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

This drawing shares its configuration with the Flavin work that Judd permanently installed in the north library at the Block, alternate diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd), 1964, with an opposite diagonal orientation. In a dual catalogue for two shows of Flavin’s work at the Fort Worth Art Museum, Jay Belloli wrote, “The way the drawings function in terms of Flavin’s work—as a ‘reciprocating system’ in which ‘continuous retention is constantly required’ and the work itself are manifestations of Flavin’s always having ‘aimed at an ideal in practical terms.’”²

¹ Marianne Stockebrand, “A Conversation with John Wesley,” Chinati Foundation newsletter 10 (October 2005), 1.

² Jay Belloli, “Introduction to the Installations in Fluorescent Light of Dan Flavin,” in Dan Flavin: Drawings, Diagrams and Prints 1972–1975; Dan Flavin: Installations in Fluorescent Light 1972–1975, exh. cat. (Fort Worth, TX: Fort Worth Art Museum, 1977), 31–32.