Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
only he would choose a field other than art.10 This was the view not only of the authorities but also of some of his classmates. Gray Bazelon, reflecting on LeWitt’s rise to fame, said, “What Sol LeWitt became afterward had no relationship with who he was at Syracuse. He was a nonentity for four years. We couldn’t believe it [when he became famous].”11 She had not wanted to spend time with him as she had with other students, such as one who “could draw like a Renaissance master.”
It was a considerable service that the curriculum was focused on Old World art. How could a young person prepare to become an artist or art teacher without being knowledgeable about Rafael, Giotto, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and the movements that stretched from the Renaissance to the eve of Modernism? But the eve of Modernism was the limit at Syracuse. By 1945, other universities’ fine arts programs were teaching about what had happened since the Paris Salon dropped its requirement that to be exhibited, works of art had to be idealistic. In other words, the definition of art, as the years passed, changed dramatically from work that was representational to work that was affected by other elements, and ideas became as prominent as renderings.
What did it mean, Syracuse students may have wanted to know, when Paul Cezanne’s green blobs represented trees; Georges Seurat extended the gap between artist and viewer with white space between dots and trusted the viewer to make up the difference; or when Marcel Duchamp decided that a urinal could be shown in an art gallery, turning both the object and assumptions about art upside down? What about the pranksters of Dadaism and the innovators of futurism, Fauvism, surrealism and other isms that led to the revolution of the abstract and its offshoots? Weren’t they important as definitions (and collections) of art were changing dramatically?
In the years that followed, LeWitt became passionate about the foundations of expression. He wrote, as a kind of career statement, “I’d like to produce something that I would not be ashamed to show Giotto.”12 As he learned more about the world and traveled as much as any young artist of the era did, he understood that he was part of a continuum and found breathtaking the meticulous work of the masters, particularly those of the Italian Renaissance. His career, however, did not depend on his ability to learn their techniques. He grew to admire their achievements, but appreciating them, learning from them, and being inspired by them are quite different from copying them.
At Syracuse, the work that he was required to do meant that his freshman grades were mediocre at best.13 He received a D in design and Cs in still life and other art courses. In his sophomore year his performance improved a bit, though he still got Cs in his portrait and watercolor classes. He got Bs in still life, illustration, and art history. And his best grade of all reflected the dean’s opinion of his capacity outside the art world: LeWitt earned an A in English literature.
In the later 1940s, something of a revolution occurred on campus that changed LeWitt’s outlook and prospects. Syracuse’s chancellor, William Pearson Tolley, decided that the art school had to adopt a more contemporary view of art.14 Kaish said, “My recollection is he put together a search committee, which came up with a recommendation that he chose not to follow.”15 Tolley brought Norman Rice to Syracuse, who in turn brought members of his Art Institute of Chicago circle, and Rice made the art program more innovative and diverse. Among the new faculty members were Merlin Pollack, Dean Butler, and George Vandersluice. Kaish recalled, “I liked the conservative guys, but suddenly they were out.”
Kaish came back to campus for his junior year and saw dumpsters out in front of the school:
At first, I was dismayed and overcome by sadness. I loved the old way, and I didn’t really know how much I loved it until it was gone. I loved that there was no freedom and experimentation in the way you looked at things, or in the material we used. After the change, we began using new ways to think about design and color as opposed to the accuracy of shape. We were no longer documenting. We were interpreting and transforming. Eventually it all became very exciting, but some people never got over the change.16
LeWitt did. Of the new faculty members, he said: “They had decided that anyone who was in school before that was totally lost. They really didn’t give a shit at all, and we didn’t get very much instruction, which was the best thing in the world for me at the time.”17
In his third year, LeWitt’s grades improved, though not dramatically. He still got Cs for anything that had to do with detailed portraiture, but in the class on form and expression he received an A. His senior year was by far his best, with all of his grades As, except for a B in esthetics. And he proved outstanding in his newest discovery, lithography. (Throughout college his grades in courses outside of art—history, English, and philosophy—were consistently high.) He didn’t think he showed nearly as much talent as many of his classmates: “Some [of the other students] were really very good, but most of them didn’t turn out to be artists after all. Some of the best ones never did. One guy became a window designer. There was one guy who did Lord & Taylor ads for a while. Then he started doing paintings, which were not so good.”18
Theodore Salz, by consensus the star of the class, never became a full-time artist, though Gray Bazelon recalled, “We stood around awestruck looking at his drawings.”19 Other star students put their talents to use in various ways. Marvin Israel became art director for Vogue, Sydney Tillim was a long-time teacher at Bennington College, and Josh Fendell taught for nearly thirty years at the Maryland Art Institute. Kaish was one of the few who had major success in the art marketplace. Gray Bazelon’s paintings became valuable commodities in New York City. And Kramer landed his dream job as art critic for the New York Times, though during his long tenure there he never let his friendship with Le-Witt soften his views on the artist’s work.
When asked why some of the best students didn’t become artists but went off into the academic world, LeWitt’s reply was one that ought to give hope to anyone who does not fit into the category of prodigy:
Well, I think the reason they were very good students was that they had a great deal of talent; they had a great deal of facility. Having a great deal of facility, there wasn’t the sense of struggle or sense of desire to improve that other people who didn’t have this facility or natural talent to do things had to struggle a lot more. And merely doing things well in school is not the program of being an artist. It’s a good program for being a student … because you do get very good grades and you do what’s expected of you. To be an artist you probably need a little more rebelliousness…. Most of the artists I know, well, some of them never went to art school at all. Most of them weren’t the best students.20
The interview in which he said this, by Paul Cummings, avoided most personal subjects, like all of the interviews of LeWitt. If Cummings, going out of character for such interviews, had asked this question: “So, Sol, during your four years at Syracuse did you attract the attention of any lovely coed?” LeWitt might not have answered, or he might have responded with something less than a full accounting. Indeed, he did attract such attention. Gray Bazelon recalled—in contrast to how LeWitt would think of himself in later years—that the quiet young man had “handsome features.” She herself had no interest in him—“the ballsy guys were the ones I was attracted to.”21 (She later married the classical composer Irwin Bazelon.) But another pretty student from New Rochelle became a LeWitt pursuer, up to a point.
North, LeWitt’s friend and fellow art student, was the matchmaker. He talked to Naomi Bragman about a Syracuse junior art student who just might be interested in a date. When LeWitt met Bragman formally—they had previously seen each other at Crouse Hall—he told her his story in a few words. He spoke of his physician father, whom he’d never really had the chance to know. Bragman’s father had been a physician, too (a psychiatrist), and, again like Abraham LeWitt, had met with an untimely death. Naomi had been only nine years old at the time.
She told LeWitt that her family had moved from Syracuse to Binghamton, New York, when she was a young girl, and that her father became the first person to have a psychiatric practice in that city. In the evenings, she, her sister, and their dad formed a chamber group, the Ill-Harmonic Trio, with herself on clarinet, her sister on piano, and their father on violin.
She said that