For more than thirty years, Dan Flavin (b. 1933, New York; d. 1996, New York) devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by frames, pedestals, and other conventions of display. His embrace of the unadorned fluorescent fixture as an aesthetic object aligned him with a generation of artists whose use of industrial materials, emphasis on elementary forms, and nonhierarchical relationships among component parts became the salient characteristics of Minimalism. In 1963…