"Unless you're involved with thinking about what you're doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating." -- Sol Lewitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 - April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism.
LeWitt rose to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, and painting.
He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965. His prolific two and three-dimensional work ranges from wall drawings (over 1200 of which have been executed) to hundreds of works on paper extending to structures in the form of towers, pyramids, geometric forms, and progressions. These works range in size from gallery-sized installations to monumental outdoor pieces. Sol LeWitt’s frequent use of open, modular structures originates from the cube, a form that influenced the artist’s thinking from the time that he first became an artist.
"A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form.""All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.""Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.""Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.""Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.""Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.""Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.""During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.""Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard.""I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.""I believe that the artist's involvement in the capitalist structure is disadvantageous to the artist and forces him to produce objects in order to live.""I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.""I was not interested in irony; I wanted to emphasize the primacy of the idea in making art.""In my case, I used the elements of these simple forms - square, cube, line and color - to produce logical systems. Most of these systems were finite; that is, they were complete using all possible variations. This kept them simple.""Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.""Minimal art went nowhere.""Minimalism wasn't a real idea - it ended before it started.""The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators.""The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.""The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.""The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.""The thinking of John Cage derived from Duchamp and Dada. I was not interested in that.""When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.""You shouldn't be a prisoner of your own ideas."
LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, LeWitt traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master painting. Shortly thereafter, he served in the Korean War, first in California, then Japan, and finally Korea. LeWitt moved to New York City in the 1950s and studied at the School of Visual Arts while also pursuing his interest in design at Seventeen magazine, where he did paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats. Later, for a year, he was a graphic designer in the office of architect I.M. Pei. Around that time, LeWitt also discovered the work of the late 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies in sequence and locomotion were an early influence. These experiences, combined with an entry-level job he took in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, would influence LeWitt's later work.
At the MoMA, LeWitt’s co-workers included fellow artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, and Robert Mangold. Curator Dorothy Canning Miller's now famous 1960 “Sixteen Americans” exhibition with work by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella created a swell of excitement and discussion among the community of artists with whom LeWitt associated. Dan Graham's John Daniels Gallery gave LeWitt his first solo show in 1964 or 1965. In 1966, he participated in the "Primary Structures" exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York (a seminal show which helped define the minimalist movement), submitting an untitled, open modular cube of 9 units. The same year he was included in the "10" exhibit at Dwan Gallery, New York. Interviewed in 1993 about those years LeWitt remarked, “I decided I would make color or form recede and proceed in a three-dimensional way.”
MoMA gave Sol LeWitt his first retrospective in 1978-79. The exhibition traveled to various American venues. Other major exhibitions since include Sol LeWitt Drawings 1958-1992, which was organized by the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1992 which traveled over the next three years to museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the United States; and in 1996, the Museum of Modern Art, New York mounted a traveling survey exhibition: Sol LeWitt Prints: 1970-1995.In recent years the artist was the subject of exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Center, Long Island City (Concrete Blocks); The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover (Twenty-Five Years of Wall Drawings, 1968-1993); and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (Incomplete Cubes), which traveled to three art museums in the United States.
In 2006, LeWitt’s “Drawing Series” was displayed at Dia:Beacon and was devoted to the 1970s drawings by the conceptual artist. He had drawn directly on the walls using graphite, colored pencil, crayon, and chalk. The works were based on LeWitt’s complex principles, which eliminated the limitations of the canvas for more extensive constructions.
A major LeWitt retrospective was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. At the time of his death, LeWitt had just organized a retrospective of his work at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio.
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, a landmark collaboration between the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) opened to the public on November 16, 2008, at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The exhibition will be on view for 25 years and is housed in a three-story historic mill building in the heart of MASS MoCA’s campus fully restored by Bruner/Cott and Associates architects (and outfitted with a sequence of new interior walls constructed to LeWitt’s specifications.) The exhibition consists of 105 drawings —- comprising nearly one acre of wall surface...that LeWitt created over 40 years from 1968—2007 and will include several drawings never before seen, some of which LeWitt created for the project shortly before his death.
Sol LeWitt was one of the main figures of his time; he transformed the idea and practice of drawing and changed the relationship between an idea and the art it produces. LeWitt’s art is not about the singular hand of the artist; it is the ideas behind the works that surpass each work itself.
LeWitt collaborated with an architect to design a synagogue for his congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek; he conceptualized the "airy" synagogue building, with its shallow dome supported by "exuberant wooden roof beams", an homage to the Wooden synagogues of eastern Europe.
Sol LeWitt is represented by the Donald Young gallery in Chicago, Lisson Gallery in London, and Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.
The Pace Gallery was appointed the International Representative of the LeWitt Estate in November 2007, and continues to represent the Estate today.
Arcs, Circles and Grids, Sol Lewitt. Bern, Switzerland; Kunsthalle & Paul Biancini, 1972.
Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings, Damiani, 2006.
The Location of Eight Points, Washington, D.C.; Max Protech, 1974.
Autobiography, Sol LeWitt. New York and Boston; Multiple, inc. and Lois and Michael K. Torf, 1980.
Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974 ISBN 0-87982-007-1
Cross, Susan (ed.) Sol LeWitt: 100 Views, Yale University Press, 2009 ISBN 0-300152-82-5
Gale, Peggy (ed.) Artists Talk: 1969-1977, Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2001 ISBN 0-919616-40-2
