Judd Foundation

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 inscribed this five-sided drawing on the verso with two different dates: December 19, 1963, and September 8, 1964. Although the drawing was made in December of 1963, the artist dated it over nine months later.

He wrote in one of his record books, “I have found that drawing is always important to me—for intense leisure, for refreshing returns to observation and reorientation in form. Simply I love to draw again and again (my holy compulsion).”² This drawing is related to Flavin’s works in three-dimensional space; in 1963, Flavin created a number of pieces utilizing single light tubes placed in corners, such as pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns).

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

² Isabelle Dervaux, “A ‘Holy Compulsion’ for Drawing,” in Dervaux, Dan Flavin: Drawing, exh. cat. (New York: Morgan Library & Museum, 2012), 10.