Sol LeWitt; NY Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/design/09lewitt.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures
and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall
paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American
art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly
in Chester, Conn.
The cause was complications from cancer, said Susanna
Singer, a longtime associate.
Mr. LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as
dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend
of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the
artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in
him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was
camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He
particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph
in the newspaper.
Typically, a 1980 work called "Autobiography" consisted of
more than 1,000 photographs he took of every nook and cranny
of his Manhattan loft, down to the plumbing fixtures, wall
sockets and empty marmalade jars, and documented everything
that had happened to him in the course of taking the
pictures. But he appeared in only one photograph, which was
so small and out of focus that it is nearly impossible to
make him out. His work - sculptures of white cubes, or
drawings of geometric patterns, or splashes of paint like
Rorschach patterns - tested a viewer's psychological and
visual flexibility. See a line. See that it can be straight,
thin, broken, curved, soft, angled or thick. Enjoy the
differences. The test was not hard to pass if your eyes and
mind were open, which was the message of Mr. LeWitt's art.
He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes
(quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow,
blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by
guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he
devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a
thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings
or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.
Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a
game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could
not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to
allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then
credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall
drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of
people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for
which he had given the instruction "not straight" was
sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many
more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later
years that his works look just the way he wished). But he
always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input
of others - their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever -
remained part of the art.
In so doing, Mr. LeWitt gently reminded everybody that
architects are called artists - good architects, anyway -
even though they don't lay their own bricks, just as
composers write music that other people play but are still
musical artists. Mr. LeWitt, by his methods, permitted other
people to participate in the creative process, to become
artists themselves.
A Dry Humor
To grasp his work could require a little effort. His early
sculptures were chaste white cubes and gray cement blocks.
For years people associated him with them, and they seemed
to encapsulate a remark he once made: that what art looks
like "isn't too important." This was never exactly his
point. But his early drawings on paper could resemble
mathematical diagrams or chemical charts. What passed for
humor in his art tended to be dry. "Buried Cube Containing
an Object of Importance but Little Value" (1968), an object
he buried in the garden of Dutch collectors, was his deadpan
gag about waving goodbye to Minimalism. He documented it in
photographs, in one of which he stands at attention beside
the cube. A second picture shows the shovel; a third, him
digging the hole.
Naturally, he was regularly savaged by conservative critics.
By the 1980s, however, he moved from Manhattan to Spoleto,
Italy, seeking to get away from the maelstrom of the New
York art world. (He had had a retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1978.) His art underwent a transformation.
Partly it grew out of what he saw in Italy. But it was all
the more remarkable for also proceeding logically from the
earlier work.
Eye-candy opulence emerged from the same seemingly prosaic
instructions he had come up with years before. A
retrospective in 2000, organized by the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Chicago, concluded with some of these newly colorful wall
drawings. (Mr. LeWitt always called them drawings, even when
the medium became acrylic paint.)
His description for a wall drawing, No. 766 - "Twenty-one
isometric cubes of varying sizes each with color ink washes
superimposed" - sounded dry as could be: but then you saw it
and there were playful geometries in dusky colors nodding
toward Renaissance fresco painting. "Loopy Doopy (Red and
Purple)," a vinyl abstraction 49 feet long, was like a
psychedelic Matisse cutout, but on the scale of a drive-in
movie. Other drawings consisted of gossamer lines, barely
visible, as subtle as faintly etched glass.
Some people who had presumed that Mr. LeWitt's Conceptualism
was arcane and inert were taken aback. He began making
colored flagstone patterns, spiky sculptural blobs and
ribbons of color, like streamers on New Year's Eve, often as
enormous decorations for buildings around the world. It was
as if he had devised a latter-day kind of Abstract
Expressionism, to which, looking back, his early
Conceptualism had in fact been his response.
Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, on Sept. 9 1928, the son of
immigrants from Russia. His father, a doctor, died when he
was 6, after which he moved with his mother, a nurse, to
live with an aunt in New Britain, Conn. His mother took him
to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He
would draw on wrapping paper from his aunt's supply store.
Finding His Way
At Syracuse University, he studied art before he was drafted
for the Korean War in 1951, during which he made posters for
the Special Services. After his service he moved to New York
to study illustration and cartooning. For a while he did
paste-ups, mechanicals and photostats for Seventeen
magazine. He spent a year as a graphic designer in the
office of a young architect named I. M. Pei.
Meanwhile, he painted, or tried to. For a while, he hired a
model to draw from life and copied old masters. He felt
lost. An aspiring artist in New York during the waning days
of Abstract Expressionism, an art squarely about individual
touch, he thought he had no particular touch of his own and
therefore nothing to add.
But then he took a job at the book counter at the Museum of
Modern Art, where he met other young artists with odd jobs
there, including Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Robert
Mangold. He noticed the nascent works of Flavin and also
absorbed early art by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella.
Minimalism, a yet-unnamed movement, seemed like a fresh
start. Mr. LeWitt was meanwhile intrigued by Russian
Constructivism, with its engineering aesthetic, and by
Eadweard Muybridge's photographs, sequential pictures of
people and animals in motion, which he came across one day
in a book that somebody had left in his apartment. From all
this he saw a way forward. It was to go backward.
He decided to reduce art to its essentials, "to recreate
art, to start from square one," he said, beginning literally
with squares and cubes. But unlike some strict Minimalists,
Mr. LeWitt was not interested in industrial materials. He
was focused on systems and concepts - volume, transparency,
sequences, variations, stasis, irregularity and so on -
which he expressed in words that might or might not be
translated into actual sculptures or photographs or
drawings. To him, ideas were what counted.
At the time, linguistic theorists were talking about words
and mental concepts as signs and signifiers. Mr. LeWitt was
devising what you might call his own grammar and syntax of
cubes and spheres, a personal theory of visual signs. It was
theoretical, but not strictly mathematical. Partly it was
poetic. He began with propositions for images, which became
something else if they were translated into physical form by
him or other people.
He also liked the inherent impermanence of Conceptual art,
maybe because it dovetailed with his lack of pretense:
having started to make wall drawings for exhibitions in the
1960s, he embraced the fact that these could be painted over
after the shows. (Walls, unlike canvases or pieces of paper,
kept the drawings two-dimensional, he also thought.) He wasn't
making precious one-of-a-kind objects for posterity, he
said. Objects are perishable. But ideas need not be.
"Conceptual art is not necessarily logical," he wrote in an
article in Artforum magazine in 1967. "The ideas need not be
complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously
simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of
simplicity because they seem inevitable."
Relishing Collaboration
To the extent that Mr. LeWitt's work existed in another
person's mind, he regarded it as collaborative. Along these
lines he became especially well known in art circles for his
generosity, often showing with young artists in small
galleries to give them a boost; helping to found Printed
Matter, the artists' organization that produces artists'
books; and trading works with other, often needier artists,
whose art he also bought. Some years back he placed part of
what had become, willy-nilly through this process, one of
the great private collections of contemporary art in the
country on long-term loan to the Wadsworth Atheneum, his
childhood museum and the one that again was in his
neighborhood after he moved, in the mid-'80s, from Spoleto
to Chester. He lived there with his wife, Carol, who
survives him, along with their two daughters, Sofia, who
lives in New York and works at the Paula Cooper Gallery, and
Eva, a senior at Bard College.
It was said that Mr. LeWitt didn't like vacations. His
pleasure was being in his studio. He explained that he had
worked out his life as he wanted it to be, so why take a
vacation from it?
To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she
was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an
impasse. "Stop it and just DO," he advised her. "Try and
tickle something inside you, your 'weird humor.' You belong
in the most secret part of you. Don't worry about cool, make
your own uncool." He added: "You are not responsible for the
world - you are only responsible for your work, so do it.
And don't think that your work has to conform to any idea or
flavor. It can be anything you want it to be."
Gary Garrels, a curator who organized Mr. LeWitt's
retrospective for San Francisco in 2000, said: "He didn't
dictate. He accepted contradiction and paradox, the
inconclusiveness of logic."
He took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried
to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied
with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition
opening onto a fresh question. Asked about the switch he
made in the 1980's - adding ink washes, which permitted him
new colors, along with curves and free forms - Mr. LeWitt
responded, "Why not?"
He added, "A life in art is an unimaginable and
unpredictable experience."