Sol LeWitt became involved with art as a teenager under expert guidance. He studied art from 1945 onwards and worked for several years with artists from various disciplines. He began teaching art in his thirties. Throughout this time, he naturally continued to actively create art himself.
When he appeared in his first solo exhibitions in the mid-1960s, an artist stepped into the public eye who had spent roughly three decades actively and passively learning about and creating art.
LeWitt is considered apioneer of both Minimal and Conceptual art. Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge's successive photographs of animals and people in motion,LeWitt integrated seriality into his works to suggest the passage of time or a narrative sequence. Two important essays by LeWitt were particularly influential on this new art movement:"Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"(1967) and"Sentences on Conceptual Art"(1969). In the first text, he states:
The idea becomes a machine that creates art
He left behind a mature body of work, which has been on display in the exhibitions listed below. Art lovers who view this work quickly realize this. Sol LeWitt's posthumous success continues to grow steadily.
Sol LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut. As a child, he attended art classes at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. In 1949, he earned his BFA from Syracuse University and subsequently served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, stationed in Korea and Japan.
In 1953, LeWitt moved to New York, where he attended classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and simultaneously did production work for Seventeen magazine. From 1955 to 1956, he worked in the graphic design office of architect I.M. Pei.
He worked with precise, carefully considered formats such as grids and modules, systematically developing various variations. His approach was often mathematically driven, determined by language, or arose through chance. He applied similar principles to his works on paper. LeWitt presented his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the John Daniels Gallery in New York.
Structures, soon with human proportions
“White Cubes” by Sol LeWitt, 1991 in Frankfurt/Main by laurenatclemson (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
In the early 1960s, LeWitt earned his living as a night receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art. There he met the future art critic Lucy Lippard, as well as the artists Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman. It was during this time that Sol LeWitt began creating "structures,"
He utilized the open, modular structure of the cube, a form that had fascinated his thinking since the time he first considered himself an artist. After an initial series of closed-shaped wooden objects, thickly lacquered by hand, he decided around the mid-1960s to “completely remove the skin and reveal the structure.”
This skeletal form, radically simplified open cubes , became a fundamental building block of his three-dimensional works. These open cubes always contained the same twelve linear elements, which were connected at eight corners to form the skeletal structure.
In the second half of the 1960s, his art was increasingly shown in group exhibitions, which were soon grouped under the term Minimalism; this included the exhibition "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum New York in 1966. During this time, he taught at various educational institutions in New York, including New York University and the School of Visual Arts.
From 1969 onward, he created many of his modular structures on a larger scale. They were manufactured in aluminum or steel by industrial processors. Each of his large, open cubes was 63 inches high, roughly equivalent to eye level. At this stage, LeWitt began to generally apply the proportions of the human body to his fundamental sculptural units.
From the mid-1980s onwards, LeWitt then assembled some of his sculptures from stacked concrete blocks. As with the previous “structures”, he created variations on a self-imposed limitation.
Sol de Witt's “Circle with Towers” in Madison Square Park Photo by acegas @ flickr.com, artwork by Sol De Witt (flickr.com/photos/acevedo/23872048/) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
LeWitt began working with concrete blocks. In 1985, the first “Cube” in a park in Basel (now in Zellweger Park, Uster, Canton of Zurich). From 1990 onwards, LeWitt conceived numerous variations of a tower to be built from concrete blocks.
In doing so, LeWitt, departing from his well-known vocabulary of geometric forms, developed a growing interest in random shapes with curved lines and highly saturated colors.
This interest culminated, until his death in April 2007, in the design of a concrete sculpture with nine towers, consisting of almost 4,000 white concrete blocks and reaching a total height of five meters. Sol LeWitt's "9 Towers" has been located at the Kivik Art Centre in Lilla Stenshuvud, Simrishamn, Sweden, since 2014.
Wall Drawings – Wall Paintings
In 1968, LeWitt began murals , simple diagrams directly onto the wall . His first works were in graphite, later he used colored pencils, colored graphite pencils, ink, acrylic paint, and other media.
Because LeWitt created one of these “Wall drawings” in 1968 for the opening exhibition of the Paula Cooper Gallery, which supported the “Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam”, these Wall Drawings soon appeared reproduced thousands of times on surfaces of walls everywhere.
“Wall Drawing 831 (Geometric Forms)”, by Sol LeWitt, Museo Guggenheim (Bilbao, Spain). Photo by Zarateman [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
From 1969 to 1970, LeWitt created four “Drawings Series” that show the basic elements of his earlier works in various combinations. In each series, he devised a different system for assembling the twenty-four possible combinations of a square divided into four equal parts.
LeWitt called the system of “Drawings Series I” “Rotation” , in “Drawings Series II” he used the “Mirror” , “Drawings Series III” used “Cross & Reverse Mirror” and “Drawings Series IV” the “Cross Reverse” .
These systems and LeWitt continued to evolve, from the bright “Wall Drawing #122” (1972) to the dark “Wall Drawing #792” (1995), from pencil and chalk to vibrant ink applied in a smudge technique, the use of which LeWitt attributed to his study of the frescoes of Giotto, Masaccio and other early Florentine painters during his time in Italy (late 1970s).
Towards the end of the 1990s/beginning of the 2000s, LeWitt had arrived at highly saturated, colorful acrylic wall drawings whose forms appear curved, playful, and almost random, but which were created according to a sophisticated system. For example, the bands running across the image had to be exactly the same width; no colored section was allowed to touch another section of the same color.
In 2005, LeWitt began a series of 'scribble' wall drawings , which got this name because he only sketched outlines that later had to be painstakingly filled in by 'scribble' with graphite.
The density is precisely prescribed, with six levels of gradation, creating a unique impression of three-dimensionality. However, the six-week meditation course in the Tibetan monastery, with its vow of silence, is a far more exciting event than a few weeks of full-time scribbling.
On albrightknox.org you can watch people from Sol LeWitt's circle “scribble” – in 2010, they are creating the artwork conceived by LeWitt in 2006.
This largest scribbled mural, “Wall Drawing #1268”, still hangs in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York; its absolutely stunning effect can already be guessed from the small image.
The completion of the artwork by others is not a unique occurrence due to the artist's death, but rather one of the principles of LeWitt's work; the wall drawings are and should normally be executed by other people and not by the artist himself.
Sol LeWitt authored the seminal work of conceptual art
It has already been mentioned above that the artist Sol LeWitt, initially classified as a minimalist, is referred to as the "father of conceptual art" because he invented this term.
To be a little more precise, it can be stated that Sol LeWitt moved in the midst of the many artists who jointly invented conceptual art – a new style in art lingers in the air for a similar amount of time as a new behavioral trend in a society (e.g., the currently observable trend from uncritical “I’m not stupid” consumption to the consumption-abstinence that despises stupid consumption).
Sol LeWitt himself coined the term “Conceptual Art” and thus also presented the theoretical guideline of the new art movement : The “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” described conceptual art in its entirety as art in which the idea of the artwork is paramount; the concept defines the art.
And part of this idea is that a work of art is completed by other people and not by the artist himself, one of the central principles in his soon-to-be standard work “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” .
Colored Logic: Sol LeWitt's Gouaches
In the 1980s, after his time in Italy, Sol LeWitt began painting with gouache. Using this semi-transparent, water-based paint, he created free-flowing abstract works in contrasting colors.
Quite atypical for the idea of conceptual art, he painted these artworks with his own hands, often in series that revolved around a specific motif.
No motif in the figurative sense; the series deal with “Irregular Forms” , “ Parallel Curves”, “Squiggly Brushstrokes” and “Web-like Grids” .
These gouaches, which at first glance appear to be a tremendous break with LeWitt's previous work in their loosely sketched compositions, are on second glance the exact logical continuation of his work.
His “Irregular Forms” possess an almost compelling regularity in their irregularity (seeartnet.de). His “Parallel Curves” convey to the human brain the logic of an organically grown structure.
The “Squiggly Brushstrokes” subconsciously evoke the slightly curly fur of the animal adapted to a special environment, which, as is well known, also developed according to a highly sensible order in precisely this curly texture over the course of a long evolution.
In his “Web-like Grids” one could see the ingenious foresight of an organic development of precisely this web, which did not yet exist at the time the artworks were created: from the blurred, self-organizing surface to the absolute condensation that swallows information in black space.
So, once again, art with a logical structure. It would be interesting to know whether Sol LeWitt is revered by artistically inclined mathematicians to the same extent as Johann Sebastian Bach is by musically inclined mathematicians.
Since Sol LeWitt began his artistic career, various scientific disciplines have discovered ingenious principles of order behind organic structures—precisely the kind of organic structures that people with a love of materials think of when viewing Sol LeWitt's work. Sol LeWitt explored the logic of such structures, as simple as it is ingenious, less through rigorous scientific inquiry than through a rather brilliantly intuitive understanding of his art…
Artists' books
Sol LeWitt's interest in the seriality of art has produced over 50 artist's books since 1966, the last one in 2002.
In 1976, he founded “Printed Matter” , an organization that still exists today and supports “artist’s books”printedmatter.org .
Architecture and landscape architecture
Sol LeWitt worked with architect Stephen Lloyd design a synagogue for the “Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek”
An “airy” synagogue building was created, with a flat dome supported by a lavish wooden roof truss, a tribute by LeWitt to the wooden synagogue buildings common in Eastern Europe and exceptionally beautiful, pictures at www.cbsrz.org .
In 1981, LeWitt was invited by the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art ) to design a public artwork for Fairmount Park. He conceived "Lines in Four Directions in Flowers," featuring over 7,000 plants to be planted in a precisely defined ornamental pattern. The artwork was planted in 2011 and can be viewed in a short slideshow here : www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/770.html
LeWitt as an art collector
LeWitt and his wife Carol have amassed an impressive collection of well over eight thousand works of art since the 1960s, encompassing works by his predecessors as well as his contemporaries. They have proven to be generous lenders to numerous institutions, with the Wadsworth Atheneum being particularly noteworthy.
Major traveling retrospectives of LeWitt's work were organized by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978 and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, LeWitt made Chester, Connecticut, his primary residence.
He died on April 8, 2007 in New York.
Exhibition history – Sol LeWitt as a world-renowned artist
A comprehensive report on the life and work of an exceptional artist naturally includes a look at the exhibition history.
In 2015, the exceptional artist Sol LeWitt and his work celebrated exactly half a century of exhibition history , which can no longer be summarized – at least it would be a rather lengthy undertaking to list and read about over 300 solo exhibitions and well over 500 group exhibitions .
Therefore, the following journey with Sol LeWitt takes us around the world, across these and rather randomly selected exhibition venues. This cross-section, with one or two outstanding exhibitions per year in various centers of contemporary art, illustrates far more vividly than any longer list. Sol LeWitt was and is at home in the centers of modern art, all over the world.
Solo exhibitions
1965 John Daniels Gallery, New York, USA
1969 Sol LeWitt: Sculptures and Wall Drawings, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany
1970 Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, first retrospective
1972 Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland
1973 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England
1974 Incomplete Open Cubes and Wall Drawings, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland; followed by a tour to other locations 1974-1977
1975 Wall Drawings, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
1996 Thinking Print: Books to Billboards 1980 – 1995, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
1996 Sculpture Projects, Münster, Germany
1996 XLVII Esposizione Internazional d'Arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy
1997 Sculpture Projects, Münster, Germany
1997 XLVII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy
1998 SESC, New Delhi, India
1998 Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold: Prints, Galerie Franck + Schulte, Berlin, Germany
1999 Galeria IBEU, Copacabana, Brazil
2000 Artisti Collezionisti, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy
2001 Art Works: The Marzona Collection Art around 1968, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany
2002 Conceptual Art: 1965-1975 from Dutch and Belgian Collections, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
2003 The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA
2004 Traces: Body and Idea in Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan
2005 Collection Lambert en Avignon, Musée d'art contemporain, Avignon, France
2006 Ideal City – Invisible Cities, an exhibition by European Art Projects, Zamosc, Poland and Potsdam, Germany
2007 Dump: Postmodern Sculpture in the Dissolved Field, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway
2007 Words from the Collection of Societe Generale Paris, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania
2007 Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
2008 Exact + Different: Art and Mathematics from Dürer to Sol LeWitt, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna, Austria
2009 Don't Think. Feel! Gallery Yamaguchi, art building, Tokyo, Japan
2009 American Printmaking since 1960, Art Gallery Dubrovnik, Croatia
2010 On-Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
2011 Conceptual Tendencies 1960s to Today, Daimler Art Collection, Potsdammer Platz Berlin, Germany
2012 En Subjektiv Historia 1966-2011, Galerie Aronowitsch, Stockholm, Sweden
2013 Conceptual Tendencies 1960s to Today II: Body/Space/Volume, Daimler Art Collection, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, Germany
2014 Melting Walls, works from the Igal Ahouvi Art Collection, Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel
2015 America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
Despite or perhaps because of the random selection, the above list of Sol LeWitt's exhibition venues provides a surprisingly precise view of the world's art centers and the fact that art has something to do with democracy…
Sol LeWitt's art can be viewed in public spaces in many places around the world, including in Germany and nearby, for example, the “Cube” (1984) in Zellweger Park in Uster near Zurich, the “Black Form – Dedicated to the Missing Jews” (1987) in Hamburg-Altona, the “Open Cubes” (1991) in the Gallusanlage in Frankfurt am Main, the “Three Triangles” (1993/94) at the northern end of the Teerhof peninsula in Bremen, “Untitled” (2006/2007) in the Mercatorhalle in Duisburg, and “Wall drawing” in the US Embassy in Berlin.
Three Triangles by Sol LeWitt (1994) Photo by Verograph (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
More Sol LeWitt works can be found in Europe in many public collections , including the most important museum collections of contemporary art :
Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia;
Center Georges Pompidou, Paris;
Dia: Beacon, New York;
EVN Collection, Maria Enzersdorf, Austria;
Slide:Beacon, Guggenheim Museum, New York;
Halls for New Art, Schaffhausen, Switzerland;
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC;
Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich;
Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples.
Museum of Modern Art, New York;
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC;
National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade;
Tate Modern, London;
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven;
in the USA there are some permanent “wall drawings” that can be found in/at the AXA Center, New York; Atlanta City Hall, Atlanta; Akron Art Museum, Akron; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Columbus Circle Subway Station, New York; Conrad Hotel, New York; Green Center for Physics at MIT, Cambridge; Jewish Community Center, New York; The Jewish Museum of New York, New York; John Pearson's House, Oberlin, Ohio; United States Courthouse in Springfield, Massachusetts; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.
Where can I buy art by Sol LeWitt?
To acquire art by this exceptional artist, the following contact points are particularly recommended:
The question often arises among the world's leading figures in art: how did they manage to rise to such top positions? Sol LeWitt is a pleasing example of how such a rise is possible without the dark forces of an almost satanic talent, without the sordid influence of powerful relatives/acquaintances promoting the untalented, without the radiant energy of extraordinary luck, and without even a hint of chance; simply through hard work .
From the very beginning, Sol LeWitt pursued a consistently followed and sustainably implemented career strategy for his art. Until his death in 1980, LeWitt realized one creative idea after another.
To get a good impression of the diversity of his art, simply enter "Sol LeWitt" into an image search engine or browse the following pinboard:
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Sol LeWitt is undoubtedly one of the most important artists of his time, if you want to express it in monetary terms: in 2014, “Wavy Brushstroke” (1995, gouache on cardboard) for $749,000 via Sotheby's, New York .
Sol LeWitt left a great deal to art lovers with his art and the conceptual framework behind his idea of conceptual art: He changed the relationship between the idea and the artwork – and it is a change towards more democracy when everyone can create art.
The underlying idea is that the artist does not stand, or should stand, on a pedestal of admiration, but that everyone can create art, is allowed and encouraged to conceive art – a path towards more creativity and more freedom of thought.
A brief overview of Sol LeWitt's works on an image search engine reveals a striking consequence of the logic that LeWitt always incorporated into his art: Sol LeWitt's artworks all possess a high degree of aesthetics ; nothing is contrived, provocative, or visually disturbing, and many of his works are perceived as beautiful by many people.
In this sense, the question "Does it always have to be conceptual art?" may apply to some artworks on Auguststrasse in Berlin, but in the eyes of most people, never to conceptual art by Sol LeWitt.
Conceptual art is an artistic style that was coined in the 1960s by the US artist Sol LeWitt (in English-speaking countries: Conceptual Art).
The origins of conceptual art lie in minimalism , and with it the theories and tendencies of abstract painting further developed.
What is special about this style is the fact that the execution of the artwork is of secondary importance and does not have to be carried out by the artist themselves. The focus is on the concept and the idea, which are considered equally important for the artistic work.
In this section of the art blog you will find numerous articles and content about this topic, as well as about artists, exhibitions and trends.
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Illuminated LED canvas print "Structo", textured & roughened surface
219,00 €
