Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
In the case of LeWitt, though most fans know of his revolutionary campaign to change the definition of art, few know anything about his private life (or how it influenced his work) or could have picked him out in a crowded gallery in New York, São Paulo, Sydney, Venice, Düsseldorf, Tokyo, or London.
When the artist attended exhibition openings, he was the quiet and burly fellow in the corner who wore a sport coat with no tie. By choice he was the wallflower, the man with the bald pate whose pleasantly round visage, circular eyeglasses, and tolerant smile hid his distaste for party chatter and art speak. Even at the height of his long career, he never fit the image of the ego-driven artist in need of constant adulation. On party nights, he preferred to stay at home to watch a televised baseball game; read a book of history or philosophy; or listen to one of his more than 4,000 tapes of classical music, jazz, and opera with the volume turned up because of his partial hearing loss. All of that was more attractive than making small talk. As his wife, Carol, once said in regard to his tolerance for public events, “Sol doesn’t do fun.”3
He also didn’t do the rituals of self-aggrandizement. He frustrated photographers and interviewers intent on prying into his life, arguing that it had nothing to do with his art. In the early 1970s, when an Italian magazine asked for a photograph, LeWitt sent a picture of his dog.4 When in his later years he had an opening in Perugia, Italy, and balked at going, one of his assistants took his pooch instead.5 Patrons wanted to know the man behind a reinvention of art making—the Los Angeles Times referred to him as the figure “who changed art internationally”6—but this reinventor, according to the New Yorker’s art critic Peter Schjeldahl, was an artist of “militant anti-personality.”7
LeWitt’s primary impact on contemporary art was his insistence that the role of the artist is that of a thinker instead of a craft master, and that the product of the mind is more significant than that of the hand. The artist’s task, LeWitt argued, is to develop the scope, purpose, and site-specific impact of the work rather than focus on its execution, which he considered “perfunctory.”8 For centuries, it had been the practice of artists, with rare exceptions, to make compositional decisions as they worked. For his major pieces, LeWitt made all decisions before a drop of acrylic paint or an element of sculpture was ever applied. And even then, it was other artists who applied them, not LeWitt. “The idea,” he wrote, “becomes the machine that makes the art.”9 Until his ideas took hold, critics assessed art primarily by examining art as a physical object, not the idea that produced it.10
LeWitt created in the same manner as an architect or composer does, in effect providing only blueprints or scores and hiring multitudes of young artists to finish and install what he had conceived. His oeuvre was vast, consisting of more than 1,250 wall drawings, many of them measured in yards and boldly colored; hundreds of sculptures that he referred to as structures, as a way to demystify art; photography that turned ordinary images into theme-driven statements; an uncountable number of gouaches (because he gave so many away); and books published to promote and distribute the work of colleagues to the general public. In a subjective field like art, there is no reliable way to measure one artist’s output versus another, but the curator Gary Garrels tried in 2000: “LeWitt’s fecundity is staggering. Perhaps not since Picasso has an artist worked with such relentlessness and range.”11
At the same time that he created opportunities and challenges for young artists, he did the same for viewers of contemporary art. For example, through his work on variations on open cubes, he let viewers note the elements that were missing and complete the work in their heads. Cubism had introduced the idea,12 but only in painting and, notably, not using cube shapes.
LeWitt came into his own when the art market began to rival other forms of investment and many artists, particularly the later abstract expressionists and pop art innovators, became media darlings. Some also prospered by branding themselves—doing work over and over again once they had discovered a way to earn money in a competitive art market. LeWitt considered reliance on formula to be lethal to the creative soul. On the effect of market-driven pressures, LeWitt said, “The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns out refrigerators.”13 Yet by doing things his own way and ceaselessly pushing himself to come up with new ideas that by their nature undermined the idea of branding, he managed to earn millions—and gave a good deal of that fortune away to younger artists and to causes in which he believed.
Following his death from the effects of colon cancer in April 2007, the media focused on his professional achievements and made only sketchy references to anything personal. The obituary in the New York Times called him “a lodestar of American art.”14 Pravda quoted Joanna Marsh, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art’s curator of contemporary art, who referred to LeWitt as “one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.”15 The Guardian said, “He left in his wake a gaggle of the world’s most ponderous art critics disputing over whether he was a conceptualist or a minimalist or both, while he himself bent his own rules with wiggly lines, irregular geometrical shapes, and even splotches of paint.”16
LeWitt contributed to the confusion. Among his contradictory (and often wry) views was the belief that “it’s not too important what art looks like.”17 He also said that he preferred the kind of art that is “smart enough to be dumb.”18 When given credit for the innovation of wall drawings, he responded, “I think the cave men came first.”19 (The cave men, however, valued permanence, and LeWitt did not.) His sense of humor and highly personal use of words were examples of demystification and the art of the twist: “The wall drawing is a permanent installation, until destroyed,” he said, and “irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.”20 It seemed at times as if he was the art world’s satirist. When he gave interviews, he punched holes in the usual response script. Asked about the legacy of his native Hartford, Connecticut, a city that had once had a rich cultural identity, he responded, “Everyone is from somewhere.”21 He called out those who relied on art speak, “a secret language that art critics use when communicating with each other through the medium of art magazines.”22
In 1993, the UK critic Rachel Barnes used the term “LeWitticisms” to describe his way of using language to break down barriers.23 The natural enjoyment of art, LeWitt argued, is impeded by critical assessments that are heavy on jargon and short on clarity. He loathed such snobbish and dense interpretation and thought of art as universal: “Every person alive is an artist in some way. The way he thinks or walks or dresses or acts. We’re all making art as we live. You furnish your house the way you want. You arrange your day, if you can, the way you want.”24 About critics, he said: “Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.” He also commented, “When artists make art they shouldn’t question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.”25
LeWitt’s playfulness with language sometimes replaced one form of confusion with another, as his logical mind worked out mathematical formulas (even though he insisted he was not particularly interested in math). He typically used the same words as both the title of a work and instructions to the artists who were to complete it. For example, the full title for Wall Drawing #211, created for the Portland (Oregon) Center for Visual Arts in 1973, is: “A line drawn from a point halfway between the midpoint of the left side and a point halfway between the center of the square and midpoint of the left side to a point halfway toward the point where two lines would cross if they were drawn from the center of the square to the midpoint of the top side, and the second line from the point halfway between the midpoint of the left side and the upper left corner to the upper right corner.”26
But the artists he hired to install these pieces understood and were grateful both for the work and for the interest LeWitt took in their own. His crews were largely female, a continuation of his early efforts to encourage many women who challenged the bullies of what was then an overwhelmingly male profession.
Even during his early days as an artistic loner when income was meager, LeWitt promoted the art of colleagues. As time went on and his income grew, he bought or traded pieces for such work,