Diagonal of May 25, 1963 by Dan Flavin in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2019

The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (To Robert Rosenblum)

Artist: Dan Flavin (American, New York 1933–1996 Riverhead, New York)

Date: 1963

Medium: Cool white fluorescent light

Dimensions: 96 x 3 3/4in. (243.8 x 9.5cm)

Classifications: Sculpture, Variable Media

Credit Line: Gift of Peter M. Brant, 1974

Accession Number: 1974.373.5a, b

A milestone of Minimalist art and the very first of Flavin’s fluorescent-light sculptures, this work exists in nine versions. The first, in yellow, is dedicated to the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, while this, the second, in "cool white," honors the renowned art historian Robert Rosenblum—an early proponent of downtown New York artists of the 1960s. The Diagonal joined a selection of Flavin’s other fluorescent sculptures in a groundbreaking show at New York’s Green Gallery in the fall of 1964, where the pieces flaunted their banal and utilitarian origins—they are simple fixtures ordered from a supplier in Brooklyn—while flooding the walls and floors of the gallery with colorful, painterly light.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/481231