Since the dawn of time, people have drawn on walls. Take, for instance, the wall drawings of the Lascaux Cave or the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Now, fast forward a few thousand years and adjust your sights on the walls of Building 7 in the heart of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) campus. The interior walls of the three-story structure †nearly an acre of space †resonate with the line and color of Sol LeWitt (1928′007).
The retrospective of 105 wall drawings displays and preserves 40 years of work by the Minimalist innovator †famous for declaring the genre “dead” and moving on to explore the extremes of Conceptualism. In doing so, LeWitt advanced the notion of how art is made by separating the act of conceiving a work from the act of executing it.
“Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” is the apotheosis of that approach. The drawings, which LeWitt conceived and laid out in diagrams, were executed over a six-month period by 24 of the artist’s own assistants and 30 students from Yale, Williams College, the Massachusetts College of Liberal arts and other institutions across the country.
The concept for the exhibition itself was born during a 2003 conversation between LeWitt, his wife, Carol, and Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II director of the Yale University Art Gallery, as the three explored ways as to how the wall drawings might best be documented, preserved and re-drawn in years to come.
LeWitt was interested in gifting a teaching museum with his work. Ultimately, it took collaboration between Yale, Williams College Museum of Art and Mass MoCA to realize the project.
Typical of the process attached to the wall drawings, LeWitt was actively involved in structuring the installation. He selected the building at Mass MoCA and dictated specifications for its restoration, including a series of “flying bridges” and newly created courtyard spaces. According to Mass MoCA director Joseph Thompson, “Sol’s understanding of architectural space was as masterful as the wall drawings themselves.”
LeWitt’s career may have culminated in a generation-spanning exhibition that will delight as well as teach, but it began rather more humbly. A Hartford, Conn., native, LeWitt studied at the Wadsworth Athenaeum as a young artist. After serving in the Korean War, he moved to Manhattan in 1953, took classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrator’s School, did paste-ups for Seventeen magazine and worked as a graphic designer in I.M. Pei’s offices. During the first half of the 1960s, he supported himself by working as a night receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met the future critic Lucy Lippard and fell in with the group of groundbreakers that included Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman.
In the early 1960s, LeWitt created paintings and geometric wall reliefs. In the mid-1960s, he explored three-dimensional works based on the cube. Using precise grids and modules in measured formats, he systematically developed variations.
LeWitt responded to the Nineteenth Century photographic works of Eadweard Muybridge, the first to trigger banks of cameras in quick-fire succession to capture the sequential representations of human and animal locomotion. LeWitt adapted the format, creating what the artist Mel Bochner called his “serial attitude.” Repetition of themes taken to their logical and farthest conclusions infused his works, particularly the wall drawings.
In 1965, well into his mid-30s, LeWitt had his first solo show at the John Daniels Gallery. He was later shown in group exhibitions with the Minimalists and at the seminal show “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum.
While LeWitt seemed far out to many, Donald Judd considered his use of wood “old-fashioned.” The Materialists thought his work too conceptual. Bochner relates LeWitt’s response to Judd on viewing his 1968 Whitney retrospective: “The show firmly establishes Don’s reputation as&ur leading West Coast sculptor.”
It was an edgy and enviable time. They were a coterie of artists playing off of one another, reaching for inspiration in a thousand different ways, changing the face of art.
In 1967, LeWitt eclipsed the field by separating the idea of conceiving art from the process of making of art, which he defined in an ARTForum essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art,” he wrote, essentially defining Conceptual Art.
By expressing his point of view that concept †the planning and decisionmaking †are primary and the execution secondary, LeWitt rejected the notion that art is unique and precious. He also justified the use of assistants to carry out his idea. The fact of the matter is that, in one manner or another, assistants had always been a part of the process †from Old Masters’ circles to contemporary collaborations. But Le Witt formalized it, without apology or covertness.
By 1968, he had conceived his first wall drawing. It came to life on the walls of the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City. Drawing in black pencil, LeWitt produced 32 identically sized squares. In them he drew combinations of the four straight lines that composed the work’s visual vocabulary. The serialized lines †vertical, horizontal, diagonal right to left or left to right dentified all the possible ways in which the four elements could be combined in a series of two.
Although LeWitt executed this drawing himself, he quickly turned the process over to others, just as a musician guided by a composer’s score gives direction to the individual, the ensemble or the orchestra.
Within a year, he had described nine more wall drawings with language and clear diagrams for sites in Los Angeles, Düsseldorf and Rome, and left them to be realized by eager assistants. In 1969, he produced “Wall Drawing 11,” again at the Paula Cooper Gallery. This is the earliest work included in the Mass MoCA exhibit.
A year later, LeWitt, perhaps influenced by his stint with I.M. Pei, broadened his concept to include architecture in his drawings. “Wall Drawing #51. All architectural points connected by straight lines” was drawn with a contractor’s blue chalk snap line. It has since been executed in numerous buildings across the globe. In each case, the resulting combination and length of lines is subtly different, depending on the specifics of the architectural circumstances.
By adding three primary colors, LeWitt greatly expanded the possible permutations of his four straight lines and increased the visual impact. He also expanded the visual vocabulary to exceed combinations of straight lines and began investigating other ways in which lines could fill an entire wall.
Walls completed by assistants reflected the new degree of latitude. For example, “Wall Drawing #46. Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly” and “Wall Drawing #86. Ten thousand lines about ten inches (25 cm) long, covering the wall entirely” differ from venue to venue.
For the next decade, LeWitt experimented with basic geometric figures and form. “Wall Drawing #295. Six white geometric figures (outlines) superimposed on a black wall,” is an austere masterpiece from 1975 that evokes Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.”
The same period saw LeWitt broadening the variety of materials used to execute what was becoming a rapidly growing body of work. Colors grew bolder. Hues were expanded. He specified the use of latex paints, India inks, Pelican watercolors and Lascaux light-fast acrylic paints and washes. Ironically, some of those infused with acrylics he later described as “raucous and vulgar.”
Meanwhile, LeWitt did not abandon sculpture. Here, as in the wall drawings, his “serial attitude” was constantly in play. In 1974, “Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes” culminate in the 122 permutations of a cube with one side missing.
The same intensity was applied to the books he produced as early as 1966. The most articulate of these is Autobiography , 1980, in which LeWitt documents in 1,000 photographs the minute aspects of his Hester Street studio/apartment. (Known for being camera shy and eschewing celebrity, LeWitt appears in only one of the photos and even then is barely discernable.) The interest in books eventually led to Printed Matter, a publishing venture with Lucy Lippard that organized and distributed artists’ books.
Finally recoiling from the heat of the limelight, LeWitt and family moved to Spoleto, Italy. During the 1980s, he composed sculptures of serialized stacked cinder blocks. The wall drawings of this period became populated with geometric forms and stars as well as solid areas of ink-washed color. The wall drawing for the 1988 Venice Biennale covered the Italian Pavilion’s interior.
As part of his artistic language, LeWitt devised a system of communications that could easily be read by assistants. For example, an intense single color was RRRR (red, red, red, red). A mixed color might be YBBGG (yellow, blue, blue, gray, gray.) As the drawing became ever more complex, the demands on assistants grew. They were forced to develop not only careful measuring and drafting skills but also, as Jock Reynolds notes in his introduction to the exhibition catalog, “preparatory projection.” The latter, being the underlying premise of Conceptualism, demanded that both senior and student assistants stretch to meet the horizons of LeWitt’s original mindset, whether they were working nearby or continents away.
In spite of the complexities engendered by the maturation of LeWitt’s style and techniques, the artist’s basic visual vocabulary remained spare and direct. During the last four years of his life, as cancer advanced, LeWitt continued his daily work routine and, returning to the simple and direct techniques he pioneered four decades earlier, created wall drawings with remarkable speed. Reynolds refers to most recent, the black and white scribble drawings done near the end of LeWitt’s life, as being among the most beautiful. They are “imbued with a transcendent aura of light and luminosity,” he writes. LeWitt, direct as ever, described them as single lines “taken for a random walk.”
Six of the scribble drawings have been drawn and comprise the end scene in the Mass MoCA exhibition.
The exhibition is due to run, enlighten and teach for two and a half decades. In conjunction with “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective,” a catalogue raisonné will be published in 2010.
“Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” is on view at Mass MoCA through 2033. Mass MoCA is at 1040 Mass MoCA Way. For information, 413-664-4481 or www.massmoca.org .
