Sol LeWitt

born 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, USA
died 2007 in New York, USA

The son of immigrants from Russia, Sol LeWitt graduated with a bachelor of fine arts from Syracuse University. After serving in the Korean War, he moved to New York City and pursued his interest in design, doing paste-ups, mechanicals and photostats for a magazine before working as a draftsman for the architect IM Pei. In 1960, he took a job at the book-counter of the Museum of Modern Art, where his co-workers included fellow artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Robert Mangold.

Like many artists at the time – Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein among them – LeWitt sought to escape the dominance of abstract expressionism, with its large-scale paintings and emotionally loaded brushwork. He began to explore a new method of making art that eliminated the arbitrary and subjective. In 1967, he published his renowned text ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’ in the journal Artforum.

LeWitt had his first solo exhibition at the Daniels Gallery, New York in 1965 and participated in several significant group exhibitions of minimalist and conceptual art during the late 1960s and early ’70s, including Primary structures at the Jewish Museum, New York in 1966 and Live in your head: when attitudes become form at the Kunsthalle Bern, in Switzerland in 1969.

From late ’60s, he used black pencil lines to transect pencilled grids. In his Wall structures, graphite lines were placed directly onto the architecture, like frescos, exploring not only the space but also its contours. Later his wall drawings reintroduced illusionistic space, his colours became more subtle, and his graphic technique more complex. Then he added human factors and the work eventually veered into unforeseen, chancy territory: for example, asking one person to draw an irregular line and for others to attempt to copy it.

By the early ’70s LeWitt’s art made frequent use of open, modular structures that originated from the cube. In the 1980s, after living in Spoleto, Italy for a few years, he began using great, close ranks of colour. His later works reconciled sculpture and design by the creation of ensembles conceived in situ, or with multicoloured wall drawings echoing his white wood pieces. His very last works were black drawings made from taping together two pencils and rhythmically rolling them through his fingers to create loopy, twisting effects against the backdrop of white walls.

A major display of LeWitt’s wall drawings is currently on show until 2033 at the Museum of Modern Art Massachusetts.

LeWitt was also a founder of the artists organisation Printed Matter, which continues to produce artists books – an important part of LeWitt’s own practice.

Read more about Sol LeWitt’s 1977 Kaldor project and 1998 Kaldor project.

See also
Sol LeWitt, Museum of Modern Art
Sol LeWitt, Lisson Gallery
Sol LeWitt: a wall drawing retrospective, MASS MoCA