Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
SOLLY
In May 1935, a six-year-old boy in Connecticut used red and black pencils to draw a Mother’s Day card that featured a heart on the cover.1 When he finished his work, he gave the card to the woman who read Russian novels to him in the original language, cooked him borscht with potatoes and onions, and provided other homemade comforts in a period when, much too early in life, the child learned the meaning of bereavement. The Mother’s Day drawing, then, is both Sol LeWitt’s oldest surviving work and a symbol of the enduring bond between a mother and son.
That rendering of a heart, however, provides little evidence that its artist was a prodigy who one day would create a new definition of art. It is a little unusual, yes—instead of a wide and ebullient heart in the style of most childhood versions, it is narrow and deep, as if stretched from top to bottom.
On the back of the card is this handwritten message: “ROSES ARE RED/ VIOLETS ARE BLUE/ YOU ARE THE BEST MOTHER/ I EVER KNEW.”
Many decades later, after the adult LeWitt was identified as a pioneer in two of art’s many “isms,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl said: “The Minimalists scared me to death. Except for Sol LeWitt, who must have been dropped on his head as a kid. He’s the sweetest, most decent, most intelligent man in the world, and he’s a minimalist. How does that work?”2
Dropped on his head as a kid? In a way, yes.
■ Solomon LeWitt, called “Solly” by the immediate family, was the only child of two refugees who emigrated from Russia but didn’t meet until they were living in the United States. Like all new arrivals from a different culture who spoke a different language, they had much to overcome. Each, though, set examples for their child about the need for independent thinking, taking personal and professional risks, and performing tikkun olam (Hebrew for “repair of the world”).
One piece of memorabilia from those days is a formal black-and-white photograph of a man dressed in a tailored woolen suit and waistcoat. It shows that Dr. Abraham LeWitt had angular cheekbones, an imposing forehead, a well-groomed mustache, and lips that were slightly downturned but indicated a bemused countenance.
At the time the photo was taken, circa 1930, Dr. LeWitt; his wife, Sophie; and their son lived at 3333 Main Street in Hartford, the “Insurance City,” which then was one of the richest communities in the country in terms of household income.
Connecticut’s capital city had had a run of good fortune that extended back into the Gilded Age, fed not only by the insurance giants Aetna, Travelers, Hartford Fire (as it was known before it became the Hartford), and others but also by the nineteenth-century publishing empire that benefited writers who remain among the city’s most luminous figures: Mark Twain and his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe—the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even in the Great Depression Hartford remained a city of distinction. It was sometimes called “the Athens of America,” largely because of the work and vision of A. Everett “Chick” Austin, the director of the oldest public art museum in the United States, the Wadsworth Atheneum. Indeed, members of the LeWitt family were in the audience on the night in 1934 when the museum’s theater hosted the world premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, the first opera with an all-black cast.3
The home of Abraham, Sophie, and Solly was two miles north of the museum. Like many of the single-family houses in Hartford’s prosperous north end, the LeWitt home was spacious—occupying 2,818 square feet and containing four bedrooms and two baths4—reflecting Abraham’s standing as a surgeon and one of the founders of Mount Sinai Hospital, then a new institution, where he served as medical director. Even then, however, Dr. LeWitt found himself under great stress, a circumstance that he well knew could exacerbate his condition—he had been diagnosed with arteriosclerosis in addition to colorectal cancer.
How much of the details of Abraham’s life story were passed along from Sophie to her son is unknown, but it appears that some important information was omitted. In the artist’s later years, he said that he had few memories of his father, and he was uncertain about where Abraham had been born. He thought it was Turkey, as the birth certificate specified,5 yet there had never been any stories passed down in the family about that country. However, among the documents the family kept was a copy of a certificate from an official registry in Istanbul that listed Abraham’s father, Simcho, in the year 1891:
Eligibility to vote: None
Religious Affiliation: Jew
Date and Place of Birth: Ottoman Calendar 1247 (1832/33) Austria
Trade and Qualifications and Means of Livelihood: None
Age: 60
Father’s Name and place of residence: Avram
Name and Reputation: Simchi [sic] LeWitt
Type of Residence: House
Street No.: 23
Street: Bath House
Neighborhood: Dark Mustafa Pasha the Archer
District: 6
City: Istanbul
Permanent distinguishing mark: None
Moustache and Beard: Red Beard
Eyes: Hazel
Height: Medium.6
Sometime after this certificate was issued, however, the family moved from Istanbul to Palestine, taking up residence in Hebron, where Abraham was born. Thus the confusion. At the time, Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and this fact, presumably, led the artist to believe that Turkey was his father’s birthplace.
Abraham LeWitt left Palestine after becoming one of the few Jews accepted to study in Russia at the Samuel Poliakov School of Mining Engineers, in Gorlovka, from which he graduated with highest honors in 1890.7 Later that year, he and his mother, Hinda, sailed from Hamburg to Liverpool on the passenger ship Warrington. In Liverpool they boarded the Pennsylvania and sailed for New York City, where they lived with Abraham’s sister, Bella, in an apartment on East Thirty-Ninth Street.
Abraham worked with his brother, Michel, in the latter’s Brooklyn jewelry store, which eventually moved to New Britain. Abraham was briefly employed after that as a mining engineer near Scranton, Pennsylvania, but then, wanting to be near members of his family, took a job at Russell & Erwin Manufacturing Co. of New Britain. There, his work on cylinder locks led to patents held by the firm. But he had plans to become a physician and enrolled in the first class at the new Cornell University Medical College in Harlem. Two years later, in 1902, the State of New York issued medical license number 4230 to Dr. Abraham Le-Witt. Once again to be near relatives, he moved back to Connecticut. In a relatively brief time, he became one of Hartford’s most prominent physicians, specializing in maladies of the eyes, nose, and throat, and also practicing surgery. He invented several medical devices, including clamps used in eye surgery and a girdle harness that helped intestines heal after abdominal surgery, which led him to become one of the city’s wealthier residents. He invested in real estate, particularly apartment buildings, a financial plan that worked well for a time. He intended to stay single until his mother died.
■ Sophie (a nickname for Sofia) Appell was born in 1890 in Rostov-on-Don, in western Russia. She was one of the seven children of Solomon and Elizabeth Appell. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, for which many Russians incorrectly blamed the Jews, pogroms proliferated in cities and villages across Russia. In 1892, Solomon parted from his wife and children to see if he could find a place in the new world for them.
Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Jewish German banker, had devoted some of his enormous fortune to helping Eastern European Jews emigrate. Initially most of the Jews moved to Argentina, Canada, and Palestine, but many were also immigrating to the United States by the 1880s. Other charitable and humanitarian efforts were begun, and Jews from Russia began to settle on American farmland that was largely available because it was too difficult for others to till.
This is how Solomon Appell ended