Sol LeWitt

Biography

The instruction for Wall Drawing No. 122 fits into a single sentence: all combinations of two lines crossing, placed at random, using arcs from corners and sides, straight, not straight and broken lines. In 1972, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it produced a hundred and fifty pairs of lines running across the walls of the gallery.

LeWitt himself never touched the walls. That was the idea.

Solomon LeWitt was born on 9 September 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, into a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father died when the boy was six; his mother took him to drawing classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum. In 1949 he graduated from Syracuse University with a BFA, went to Europe to look at the Old Masters, and then served in the Korean War: California, Japan, Korea. In 1953 he moved to New York, took a studio on Hester Street on the Lower East Side, studied at the School of Visual Arts and did paste-ups and photostats for Seventeen magazine; in 1955 he spent a year as a graphic designer in the office of the architect I. M. Pei. In 1960 he took a job as night receptionist and clerk at the Museum of Modern Art, where Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold and the future critic Lucy Lippard, then a page in the library, were also working; the exhibition “Sixteen Americans”, with Johns, Rauschenberg and Stella, was the main topic of their conversations. Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson became his friends.

His first showing was a group exhibition in 1964 at the Kaymar Gallery, put together by Flavin; his first solo show came in 1965 at Dan Graham's John Daniels Gallery. LeWitt's early pieces were closed wooden objects, thickly lacquered; in the mid-1960s he decided, in his own words, to remove the skin altogether and reveal the structure. So the open cube appeared: twelve identical bars meeting at eight corners, a ratio of void to material of eight and a half to one, painted white to avoid the expressiveness of black. In 1966 a modular cube of nine units stood in “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum, the exhibition that defined Minimalism; in 1967 Artforum printed the “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, and in 1969 the magazine 0 to 9 published the “Sentences on Conceptual Art”. In 1968 he buried a metal cube in the ground in the Netherlands and documented its disappearance; in 1969 Harald Szeemann invited him to Bern for “When Attitudes Become Form”. From 1969 the large structures in aluminium and steel were made by industrial fabricators.

The wall drawings began in 1968 with the opening of the Paula Cooper Gallery, an exhibition in aid of the students' committee against the war in Vietnam. Graphite at first, then coloured pencil and crayon, later ink washes and bright acrylic. In 1969–1970 he made four “Drawings Series”: a square is divided into four parts, each containing one of four types of line, vertical, horizontal, two diagonals, and four systems of permutation are applied to the twenty-four possible combinations. “Each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently,” he wrote in 1971; the drawings live for as long as the exhibition runs, then they are painted over and can be revived anywhere, provided the proportions of the diagram are kept. By 2007 there were more than 1,270 such instructions. From 2005 he added “scribbles”: the wall is filled with graphite hatching at six densities, the boundaries are marked out with stretched string, and the grey gradation gives an illusion of volume.

In 1970 the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague staged his first retrospective, and in 1978–1979 MoMA followed. In 1976, with Lucy Lippard and others, he founded Printed Matter, a shop and publisher of artists' books; of his own books he produced more than fifty. In 1980 LeWitt moved to Spoleto; the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio, by his account, were what pushed him from pencil to coloured washes, and in the eighties he began for the first time to paint gouaches with his own hand: irregular forms, parallel curves, squiggly brushstrokes. From the mid-eighties came concrete blocks: in 1985 the first concrete cube went up in a park in Basel, and in 1987, for Skulptur Projekte in Münster, he built out of black blocks “Black Form: Memorial to the Missing Jews” in front of a white government building; it now stands by the town hall of Altona in Hamburg. In the late 1980s he returned to America and settled in Chester, Connecticut.

Together with his wife Carol Androccio he assembled about nine thousand works by seven hundred and fifty artists: Flavin, Ryman, Hesse, Judd, On Kawara, Richter. He bought, traded and received them as gifts.

Then came a survey of drawings from 1958 to 1992 that travelled for three years through Europe and America, a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000, and the coloured “Splotches, Whirls, and Twirls” on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in 2005. For his congregation in Chester he conceived, together with the architect Stephen Lloyd, a synagogue with a shallow dome on wooden beams, in memory of the wooden synagogues of eastern Europe. In Syracuse in 2004 “Six Curved Walls” of concrete blocks were put up, and in Philadelphia in 2011, from his sketch of 1981, seven thousand flowers in four colours were planted in rows running in four directions. To my mind he was the most consistent man in American art: from the cube of 1965 to the flowerbed of 2011 the rules did not change. LeWitt died on 8 April 2007 in New York, at seventy-eight. A year later, at MASS MoCA in North Adams, a retrospective of a hundred and five wall drawings opened in a three-storey former mill building, planned to run for twenty-five years; some of them he had conceived a few weeks before his death, and they were drawn without him.