his materials. He wrote in 1966, “The lamps will go out (as they should, no doubt). Somehow I believe that the changing standard lighting system should support my idea within it. I will try to maintain myself this way. It may work out. The medium bears the artist…” (D. Flavin, “Some Remarks,” Artforum, December 1966). The neon tubes in Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) bear both artists, Flavin and Mondrian, and in retrospect the present work is a memorial to them both. Even with this meditation on death and legacy, a certain whimsicality cannot be denied in Flavin’s neons, especially those like the present work that use only primary colors. A 1985 review of his solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York recalls the “children that were crawling ecstatically around the floor during the reviewer’s visit, supplying the ‘performance’ that the lights seem to promise” (V. Raynor, “Art: The Colorful Fluorescent Bars of Dan Flavin,” The New York Times, June 28, 1985). Even within the deepest questions of art and life, there can also be moments of quotidian joy.
Untitled (for Piet Mondrian) could be considered a companion piece to Flavin’s earlier greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) (1966). Mondrian never used green, and famously hated it, so Flavin created a fencelike structure in that fraught hue. Whether ironic or sincere in his engagement with the past, Flavin was “rediscovering, via a hardware store’s fluorescent spectrum, the three primary colors once sanctified by Piet Mondrian (and reinvented in the 1960s by [Barnett] Newman and Roy Lichtenstein)” (R. Rosenblum, “Passages: Dan Flavin,” Artforum, March 1997). Flavin takes the transcendental aims of Mondrian’s paintings and pays tribute to them, while also recreating them with every day, functional materials, not unlike the Pop artists.
Like a noirish sign in a dark city, Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) illuminates space without fully denuding it, thereby encouraging mystery and speculation. In this sculpture, Flavin, an American pioneer of Minimalism, meets Mondrian, the Dutch luminary of De Stijl. Two of the most important artists of the 20th century, though they never met, have much to say to each other across time and space. Mondrian enabled the innovations of Minimalism, while Minimalists like Flavin further extended Mondrian’s vision into three-dimensional space. Untitled (to Piet Mondrian) elegantly reveals the interconnectedness of art history, just as its neon components fit seamlessly together.