This weekend I visited the Barbara Krakow gallery to see the work of Kiki Smith. While touring the exhibit, I noticed the proprietor had a few Sol LeWitt paintings in her office and a floor to ceiling mural on the back wall. Turns out Barbara is a big fan, asked if Sol would create a piece for her, and he painted the colorful minimalist piece himself a few years prior to his death.
(Sol Lewitt at Mass MoCA)
Wow, I wish I had that kind of clout.
“Dear Chris Berens,
Hey! Hope all is well. Big fan. Soo, I really like your work and got to thinking.. maybe you’d want to come over and paint my bedroom wall when you had a chance? We can play Nintendo and eat Lorna Doones with sweet tea. Are you allergic to dogs?
Let me know what works best for you, I’m available most nights and weekends.
Kind regards,
Liz”
Someday.
Prior to this gallery visit and my recent trip to Mass MoCA in North Adams, I did not know much of Sol beyond my knowledge of his serious following and ‘influence on conceptual art’ from a textbook blip. But why was his work so significant? I decided to crack open The Internet™ and thought I would share my findings with you.
Overview
Sol LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was a leading voice within the Conceptual and Minimalist art movements that began in the 1960s, and he championed the idea of the art project over the finished object in his own artistic process. Challenging the long and distinguished tradition of the artist as authenticator of unique, valuable objects to be placed on pedestals for veneration, Conceptual artists like LeWitt often distanced themselves from the physical construction of the artwork and worked in multiples.
The artist came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and “structures” (a term he preferred instead of “sculptures”) but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, and painting. He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965.
Background
LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, LeWitt traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master painting. Shortly thereafter, he served in the Korean War, first in California, then Japan, and finally Korea.
LeWitt moved to New York City in 1953 and set up a studio on the Lower East Side, in the old Ashkenazi Jewish settlement on Hester Street. During this time he studied at the School of Visual Arts while also pursuing his interest in design at Seventeen magazine, where he did paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats.
In 1955, he was a graphic designer in the office of architect I.M. Pei for a year. Around that time, LeWitt also discovered the work of the late 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies in sequence and locomotion were an early influence. These experiences, combined with an entry-level job as a night receptionist and clerk he took in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, would influence LeWitt’s later work.
LeWitt taught at several New York schools, including New York University and the School of Visual Arts, during the late 1960s. In 1980 LeWitt left New York for Spoleto, Italy. Since returning to the United States in the late 1980s, LeWitt made Chester, Connecticut, his primary residence.
Work
LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both Minimal and Conceptual art.
His prolific two and three-dimensional work ranges from wall drawings (over 1200 of which have been executed) to hundreds of works on paper extending to structures in the form of towers, pyramids, geometric forms, and progressions. These works range in size from gallery-sized installations to monumental outdoor pieces. LeWitt’s first serial sculptures were created in the 1960s using the modular form of the square in arrangements of varying visual complexity. In 1968, he began to conceive guidelines for his two-dimensional works drawn directly on the wall. LeWitt’s frequent use of open, modular structures originates from the cube, a form that influenced the artist’s thinking from the time that he first became an artist. He would eventually use teams of assistants to create such works.
From 1966, LeWitt’s interest in seriality led to his production of more than 50 artist’s books until 2002; he later donated many examples to the Wadsworth Athenaeum’s library. In 1976, with Lucy Lippard and others, LeWitt founded Printed Matter, an organization established to publish and disseminate artist’s books.
In the mid-1980s, LeWitt began to work with concrete blocks. In 1985, the first cement Cube was built in a park in Basel. In the 1990s, he started using gouache, an opaque water-based paint, to produce free-flowing abstract works in contrasting colors. LeWitt’s gouaches are often created in series based on a specific motif. Past series have included Irregular Forms, Parallel Curves, Squiggly Brushstrokes and Web-like Grids.
(Thank you, Wikipedia)
Local venues where you can experience Sol LeWitt
- Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA
- The DeCordova Sculpture Park & Museum in Lincoln, MA
- M.I.T., Cambridge MA has a terrazzo floor piece designed by LeWitt on permanent view.
- MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
A collaboration between the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) opened to the public in 2008 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The exhibition will be on view for 25 years and is housed in a three-story 27,000-square-foot (2,500 m2) historic mill building in the heart of MASS MoCA’s campus fully restored by Bruner/Cott and Associates architects (and outfitted with a sequence of new interior walls constructed to LeWitt’s specifications.) The exhibition consists of 105 drawings –- comprising nearly one acre of wall surface—that LeWitt created over 40 years from 1968–2007 and will include[citation needed] several drawings never before seen, some of which LeWitt created for the project shortly before his death.
(Instruction, Daniel Joglar)
The story of Sol LeWitt’s exchanges with other artists is widely known. Though most artists engage in this process at one point or another, LeWitt seemed fully committed to it as an artistic code of conduct, a way of life. Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Hanna Darboven, and Robert Ryman are just a few of LeWitt’s celebrated contemporaries with whom the artist exchanged works. Such exchanges were not limited to well-known artists — LeWitt consistently traded works with admirers whom he did not know but who had nevertheless sent their work to him, as well as amateur artists with whom he interacted in his daily life. LeWitt’s exchanges —- he responded to every work he received by sending back one of his own -— fostered an ongoing form of artistic communion and, in some cases, a source of support and patronage. The Sol LeWitt Private Collection retains all of the works he received, as well as a record of what he offered in return.
For LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice. In addition to encouraging the circulation of artworks through a gift economy that challenged the art world’s dominant economic model, LeWitt’s exchanges with strangers have the same qualities of generosity, and risk, that characterized his work in general. This kind of exchange was designed to stage an encounter between two minds, outside the familiar confines of friendship.
If we consider the process of exchange as another of Sol LeWitt’s instructional pieces, then the rational (or irrational) thing to do is to continue to exchange work and ideas, if only symbolically, with him.
This exhibition, a curatorial project by Regine Basha, springs from a call to those who share an affinity with Sol LeWitt’s legacy as a conceptual artist, to those who knew him and those who did not—to anyone who has ever wondered, “What would Sol LeWitt like?”
Cabinet and MASS MoCA issued an open call for gifts to Sol LeWitt in any form of an image, an object, a piece of music, or a film, books, ephemera, and other non-perishable items (e.g. wine) for a two-part exhibition taking place at MASS MoCA and at the offices of Cabinet (300 Nevins Street in Brooklyn) from January 20- February 19, 2011. A publication documenting the contributions will accompany the shows and will be presented at the conclusion of the project to all participants.
Not-so-local aside, I never realized I had passed Sol’s work many a times at the National Gallery’s sculpture garden, in Washington, DC while in college.
Four Sided Pyramid
Prolific man. Interesting ideals. Hope you learned a thing or two. Or three. ♥
