Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom

      THE BOY FROM SYRACUSE

      When sixteen-year-old Solly LeWitt arrived on the campus of Syracuse University for the first time in the summer of 1945, escorted by his loving older cousins Nellie and Bella LeWitt, he became one of the youngest students in the oldest fine arts educational institution in the country.

      At that point, he knew little about the university except that one of his uncles had attended it, and that it was far enough from New Britain (about 275 miles) to suit him. He also knew that the Syracuse art department was strong, with a highly regarded faculty.

      His first impressions, to be sure, were positive. In later years, LeWitt said that he thought the city was handsome and the countryside of hills and lakes even more so. He made no specific references in interviews to the campus architecture, but considering his eventual interest in the subject—including his evocation of architectural elements in his cement block pieces—it seemed that Syracuse had been a good choice.

      The Romanesque Hall of Languages, the school’s only building when it first opened in 1873, was large enough to accommodate classrooms for 2,000 students. Nearby Crouse Hall, where the college of Fine Arts and Architecture was housed, was built in 1889 of brownstone and had a medieval atmosphere with its dark, rounded arches; carved woodwork; and high ceilings.

      Syracuse, like many other private universities, had suffered financially in previous years, because so many of the young men eligible for enrollment were fighting in World War II. As a result of returning soldiers and the promise of a GI Bill, campuses were soon overwhelmed by larger and much more diverse student bodies. At Syracuse, whose undergraduate population nearly doubled in size to about 16,000 over a period of months, a shortage of housing meant that some classes (including some in art) were held in Quonset huts.

      Martin Greenberg, who also came from Connecticut, met Solly LeWitt in the summer of 1945. Greenberg recalled that the housing shortage for freshman was so acute that the two of them were assigned to rooms in Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity. “It was a house on a nice, tree-lined street of big Victorians,” Greenberg remembered.¹ It was also headquarters for what became LeWitt’s circle of friends.

      If he was looking for fellow artists, he found them instantly. Leon Morgenstern, Edward Feldman, and Russell North became buddies. On the fringe of the group was a young man from Massachusetts named Hilton Kramer, who planned to become an art critic. A few students pursuing degrees in other subjects were part of the circle, too. Deborah Faerber was an English major and prospective teacher; Alan Nevas would pursue a career in the law and become a judge; and Arnold “Libby” Libner would go on to establish many businesses, including a prominent firm that manufactured bird feed. Sydney Geffen, a veteran who owned a car, provided the wheels for group outings to Warren Street (also known, Faerber remembers, as Fluid Street because of its multitude of bars).

      Libner, a cousin of Greenberg, might have been the one who grew closest to the young student from New Britain. “Arnold was quite literary,” Alan Nevas recalled: “He fancied himself a writer, and he wrote in a very flowery style, lots of flourishes in his fiction and nonfiction.”² Libner also had a reputation, his cousin said, for being “biting and acerbic.”

      Nevas recalled that this circle of friends often went to clubs, shepherded there by North, who yearned to introduce his pals to the pleasures and complexities of bebop. “This helped us all,” Nevas said. “None of us were big socializers. One of the reasons was that right after the war all the soldiers had come back, so the coeds our age that we would normally be dating were more interested in twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-old veterans. Guys like Sol and I were left behind socially. Besides, Sol was shy, not a pushy guy. We sort of connected on that level. So our substitute for socializing was listening to jazz.”³

      LeWitt’s other passion was sports, both as a player and a fan. At Syracuse, he quickly adopted the Orangemen, as the football team was known at the time, and he went to games at the old Archbold Stadium, though in the postwar years the team was weak and rarely won.

      The rub was academics. As LeWitt said in 1974, “Well, I was quite young when I went and … it just took me quite a while to get adjusted. And then I didn’t have much art training. That was very tough on me because it was a very academic school. There was a lot of cast drawing and stuff like that, painting in a very academic way. And I was never very good at that. So that all made it more than usually difficult.”⁴

      Naomi Bragman Stern, who took some of the same classes at the time, recalled, “Hour after hour, we drew from the same plaster casts of Greek statues. It was all very traditional.”⁵ Cecile Gray Bazelon, who enrolled in the art school the same semester as LeWitt did, remembered that students were required to produce a work in the Renaissance style.⁶ The faculty had relied for years on conservative stalwarts and taskmasters—“hard core old boys,” as another student of that period, Morton Kaish, recalled.⁷

      Unada Gliewe remembered that many of her fellow students in the pared-down freshman class in painting switched to liberal arts because of the strictures of the faculty. The schedule, she said, was rigorous: “Freshman year, we had cast drawings 9 to 12 Monday through Friday. Boy, you learned to draw. First two years were things like that, basic courses. I had illustration from 2 to 5 every afternoon. Every month you had to turn in sketchbooks. Friday they came around critiquing. Dr. [Frederick] Haucke we had for that. That man had the broadest thumb in creation. To make his point he would drag his thumb through the wet paint.”⁸ Haucke is remembered by others, such as Gray Bazelon, as an excellent teacher and one of the few in the first year or two of study who required students to use their imaginations.

      Gray Bazelon and Kaish were two students who took the classic approach to art and appreciated the school’s direction. They had the ability to copy styles of the masters. Those who earned the top grades were the ones who could render representational images without great difficulty. Kaish remembers that in such circumstances LeWitt had a difficult time:

      We all worked in light-filled high-ceilinged rooms dedicated to Old World discipline from a faculty largely composed of formalists. It was all about drawing from plaster casts, figure drawing. As the first such art school in America, [Syracuse] wanted to pass along the classic approach. I loved it because that’s what I was interested in and could do. Unlike Sol. The thing I remember about him is that he was an intellectual—very thoughtful, quiet, not one of the student stars. I also remember his paintings at the time. He was struggling. We still worked from the model. Sol always painted their heads very large, pretty much in a modified monochrome, earth colors, grays. It was astonishing in that he did it his own way even in the face of criticism of the faculty. What Sol wanted to do was more expressive.⁹

      Indeed, LeWitt would later say in an interview that the longtime dean of the college of fine arts, Lemuel C. Dillenback—hired