BIOGRAPHY

SOL LEWITT (1928-2007)

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A key figure in American art of the post-World War II era, Sol LeWitt was at the forefront of the Minimalist and Conceptualist movements. Composed of basic shapes and colors, his geometric sculptures, wall paintings and prints reveal his penchant for reductive designs, precisely rendered modular forms and the process of serialization.

LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1928. He went on to attend Syracuse University, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1949. During 1951-52, he served with the U.S. Army in Japan. In 1953, he moved to New York City, enrolling in classes at the Cartoonists' and Illustrators' School (known today as the School of Visual Arts). During these years, he painted in his spare time and worked as a graphic designer.

Between 1960 and 1965, LeWitt was employed as a night receptionist and book sales clerk at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met the writer and critic Lucy Lippard and the artists Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, all of whom shared his aesthetic ideals. Responding to the personal, gestural styles of the Abstract Expressionists, they embraced the notion that art should be pared down to simple, elemental forms--a philosophy that was vital to the evolution of Minimalist and Conceptualist of late 1960s and 1970s.

LeWitt had his first one-man show at the Daniels Gallery in New York City in 1965, exhibiting modular cube pieces--austere, three-dimensional cage-like constructions--that reflected his interest in geometric systems, as well as the impact of the Bauhaus, Constructivism, De Stijl and Eadweard Muybridge's serial photographs. The show established LeWitt's reputation as an artist whose use of "minimal" form was intended to engage the intellect rather than raw emotions. He would go on to explore the cube in other media and in various permutations. In 1968, LeWitt began making mural-sized wall "drawings," composed of patterned lines, which were executed to his specifications by a team of assistants. In the 1990s, he investigated curved shapes in his two-dimensional work, while by the mid-2000s, he was creating brightly colored sculptures akin to stalagmites.

LeWitt contributed greatly to the evolution of Conceptual art through his articles of the late 1960s--notably "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" and "Sentences on Conceptual Art"--which evoked the era's fervor for order and the notion that the artist's idea is more important than the object. Taking issue with the conventional hierarchy of media, he published much of his work in book form as a means of disseminating it to a broader audience. In 1976, along with Lippard, he established Printed Matter, a well-known bookstore specializing in artists' books. LeWitt also taught at various institutions, including Copper Union (1967-68), the School of Visual Arts (1969-70) and New York University (1970-71). Seeking refuge from the Manhattan art scene, he lived in Spoleto, Italy, during the 1980s, after which he spent the majority of his time in Chester, Connecticut.

LeWitt exhibited his work widely throughout the course of his career, participating in many important group shows devoted to Minimalism and Conceptual art. Major retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978 and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000.

LeWitt died in New York in April 2007. In an obituary, he was described as "a lodestar of modern American art . . . a patron and friend of colleagues young and old . . . the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work." LeWitt is represented in public collections throughout the United States and abroad, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Musée d'art Contemporain de Lyon, France; the Bonefanten Museum, Maastricht, The Netherlands; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

CL

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