Sol LeWitt

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Lore & Background

LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father died when he was six, and his mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. After earning a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, he traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master paintings. Shortly thereafter, he served in the Korean War, first in California, then Japan, and finally Korea. He 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. In 1960, he took an entry-level job as a night receptionist and clerk at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where his co-workers included fellow artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Gene Beery, and Robert Mangold, and the future art critic and writer Lucy Lippard. He also became friends with Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, and Robert Smithson. 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. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, LeWitt made Chester, Connecticut, his primary residence. He died at age 78 in New York from cancer complications.

Reader's Guide

LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both minimal and conceptual art. His prolific two- and three-dimensional work ranges from wall drawings (over 1,200 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 books and 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 Issue 5 of 0 To 9 magazine, LeWitt's work 'Sentences on Conceptual Art' was published, becoming one of the most widely cited artists' writings of the 1960s. In 1968, LeWitt began to conceive sets of guidelines or simple diagrams for his two-dimensional works drawn directly on the wall, executed first in graphite, then in crayon, later in colored pencil and finally in chromatically rich washes of India ink, bright acrylic paint, and other materials. According to the principle of his work, LeWitt's wall drawings are usually executed by people other than the artist himself. Writing about making wall drawings, LeWitt himself observed in 1971 that "each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently." Between 1968 and his death in 2007, LeWitt created more than 1,270 wall drawings. The wall drawings, executed on-site, generally exist for the duration of an exhibition; they are then destroyed, giving the work in its physical form an ephemeral quality. They can be installed, removed, and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes. In the early 1960s, LeWitt first began to create his "structures," a term he used to describe his three-dimensional work. After creating an early body of work made up of closed-form wooden objects, heavily lacquered by hand, in the mid-1960s he "decided to remove the skin altogether and reveal the structure." Circa 1965, he settled on a standard version for his modular cubes: the negative space between the beams would stand to the positive space of the sculptural material itself in a ratio of 8.5:1, and the material would be painted white instead of black to avoid the "expressiveness" of the black color of earlier pieces. Beginning in the mid-1980s, LeWitt composed some of his sculptures from stacked cinder blocks, and in 1985 the first cement Cube was built in a park in Basel. From 1990 onwards, he conceived multiple variations on a tower to be constructed using concrete blocks. In the late 1990s, his works indicate a growing interest in somewhat random curvilinear shapes and highly saturated colors. In 2007, LeWitt conceived 9 Towers, a cube made from more than 1,000 light-coloured bricks that measure five meters on each side, installed at the Kivik Art Centre in Lilla Stenshuvud, Sweden, in 2014.

Did You Know?

• LeWitt preferred the term 'structures' to 'sculptures' for his three-dimensional work.
• His first biography, 'Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas' by Lary Bloom, was published by Wesleyan University Press in spring 2019.
• LeWitt worked as a graphic designer in the office of architect I.M. Pei for a year in 1955.
• In 1960, he took a job as a night receptionist and clerk at MoMA, where co-workers included Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, and Lucy Lippard.
• LeWitt's wall drawings are usually executed by people other than the artist himself, following his written instructions.