Dan Flavin and Barnett Newman were kindred spirits, and their bond transcended art movements.

As a painter, Newman was sometimes lumped in with those wild abstract expressionists--slightly surprising, since his work is characterized by clean, colorblocked lines and stripes. Though he saw them as being imbued with expression, some say his simple forms and juxtaposed colors foreshadow minimalism, which was Flavin’s movement. Newman was Flavin’s predecessor by a hair, and you can pretty plainly see his influence on Flavin’s work. Even though one worked in paint and the other in light, they both just dearly loved a good vertical line.

Flavin unveiled Untitled (to Barnett Newman) in 1971, the year after Newman died. It was an exhibition of four sculptures, all dedicated to old Barnett. At the end of Newman’s life, Flavin’s homage to his influence was fitting; at the beginning of his career, Flavin experimented with positioning the light diagonally in his very first sculpture so that he wouldn’t come across as a blatant Newman copycat.

For all the “parallels” in their work (lolz), their polar approaches to spirituality separate them conceptually. Newman saw the balance, symmetry and simplicity of his paintings as a gateway to access the divine. In contrast, many viewers and critics have questioned whether there’s a spiritual undertone to Flavin’s ethereal, floating light sculptures, to which he has replied, “It is what it is, and it ain’t nothing else.”