Judd Foundation
Dan Flavin (1933-1996)
an isosceles triangle, 1964
Colored pencil and graphite on paper
11 × 13 7/8 inches (27.9 × 35.2 cm)
© Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Donald Judd met Dan Flavin in 1962 at a gathering in a Brooklyn apartment organized to discuss the possibility of a cooperative artist-run gallery. They exhibited together a year later when their work was included in New Work: Part I at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery, New York (January 8–February 2, 1963). As their mutual friend, the artist John Wesley, has said of their friendship, “[the two] became Flavin and Judd for a while. The two names were together.”1
Flavin was an avid draftsman, and drawing remained an essential part of his working process throughout his career. “All my diagrams, even the oldest, seem applicable again and continually. It is as though my system synonymizes its past, present and future states without incurring a loss of relevance.”2 This and the two drawings, right angle triangle and right angle triangle, all installed on the fourth-floor landing of 101 Spring Street, were signed and dated by the artist on the same day, soon after Flavin’s first solo exhibition at the Kaymar Gallery, New York.