Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
Abraham’s death, found themselves in reduced circumstances. In Manhattan she attended ps 9, where the teacher used to let her go to the back of the room and copy pictures while everybody else was doing math.
Her interest in art continued through school, and she applied to only Brown University (which did not appeal to her) and Syracuse (her father’s alma mater and her preference), because she intended to major in art and the tuition at Syracuse at the time was reasonable.
As she explained more than sixty years later, she took an instant liking to the much more introverted LeWitt, who, as she remembered, was seldom seen in art classes by then: “He spent hours in lithography. He was often the only person there. I don’t now if he ever went to class. When I think about him at Syracuse, I think he was basically a self-taught artist. He didn’t get anything out of Syracuse except a degree.”22
They were opposites. “I was not introverted,” Ms. Stern said:
That’s what appealed to him. We often double-dated with Russ North and his girlfriend at the time, Debbie [Faerber]. Russ had this car, which only had a front seat. So I had to sit on Sol’s lap all the time. I even wrote a poem about it. I remember the legal drinking age was nineteen. I was old enough, but the guys weren’t, so they would drink beer. I hated beer. I drank whiskey sours because you can’t taste the whiskey. We used to go out to the really cheap bars near the campus.
Sol was really poor then, but so was I. We went to a lot of free stuff—to hockey games and lacrosse games, and I never even heard of lacrosse. The rest of the time we used to sit on the back stairs of my sorority, Phi Sigma Sigma, and neck. I wasn’t really the sorority type. I joined just to see if I could get in.23
She described LeWitt at the time as “cute but not handsome. His hair was going already. But he had a lovely smile. And he was in love with me.”
Here, however, is the information that Naomi didn’t give him at their first meeting—she already had a beau, Ted Stern, back in New York City. He had graduated from Cornell, was living at home and working, and was “waiting for me so that we could marry. I used to argue with Ted, and every time we argued I was very happy to go out with Sol. When I told Sol about Ted, though, it didn’t bother him.”24 It was as if this quiet young man from Connecticut had a confidence even then that he could win her.
But it wasn’t to be. When she graduated, Naomi announced, in a tearful scene, that she did indeed intend to marry Ted: “Sol came to the sorority house later and handed me this bundle, and then left. He was on his way to Illinois, he said. He won a teaching assistant’s spot there, and would get his master’s. The bundle he left with me had a dozen lithographs and an oil painting. The painting was done with a palette knife, and it was of an old woman in a black cloak, somber, depressing. When I showed it to Ted, he hated it.”25
Indeed, LeWitt’s lithography work at this time was dark. Much of it featured loosely drawn groups of people in gloomy atmospheres, such as in Street Scene (1949). Scholars who examined that work later noted the apparent influence of German expressionists such as Max Beckmann.
Despite the unpromising reaction from Bragman, LeWitt kept knocking on her door:
A month after Sol graduated, he was still thinking he could win me back. He came to New Rochelle and surprised me in the store where I was working, Sylman’s, selling cheap clothes. I thought I would fall through the floor. He’d hitchhiked from New Britain. I had to find a place for him to stay—a friend of Ted’s took him in. But I told him I wasn’t going to marry him, that I was in love with Ted. I said, “I’m not going to see you anymore.” Ted knew, of course, and had been very jealous. Ted was an engineer, who worked in a family business. He had money, and Sol was totally broke. He lost me, and he was still smarting because he was certain he was going to get the senior art prize at Syracuse. But Mort Kaish beat him out.26
The 1949 Syracuse yearbook makes no mention of the senior art prize, or of LeWitt. He didn’t show up for his senior picture, making it the fourth straight year he’d shunned the camera, and the beginnings of a lifelong habit.
FOUR
THE ART OF WAR
NEW BRITAIN (Special). For outstanding art ability and promise, Sol LeWitt, son of Mrs. Sophie LeWitt of 51 Cedar Street, has won three art prizes and scholarships for which he competed in recent weeks. This week he was notified that he had won a cash award of $300 by placing second in an oil painting and progress competition conducted by the John F. and Anna Lee Stacey Scholarship fund in Los Angeles, Calif.
Earlier, LeWitt won the $1000 scholarship of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Fund in New York for graphic arts study and a University of Illinois art scholarship for lithograph work. Native of Hartford and graduate of New Britain schools including the Senior High School in 1945, LeWitt was graduated from Syracuse University last June. He is now doing graduate work in art at University of Illinois.
Hartford Courant, October 6, 1949
A reader of the Courant at the time would get the impression that young LeWitt, rewarded for his diligence and academic record, had embarked on a steady path toward success—at least, as success is generally measured. The scholarship for work in lithography also came with a teaching assistantship, which ensured that two years in Illinois would be comfortable enough. But it wasn’t to be—at least not for more than a few months.
LeWitt’s comments over the years about going to Illinois show that his attitude about the experience ranged from ambivalent to extremely negative. In 1974, he said of the Illinois opportunity:
I thought it was good luck at the time. But it was the opposite…. By that time I was just plain fed up with school, and I didn’t really do very much. I wasn’t very popular with the faculty. And then I had gotten the thousand dollars, and, by the time Christmas came, I was so fed up, I just left school completely. Then I thought, “Well, I really wanted to do some more lithographs,” so I went to the Hartford Art School, and I just asked them if I could use their press, and I made some sort of deal with them. I don’t know whether I paid them or what. But I did that for a few months. Then I took off and went to Europe.1
But even his recollections of Europe, where he saw great works that he had previously seen only in textbooks, were not very positive. He described the trip briefly to Paul Cummings in their interview:
MR. CUMMINGS: Was that just to travel and look around?
MR. LEWITT: I had that thousand dollars so I figured, “Well, I didn’t expect to get it so I might as well do something I didn’t expect to do.”
MR. CUMMINGS: Well, in the 1950s you could do a lot with a thousand dollars in Europe.
MR. LEWITT: Right. It lasted pretty much the whole time.
MR. CUMMINGS: Where did you go and what kind of activities did you do?
MR. LEWITT: Oh, I went to England and France, Italy, the Scandinavian countries. Oh, I don’t know, I wasn’t really interested in seeing museums and things like that. I saw some, and I just wanted—
MR. CUMMINGS: To see what the rest of the world was like.
MR. LEWITT: And at that time the Korean War had started so when I returned I knew I was going to be drafted.2
There is no reference here to the two college buddies who went with LeWitt, Alan Nevas and Russell North. Nevas, the surviving member of the three, recalled, “I was in law school [at New York University], and our pal from Syracuse, Russ [North], was also living in New York. He called one day and said, ‘Sol and I are going to Europe. Do you want to go with us?’ I was working my tail off in law school. It was very hard. And though my parents wouldn’t give me any money at the time, I had saved some, and I thought, why not [take the summer off]?”3
Nevas recalled that the trio arranged an economical voyage, securing triple-decker bunks in the hold of the