Sol LeWitt
(American, 1928 - 2007)
Death-PlaceNew York, NY
Birth-PlaceHartford, CT
BiographySolomon “Sol” LeWitt (1928-2007)“A Hartford Biography”
© Gary W. Knoble, 2015
Sol LeWitt, is arguably Hartford’s most famous native artist. While he left his hometowns of Hartford and New Britain as soon as he could, and never lived there again, he clearly retained a special affection for the artists and art institutions of the area. While his “minimalist” style drew some public criticism early on, the museums, galleries, and art loving public of the area returned his affection and continue to honor him by collecting and showing his works on a frequent basis.
Solomon “Sol” LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut on September 9, 1928. He was the only child of Abraham and Sophia LeWitt. His parents were both Russian Jews who emigrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century, escaping the anti Jewish pogroms that were raging in the Ukraine. They were married in 1921. Abraham graduated from the Cornell Medical School and practiced medicine in Hartford. In 1920 Abraham was living at 100 Windsor Street (now North Main Street) in Hartford. He must have been reasonably prosperous since he was a doctor and as early as 1914 he owned an automobile. At least one source says he was also an inventor. Sophia was a nurse. While Sol had no siblings, he had, and has many relatives in the Hartford area.
His father died on August 11, 1934 and is buried in the Zion Hill Cemetery in Hartford. After his father’s death his mother and the six-year-old Sol, moved to nearby New Britain to live with her sister who owned a grocery store there. He drew often as a child and remembered drawing on the wrapping paper from his aunt’s store. It was during the depression and he said they lived: “in the part of town that really wasn’t a very good part of town; it wasn’t so bad, really, but I remember that people were out of work. My aunt had a grocery store, and used to give credit to people and had a hard time getting paid.”
As a young child, his mother encouraged his interest in art. She took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in which the participants made art while listening to music. LeWitt recalled that, during one of the classes, his mother had made a spontaneous, black circle and had encouraged him to do the same.
He was familiar with the New Britain Museum of American art. “there’s a small museum devoted mostly to American art, and they did have some very good things, late 19th century, early 20th century – Prendergast. They had several very nice things. I used to go there, I mean, once or twice. They never changed.”
Some sources say he took also took art classes at the New Britain Museum, but his recorded recollection does not seem to bear that out.
LeWitt attended public school in New Britain, graduating in 1945. In an interview with Paul Cummings in 1974, he gives a clear picture of his young life there.
MR. LeWitt; I reached the point in high school where I had to go away to school, and by that time I had gotten to the point where it wasn't so much that I wanted to be an artist, it was just that I couldn't stand the life of the town, of this society. I just couldn't. It was more of an act of rebellion I think than a positive act of wanting to be an artist…..
Not much art training there. “the head of the school did advise me to go find something else to do (rather than art). ….. I did get the idea that being an artist was something slightly more special than going to work in a shoe store….
MR. CUMMINGS: New Britain is a nautical town.
MR. LeWITT: No, it's a manufacturing town.
MR. CUMMINGS: Manufacturing town.
MR. LeWITT: Hardware, locks, ball bearing. It's very highly industrialized.
MR. CUMMINGS: And none of that interested you in any way?
MR. LeWITT: I detested it. I worked in a factory one summer in school. This was later, but before I knew that I had no interest in business or industry. It wasn't even that; I think it was just that I was expected to, you know, I don't know, go out and get married or go out and get a job after school and work my way up, and you know-
Then another one of my classmates is the head of the Art Department at the University of Connecticut. His name is Nathan Knobler…..
LeWitt “escaped” New Britain in 1945 by enrolling, when he was 16, in Syracuse University to study art. One of his uncles had graduated from that university.
MR. CUMMINGS: What did you do during the summers in college?
MR. LeWITT: Well, I came back to New Britain to work because I didn't have very much money and needed to do something. Usually I tried to work outside. I had an uncle who had some sort of political influence, so he got me a job in the Park Department. That was pretty nice.
MR. CUMMINGS: Those are all strange jobs working for quasi-government-
MR. LeWITT: One summer I worked in a factory, and that was pretty bad. I didn't last too long. Then I got a job in the street department digging a ditch, and endless ditch, laying pipes-
MR. CUMMINGS: Yeah, block after block after block. [Laughter] In those summers, in those college summers did you draw at home, did you do any work?
MR. LeWITT: Probably not very much. I took it as a vacation. I read a lot, but I don't think I did very much drawing.
He received a BFA from Syracuse in 1949. After graduation he was a graduate teaching assistant for one semester at the University of Illinois. While there, he was notified that he had won a $1,000 grant from the Tiffany Foundation. He left Illinois and returned to New Britain for a brief time while he decided what to do with his new-found money.
“so I went to the Hartford Art School, and I just asked them if I could use their press, and I made some sort of deal with them. I don't know whether I paid them or what. But I did that for a few months. Then I took off and went to Europe. (1950)”
His $1,000 lasted for about a year and he returned to the US when he was drafted into the Army. He served in the Special Corps for six months in Japan and eleven months in Korea, often designing posters and other graphics for the Army. He said he particularly liked Japan.
After his Army service he moved to New York City. He worked in the office of I. M. Pei from 1955 to 1959 and in 1960 began working as a night receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art. At MOMA he was introduced to the work of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. He was also particularly influenced by the work of Eadweard Muybridge and the Russian Suprematists.
His first solo show took place in 1965 at the John Daniels Gallery in New York City. Around this time the term Minimalism was used to describe the works of the artists and musicians that were part of LeWitt’s circle. His first wall drawing was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1968.
While LeWitt never lived in Hartford or New Britain again, he still had many relatives in both cities and must have visited often. His two “native” cities were early to recognize his talents. In 1975 his wall drawings were shown at the Wadsworth Atheneum at their third Matrix show, a series organized to showcase emerging artists that continues to this day. The show was titled “The Location of a Rectangle”. Deborah Hornblow, writing in the Hartford Courant in 2007 said:
“By the time LeWitt first exhibited at the Atheneum in 1975, he was verging on 50 years of age with only a handful of one-person shows to his credit, most at smaller museums in Europe. ‘Outside his tight circle, he was unknown,’ Lang wrote. ‘The Atheneum, in fact, was only the second U.S. museum to show LeWitt solo. Yet he had been making art, or trying to make it, for 30 years.’"
In 1979 he had his first in a long series of shows at the New Britain Museum of American Art titled, “The Graphics of Sol LeWitt”.
In 1980, tired of the stress of New York City, LeWitt bought a house in Spoleto, Italy. In the late 1980’s he returned to his native Connecticut to live in Chester, where he lived for the rest of his life.
1981 saw three major shows in the Hartford area. The Atheneum mounted a large exhibition titled “Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings 1968-1981”. The show then moved to the Wesleyan University Art Gallery in Middletown, Connecticut. Real Art Ways in Hartford showed “Sol LeWitt; Six Geometric Figures”. A reviewer in the Courant noted: “The draftmen's names are important: Jo Watanabe, Anthony Sansotta, Peter Waite, Mary Kenealy, Cary Chris Smith and Curtis Renner.” The latter four are all Hartford artists.
Of course there was the inevitable controversy over his minimalist style. A wall drawing of his had been proposed for the Civic Center in Hartford but was refused in favor of two murals by Romare Beardon. The Atheneum stepped into the breach and commissioned the work for its own galleries. John Caldwell in the New York Times wrote:
“Certainly Sol LeWitt is far and away the greatest artist the City of Hartford and surrounding area has ever produced. In so saying, I am most certainly aware of the work of Frederic E. Church, a better known artist in certain circles, whose large and currently very expensive canvases are simultaneously vulgar and overworked, without a trace of poetry or genuine feeling for nature.
Hartford recently suffered a severe loss when opposition by some city leaders to a work Mr. LeWitt designed for the rebuilt Civic Center caused the artist to withdraw it. It would be easy to rail against the lack of judgment of those who opposed the work, yet their behavior is not surprising. LeWitt's work is new and, for the general pubic, hard to accept. Picasso, whose work was not appreciated outside a small circle of art connoisseurs until well after the years of his greatest achievement, is but one of many sadly similar cases. Mr. LeWitt's reputation in the world of art, at least, is already established; he is, for instance, the only conceptual artist to be accorded a full-scale exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art.
Fortunately, the Wadsworth Atheneum, with, alas, its smaller and very different audience, managed to find the funds to rescue Mr. LeWitt's design for the city. It is now triumphantly installed in natural light on the museum's second floor……
It is a work of surpassing, luminous beauty, and it would have been a great thing to have had it available to the mass audience of the Civic Center. It might well have inspired some viewers to look into Mr. LeWitt's art further and thus brought them to museums and libraries. A great opportunity for art education, not to mention civic beautification, has been lost.”
Interestingly the Romare Beardon murals that were installed at the Civic Center, instead of the LeWitt wall drawing, were moved to the Hartford Public Library in 2014. The Civic Center was again being remodeled and it was thought that the Beardon murals should be in a location where they would be more accessible to public view.
Alexander Calder and Carl Andre generated similar controversies in Hartford around the same time. But, their works were successfully installed in the proposed public spaces.
In 1982 LeWitt married Carol Androccio, his second wife. She was in her early 20’s when they met. LeWitt was nearing 50.
1989 saw another show at the New Britain Museum titled “Sol LeWitt Prints: 1970-1986”. This show also travelled to the Ezra & Cecile Zilka Gallery at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. A few years later in 1993 the New Britain Museum presented, “Sol LeWitt: Recent Work”.
In 1995, the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, where he had made prints 43 years earlier, showed “Sol LeWitt; New Wall Works” at their Joseloff Gallery. In 1996 the Atheneum presented “Of Sun and Stars: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings”. 1998 saw a wall drawing entitled “Irregular Blobs of Color”, installed at the Student Center at Trinity University in Hartford. In 2001 the Atheneum Matrix Series featured LeWitt for the third time with “Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes”. (LeWitt is the only artist to be featured more than once in the Atheneum’s Matrix series.) In 2002, the Saint Joseph University art gallery in West Hartford showed “Sol LeWitt Prints: 1982-2001”. In the same year Paesaggio Gallery had an exhibition titled, “Criss-Cross: Elizabeth Gourlay, Sol LeWitt, Ken Morgan, and Cary Smith”.
Lewitt and his wife also collected the work of other artist they admired. Some of the artists were famous established artists but many were emerging artists who he was always eager to help. One of those artists was Elizabeth Gourlay who also had a studio in Chester. According to Gourlay, in 2001 LeWitt and one of his daughters paid a visit to her studio and purchased several of her works for his collection. The LeWitts were always willing to lend works from their collection to local museums. Another local artist he assisted was Chet Kempczynski. Deborah Hornblow, in the Courant shortly after LeWitt’s death, wrote:
“As generous as LeWitt was with his money, it was his generosity of spirit that had as great an impact on those who knew him. When Chet Kempczynski's Hartford studio burned down in 1997, it was a phone call from LeWitt that kept him going. ‘I was ready to quit,’ Kempczynski said. ‘It's hard enough to start with. ... And then Sol calls. He read about it in the paper. I don't think I'll ever forget that. It definitely kept me going.’”
In 2003 the New Britain Museum of American Art presented a major show of works drawn from the LeWitt collection entitled, “LeWitt’s LeWitts and Selections from the Collection of Sol and Carol LeWitt”. Matthew Erikson wrote of the show in the Hartford Courant in an article titled “The Art Depot; Prolific Contemporary Artist Sol LeWitt is as Acquisitive as he is Creative”.
“’LeWitt's LeWitts and Selections from the Carol and Sol LeWitt Collection’ includes 95 pieces from LeWitt's private collection along with a smaller quantity of his most recent work. Planned originally as a show of LeWitt's own work with a few of his collected pieces, the exhibit evolved a great deal. ‘I thought this was really a great opportunity to get some of this work out. A lot of it has never been shown before. And I thought a lot of it was very good and should be seen,’ LeWitt said in a phone interview from his Chester studio. ‘Sitting in our warehouse doesn't do anyone any good.’
The collection, which started in New York in the '60s as collegial trades of his work with friends, includes pieces by the leading figures of the conceptual art movement. Different from typical collections, which consciously seek out particular artists of certain status, LeWitt's didn't discriminate.’He welcomed all artists and excluded no one,’ said Andrea Miller- Keller, curator of contemporary art at the Atheneum. Only as LeWitt's reputation grew in the late '70s, she noted, was there opportunity to trade important work with other important artists, and he could select the artists he wanted. ‘They were generally more substantial, heavier works, more significant.’
The collection is an eclectic blend of conceptual and representational art, paintings and sculpture, books, photographs and mixed media. According to Janet Passehl, who supervises and helped organize the collection, ‘The changes in the collection have been more circumstantial. ... There are major works in this collection: Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Pat Stier and also works by artists not getting exposure.’ Twelve Connecticut artists, including Ellen Carey, Richard Ziemann, Jesse Good and Peter Waite, are among those represented in the New Britain exhibit.
‘LeWitt's LeWitts’ includes the eye-catching ’Candle (before wallpaper)’ by acclaimed German artist Richter alongside a work by the influential Eva Hesse. Other such juxtapositions and links are woven through a diverse body of art, creating a startlingly rich and compelling narrative. ‘Every piece was specifically placed by Sol. He took a floor plan and designed everything out on paper ahead of time, which is the way he works. The process was thinking very carefully what belonged together’, says Passehl.
‘You could say that LeWitt's organization gives a certain window into the artist's mind, more specifically, an understanding of his motivations, background and psyche as an artist’, says New Britain museum director Douglas Hyland. The exhibit is also an opportunity to encounter the works of LeWitt's close circle of friends and colleagues, such as Chuck Close, Robert Ryman and Elizabeth Murray.
As an added bonus, the middle room of the exhibit -- what Hyland calls ‘its heart’-- features a small selection of LeWitts, including a 2003 gouache on paper, a recent gift to the museum, and two sets of prints. The colorful bands of lines on display, consistent with his earlier work, repeatedly call to mind one of the artist's early aphorisms: ‘Obviously, a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line.’
‘I like what I do, but I'm no Bach,’ he (LeWitt) said. All the same, he says he was influenced in the '60s by Bach record album booklets describing the composer's compositional technique. ‘I got a lot out of that. About how he would take a subject and turn it sideways and backwards and reverse and all that sort of stuff. To me at that point, it really made a lot of sense as far as thinking about the art I was doing.’
In 2004 the Atheneum installed one of his wall drawings in a stairwell that had previously contained several large tapestries. Tara Weiss described the installation in the Courant.
“When the space surrounding the staircase opened after several tapestries were taken down because of their sensitivity to light, Marsh contacted LeWitt, a Chester resident, to do a piece that would complement the exhibit ‘Contemporary Art: Floor to Ceiling, Wall to Wall.’ …
After LeWitt provided Marsh with his design on a long piece of paper, an intricate repetition of arcs of color, the 10 weeks of creating it began. Other artists actually apply LeWitt's design to a wall…..
LeWitt visited the museum only twice during the process to make adjustments and offer final approval.”
Real Art Ways in Hartford presented another exhibition drawn from LeWitt’s collection in 2004 titled, “Emerging Artists from the LeWitt Collection”. Erikson, who had written of the show at the New Britain Museum described the RAW show in the Courant.
“The exhibit is curated by Steven Holmes, ‘in conversation with Sol LeWitt.’ Holmes proposed the idea to LeWitt of exhibiting lesser-known artists from the collection. LeWitt complied with a list of artists and works he was interested in showing, 60 artists in all.”
In 2006, the New Britain Museum commissioned another of LeWitt’s wall drawings to grace the lobby of a major new addition to the museum. Erikson again wrote of the work in the Courant.
“LeWitt wall drawings, such as those at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art or New York's Museum of Modern Art, often use pulsating reds, yellows and blues. The 77-year-old artist has been experimenting with the intensity of graphite. In his new work, ‘Wall Drawing #1196 Scribbles,’ eight black swirling vortexes give haunting rhythm to the 14- by 28-foot wall by the museum's new entrance. ‘This is a very dark painting, but I don't find it mournful,’ says Douglas Hyland, director of the New Britain museum. ‘I find it full of energy, like funnels of a tornado.’
The work is five years in the planning. Nine months ago, LeWitt, Hyland and Steven Gerrard of Ann Beha Architects toured the new building to choose the best wall space for the mural. LeWitt liked the location, scale and rectangular proportion of the entrance wall, which is visible from the outside. “
Approximately a year later on April 8, 2007, Sol LeWitt died of cancer. He was survived by his wife Carol, and two daughters, Sofia (named after his mother), and Eva.
In the years following his death, LeWitt has continued to be honored by his hometowns. In 2010 the Atheneum presented “Sol LeWitt, Hartford’s Native Son”. The Courant article highlighted his importance to his native land:
“Although his relationship with the state wasn't always smooth (such is the case with cutting-edge artists), he eventually made the state his home again. And the museum where he took art classes as a child is leading the way with a retrospective of his work covering nearly four decades. ‘Sol LeWitt is represented in this collection more than anyone else,’ says Patricia Hickson, the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, the nation's oldest public art museum. ‘And that's how it should be for an influential international artist who has come from Hartford.’ ‘Sol LeWitt: Hartford's Native Son,’ opening Saturday at the Atheneum, is drawn entirely from the holdings of the museum and shows a vast output of work and subtly changing focus spanning nearly 40 years.
In 2012, “Wall Drawing # 1105” was installed on the Dakille Building in Downtown New Britain. In 2015, his first wall drawing at the Atheneum was reopened to the public as a part of a major renovation of the museum. Susan Dunne described it in the Courant:
“The mural, made of acrylic paint and water-based crayon, is divided into three square areas of equal size, one red, one yellow and one blue, each enhanced with vertical and horizontal white lines and geometric shapes. LeWitt was assisted in his creation by Jo Watanabe, David Higginbotham and Marianne Gunther, according to Atheneum spokeswoman Sarah Ferri.
Talbott said the museum will have no problem filling the room with artworks, since the museum has more LeWitt pieces than pieces by any other artist. LeWitt, a native of Hartford, took classes at the Atheneum as a child and retained ties to the museum and the Hartford area all his life.”
Also in 2015, the Manchester Community College, in cooperation with the New Britain Museum presented an exhibition of his works.
Sol LeWitt would probably not approve of this attempt to present a personal description of his life in the Hartford area. Michael Kimmelman in his New York Times obituary of LeWitt wrote, “He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph in the newspaper.” Patricia Rosoff, in her usual clear and concise words said the same thing. “If anything is true about LeWitt, it is that his art is not about him. It is about art, which he defined as a good ideas generated into physical form. He conceived of the artist more along the lines of an architect, whose blueprints direct a construction of a building, or a musical composer, whose notation direct a performance, than as someone with skillful mastery. To LeWitt,, art is the idea.” In spite of this, it is clear that LeWitt felt a special kinship with his “hometowns” and that the art institutions in the Hartford area including the Atheneum, the New Britain Museum, Saint Joseph’s University, Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, Manchester Community College, Trinity University, Wesleyan University, and others, will continue to honor him not only for his art but for his importance as arguably the areas most famous native artist.
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Graces Entrance to Newest Addition at his Hometown Museum in New Britain”, the Hartford Courant, 3/18/2006
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