Shining glories

THE Dan Flavin retrospective that just arrived in Los Angeles has been on the road for nearly three years. But even if you saw the first full survey of the renowned Minimalist's work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., or in Fort Worth, Chicago, London, Paris or Munich, the version at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opens Sunday, is not to be missed.

Its centerpiece -- a stunning re-creation of a 1982 installation that Flavin made for the E.F. Hauserman Co. showroom at the Pacific Design Center -- has not been seen in 23 years. It's the drop-dead highlight. It makes everything else in the exhibition look like a preparatory study or prototype, a necessary step on an impressively direct path toward the masterpiece.

To walk through the 11 galleries in which the exhibition has been chronologically -- and beautifully -- installed is to observe a mind in action. It's flat-out thrilling to go from room to room and see the results of decisions that Flavin (1933-96) made as he eliminated ineffective elements from his art and elaborated upon others, sharpening the focus and amplifying the power of his radically streamlined Minimalism.

The first gallery recaptures the heady inventiveness -- and nutty derring-do -- of believing it was possible to make a sculpture out of light. Eight of its nine pieces are so flat-footed that it's hard not to fall for their lumpen charm.

From 1961 to 1963, Flavin attached 2-foot-long red or white fluorescent tubes and variously shaped yellow, red, green and clear incandescent bulbs to flat panels and faceted blocks of Masonite. Each was painted a single color and hung on the wall like a painting or low-relief sculpture. Some lights flash, like tacky barroom advertisements. A pink square, bedecked with 28 flame-shaped bulbs, recalls a movie star's dressing-room mirror. Accompanied by elaborate titles that refer to religion, blood, soil and death, the easel-scale icons are fascinating failures, curious experiments that reveal a young artist casting about for the right stuff and coming up short.

The simplest piece in the room provides the eureka moment. "The diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi)" is an 8-foot-long yellow florescent tube and standard metal fixture fastened to the wall at a 45-degree angle. Its bottom corner rests on the floor. Electric light forms an industrial halo of oddly affecting illumination.