Sol LeWitt; Times UK obit
Hyfler/Rosner
April 17, 2007
Sol LeWitt
Artist who became an early partisan of conceptual art after
early success with his Minimalist, geometric forms
Even today, 40 years after they were published, Sol LeWitt's
renowned "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" can still have an
immensely provocative impact. For he insisted that the
artist's role lies principally in the conception rather than
the execution of the work. LeWitt then went farther, arguing
that the execution may be carried out by a competent
assistant working to a preconceived plan without any
assistance from the artist at all.
Such a standpoint, to many Americans weaned on the handmade
paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark
Rothko, seemed utterly heretical. But LeWitt, whose
"Paragraphs" appeared in the June 1967 issue of Art-forum
magazine, believed in "the idea of the artist as a thinker
and originator of ideas rather than as a craftsman".
Hence his early and defiant willingness to declare himself a
conceptual artist, even though his wall-drawings, sculpture
and prints were initially associated with the Minimalist
movement.
LeWitt never aspired to become a celebrity artist. He shied
away from media attention, preferring on the whole to let
his work speak for itself. Few of LeWitt's many admirers
across the world knew anything about his origins as the son
of Russian immigrants.
Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, he was only 6 when
his father died. So LeWitt was brought up by his mother and
aunt, deciding eventually to study art at Syracuse
University because - he later said modestly - he "didn't
know what else to do". After joining the US Army, serving in
noncombat positions during the Korean War, he moved to New
York in 1953.
He found time to read the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and
Samuel Beckett's plays. LeWitt even made a drawing for a
Beckett play, admiring the writer's objectivity, terseness,
simplicity and inescapable logic.
Afterwards, he came to believe that both Beckett and
Robbe-Grillet must have influenced him in a theoretical
sense. But he also paid tribute to his early experiences
between 1955 and 1956 as a graphic artist working in I. M.
Pei's architectural practice. LeWitt designed letter-heads,
brochures and building models of towers and parking lots. He
admitted later that Pei's emphasis on precision affected his
own way of thinking about design.
In 1958, at the age of 30, LeWitt renewed his relationship
with the paintings he admired from the past. Bold, schematic
drawings testify to his love of Piero della Francesca's
frescoes in Arezzo, Botticelli's Primavera and Velázquez's
portraits of royal children at the Spanish court. His
enthusiasms ranged from the sensuality of Rubens's Helene
Fourment in a Fur Coatto the traumatic violence in Goya's
Execution of the Rebels on May 3rd 1808. Uniting them all is
a fascination with the human figure. But a series of pencil
drawings, also made in 1958, show him focusing with
matter-of-fact austerity on his own New York loft, bedsheet
and stove.
For five years, between 1960 and 1965, he worked in the shop
and the security divisions of the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan. Several of his colleagues on the museum's support
staff would likewise emerge as leading figures in
contemporary art.
In 1962 a series of freely brushed ink studies, all called
Working Drawings, show LeWitt casting aside his previous
dependence on Old Masters and domestic subjects. Now he
concentrated on a purist notion of form, favouring primary
structures based on simple, mostly cubic units.
By the end of the year he had developed a ruthlessly
pared-down form of minimal abstraction in a work as
prophetic as Wall Structure (now owned by the Wadsworth
Atheneum in his home town of Hartford).
In 1963 his drawings became openly sculptural, showing units
jutting out from the wall in a series of steadily expanding
diamond forms. And the following year, in a quirky homage to
the serial photographer Eadweard Muybridge, a wide, black
wall-box invited the viewer to peer, like a voyeur, at the
images inside. Flashing lights, set off by a timer-switch
next to the sculpture, illuminate a seated female in the
first compartment. But she gradually moves nearer as we pass
from one peephole to the next, and by the end a close-up of
her navel has become little more than an abstract dot.
Apart from systematically negating the whole notion of
treating a woman just as a body, this sculpture sums up
LeWitt's journey from figurative art to pure form. And
Muybridge, who had pioneered the idea of repeated
photographs of human movement, stimulated LeWitt to
introduce serial progression into his own work, stacking and
clustering the now pure white cubes and stripping away their
closed outside surfaces to expose the structural grid
beneath. As his fellow conceptual artist Dan Graham wrote at
the time, LeWitt had freed structure from content, so that
it "no longer represented the structure of something".
He was ready now for his first solo exhibition, held at the
John Daniels Gallery in New York. And working drawings,
executed in ink on yellow ruled paper, show with great
clarity how he envisaged making wall pieces projecting into
space. Their geometric precision proclaims a debt to the
Bauhaus, de Stijl and Constructivism, as well as the widely
influential work of Josef Albers who had emigrated to the
US. At this crucial moment, though, LeWitt was associated
above all with fellow Minimalists such as Carl Andre, Donald
Judd and Robert Morris, whose work received widespread
recognition when displayed in the 1966 Primary Structures
exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. They
represented an extreme and dramatic move away from the
concerns of Pop Art, which had dominated so much debate
about contemporary art during the early 1960s.
Even so, sculpture did not dominate LeWitt's work at the
expense of drawing. Far from it: he continued to make marks
on paper with prolific intensity, and the outcome brings
viewers closer to the essence of his unflinching vision.
A new kind of independent drawing appeared in the late
1960s. Its emergence coincided with LeWitt's decision to
argue openly for the development of conceptual art, and his
mature priorities are announced by the titles he employs.
Lines in Four Directions, Each in a Quarter of a Square is a
classic 1969 ink study, where an upright sequence is
followed, clockwise, by a horizontal and two kinds of
diagonal direction. It sounds simple enough, but the result
looks unexpectedly complex, even mysterious. LeWitt makes
his lines far thinner, and packs them much closer together,
than his title suggests. They arrive at an almost woven
texture, and in subsequent drawings he is not afraid to make
this linear mesh denser still.
Plans for wall works prove that he now began producing
spectacular mural-size drawings in private and public
spaces, with assistants either partially or wholly carrying
out his written instructions. His first solo show in London,
at the Lisson Gallery in 1971, covered five walls with thin
pencil lines executed entirely by students. LeWitt did not
see the work until they had finished making it, and yet the
entire exhibition offered impressive evidence of his
singular identity as an artist.
By 1976 his ability to handle immense spaces was
dramatically displayed at the Venice Biennale, where the
critic Germano Celant curated an ambitious survey called
Ambient-Art. LeWitt's epic space enabled him to devise a
massive extension of his previous wall-drawing works. His
fast-growing reputation was further boosted by a 1978
exhibition at the MoMA in New York.
The central role played by print-making in his work was
honoured by the Tate Gallery in 1986, when it mounted a
survey of his lithographs, screen-prints, etchings, woodcuts
and printed books. But his ambitions to work on an
architectural scale grew apace, and in London one monumental
outcome was the richly coloured drawings in the entrance
hall of the Bankers Trust Company in Broadgate. LeWitt, who
lived for much of the 1980s in Spo-leto before returning to
Connecticut, also unleashed a riot of brilliant colour on
the exterior of a small, unconsecrated Italian chapel.
Commissioned by Bruno Ceretto, who with his brother,
Marcello, produced fine wine in the Barolo area of Piedmont,
LeWitt transformed the outside walls of this modest building
in 1999.
LeWitt, whose work is now displayed in museums across the
Western world, died after suffering complications from
cancer. He is survived by his wife, Carol, and two
daughters.
Sol LeWitt, artist, was born on September 9, 1928. He died
on April 8, 2007, aged 78