Sol LeWitt was one of the founders of Conceptual art, and he had a talent for making complex ideas seem accessible. He earned his first fame in the 1960s for sculptures assembled from white-painted cubes piled up into sturdy configurations.
“Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple,” he once said, hinting at his own talent for aesthetic clarification.
But he also possessed a talent for appreciation, and was among the leading collectors of his generation. He routinely bartered his sketches with those of his artist-friends, mostly as a gesture of moral support. He ended up with some 4,000-plus paintings, drawings, photographs and miscellaneous objects stored near his home in Chester, Conn., where he died in 2007, at the age of 78.
Clik here to view.
A fascinating new show at the Drawing Center brings together some 120 works culled from his elephantine holdings. Yes, there are a few LeWitts here, including his wonderful “Wall Drawing #1248,” which was executed for the occasion by two officially designated draftsman.
[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]
The exhibition does not explore influences between artists so much as revel in the shared DNA of the Conceptually-inclined clan of the ‘60s and ‘70s, with their predilection for graph paper and grids and rows of numerals. This hardly sounds like a recipe for pictorial engagement, but there is wit to burn in Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s ”Untitled (Falcon Rulers),” a meticulous watercolor depicting four six-inch wooden rulers framing a patch of hardwood floor. I have reason to suspect it is square.
Clik here to view.
The show becomes sweetly sentimental one floor down, where you are likely to linger among a group of hand-embellished post cards that LeWittt sent and received. One card arrived from the painter Pat Steir, who, in the small space reserved for a message, wrote “Dear Sol” a few dozen times in different colored pencils, each mark echoing the next and adding up to a very bouncy, slightly bonkers, salutation.
The show does enlarge your view of LeWitt, and not only because it memorializes him as a force for good in the art world. More importantly, I think the show calls attention to the democratic impulse underlying his work — not the sculptures so much, but the more influential “wall drawings,” many of which were actually painted, not drawn. He delegated their execution to teams of assistants whom he graciously credited, and these days, a new generation is warming to LeWitt’s collaborative approach. Clearly, he began his career on a note of subtraction, paring his art down to essentials. But in the end he turned out to be a world-class includer, and that too, was an idea ahead of its time.
“Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection” remains on view at the Drawing Center in SoHo through June 12.
