Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
opportunities, developed a small art collection. Its first curator, Fanny J. Brown, organized an ambitious temporary exhibit that featured the words of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Braque, and Modigliani—a real coup for a small, working-class city. But the head of the New Britain schools’ art program, Dewey Van Cott, considered the exhibit a travesty.20
Van Cott wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the New Britain Herald, arguing that works of the artists represented in the exhibit ignored “such utterly unessential things as how to handle brushes, how to draw, what the principles of good design are and what constitutes good, harmonious color.”21 The controversy earned the Hardware City a national reputation for provincialism. ARTNews reported that the Van Cott’s criticism “might have been quoted from the Boston papers of 1913 when the Armory show invaded the sacred city.”22
New Britain was hardly alone in its provincialism. Just nine miles away, in the more sophisticated Hartford, Chick Austin, the Wadsworth Atheneum’s director, was testing the patience of the institution’s trustees when he paid $399.65 for a painting by Mondrian—just one example of his devotion to modern art. In fact, the trustees were no more welcoming to expensive traditional paintings. When Austin paid a whopping $17,000 for a Caravaggio, the brilliant Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, an investment that secured the museum’s place as a repository of important art, the board objected to his profligate spending.23
In such an atmosphere, the odds seemed against any young person’s being inspired to think outside the rules of art as they were accepted at the time. Indeed, on the roster of native sons and daughters of New Britain who became nationally prominent, there is no prominent artist. To be sure, the city produced Walter Camp, often referred to as the “father of American football,” and two national political figures—Abraham Ribicoff, who was governor of Connecticut, a us senator, and secretary of health, education and welfare in the administration of President John F. Kennedy; and Paul Manafort, who served as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and in 2018 was convicted of several felonies. Even if adopted sons and daughters are added to the list, only one child of New Britain became an artist of international status. He was the child of a mother who never stopped doting on him and a father who never had the chance to do so.
■ When a boy loses a father at a tender age, there is often speculation about the effect of the loss and the legacy of the father. The earliest evidence shows that the young Solly seemed withdrawn. This is apparent in the testimony of childhood friends and school records. Anna Foberg, principal of Lincoln Elementary School, wrote:
Solomon did a very good job as a traffic officer. He was pleasant, not too bossy and kept his head at all times. He watched the children do things and talked about it in the meeting instead of picking small flaws. He needs to take his work less seriously and learn to smile. He also needs to step up and take charge of things as he finds that may be needed. He is apt to do just the ordinary job until an older person shows him where he may do things on his own. He was elected to the Safety Council by the votes of 200 children’s teachers of the upper grades. He was chosen second best in a group of four.24
Miss Brown, a teacher at the school, wrote: “Solomon is a sober little fellow. He needs to smile and enjoy other boys and girls. He does very good work but acts too old for his age. Not a very tidy housekeeper. Had to be reminded to come back from traffic and clear away his work.”25
As years passed, however, he occasionally showed signs of an emerging sense of humor. Walter Friedenberg, Solly’s boyhood friend and classmate at Central Junior High, remembers: “He was not loquacious, and his diction was slurring. But he was alert, companionable, and witty. He had a giggle. That little giggle.”26
Friedenberg remembers the games that their group played. There was football at Walnut Creek Park and baseball wherever the kids could play it. In those games, Solly LeWitt fit in nicely.
No doubt, however, he was different from other boys. Perhaps the clearest example is his choice of which professional baseball team to follow. New Britain is halfway between New York City and Boston, and the loyalties of the Hardware City’s residents always have been split between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Solly, however, supported the Cleveland Indians, whose home games were played hundreds of miles away. This wasn’t because of the physical and historical connection between Connecticut and Northeastern Ohio. Solly wasn’t even aware at the time that that part of Ohio had once belonged to the Constitution State—it was its Western Reserve, where Cleveland sits. He told his friends simply that a person should think for himself. And when he thought for himself, he liked the Tribe, led by the farm boy wonder, Bob Feller. He never saw the Indians play in person, and this was long before televised games. So he followed them only in radio broadcasts and the box scores and brief game accounts in the New Britain Herald. This loyalty earned Solly a healthy dose of abuse, something he laughed about later—but he remained an Indians fan until his death.
Entering his teens, Solly became a member of the Boy Scouts and went several days a week to Hebrew School at Temple B’Nai Yisrael, the Conservative congregation of New Britain. The city had two synagogues at the time, the other Orthodox. And in early October 1940, Solly was called to the Torah for the first time as a bar mitzvah. Among other duties, he delivered a short speech that Saturday morning. It clearly indicates the views of a boy who understood what his mother had done for him. As his cousin Celeste LeWitt would say decades later, “Sophie’s whole life centered on her one child,” and she never walked past him without giving him a hug.27 Friedenberg recalled, “The way she looked at him and spoke to him with great affection and love … I thought of her as a very warmhearted person.”28 This was obvious in the speech, which read in part: “Spare, I pray Thee, my dear mother for many a year. Bless her for the tender attention and selfless care she has given me to this day. May it be Thy will that she live many years to witness the results of her toil so that she may see that she has not labored in vain.”29
It certainly appeared that Sophie had not labored in vain. Solly’s early report cards were promising (with As and Bs). He received As for effort, obedience, courtesy, and cleanliness. Oddly, he earned Bs in penmanship, in which he later excelled and used in dramatic fashion in much of his work. And he did well in the Boy Scouts, earning merit badges in athletics, cooking, pioneering, safety, public health, bird study, personal health, swimming, lifesaving, handicrafts, first aid, stamp collecting, rowing, reading, civics, reptile study, path finding, scholarship, and camping.
Solly’s interest in stamps and the passion he demonstrated for his collection may easily be viewed as a part of a behavioral pattern, since he would eventually collect art obsessively. His passion to own beautiful stamps is reflected in a letter he sent in 1941 to Reverend H. G. C. Hallock, a missionary in Shanghai, China, who immersed himself in Chinese culture and collected local ephemera:
Dear Sir, I received your address through D. Mayer’s friend in Lenox Hill Hospital. Although I know you are quite busy I was wondering if you could possibly send me some extra stamps you have lying around, because I am a stamp collector and have a quite large collection. My age is 13. To get back to my stamps, I have a few (14) covers from throughout the world and I thought it would be nice to have some from China. Will you please acknowledge this letter. I would appreciate it very much.
Sincerely,
Sol LeWitt
51 Cedar Str.
New Britain, Conn., USA30
In school he took art classes, and many of his drawings survive. They show a very different Sol LeWitt—one who, in art anyway, was either obliged to or decided to think conventionally. He did portraits in pencil of famous men in public life: James Madison, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Simon Bolivar.31 It is not known whether he was free to choose his subjects, but if he was the choices indicate an early interest in history and politics that stayed with him. The portraits were straight-ahead drawings whose style would surprise no one, yet one could draw an obvious conclusion: the boy had talent, something that he dismissed in adult interviews as something everyone has. But the drawings he did at the age of fifteen stand out for their originality,