Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
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Sol LeWitt
ALSO BY LARY BLOOM
The Writer Within
Lary Bloom’s Connecticut Notebook
Something Personal
Alone Together
Letters from Nuremberg (with Christopher J. Dodd)
The Test of Our Times (with Tom Ridge)
The Ignorant Maestro (with Itay Talgam)
When the Game is on the Line (with Rick Horrow)
Twain’s World (editor and contributor)
A Still, Small Voice (contributor)
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa (contributor)
The Book That Changed My Life (contributor)
This New England (contributor)
Miles Ahead (with Bill Andresen)
Ensign-Bickford 1936–2011
A
DRIFTLESS CONNECTICUT
SERIES BOOK
This book is a 2019 selection in the
Driftless Connecticut Series, for an
outstanding book in any field on a
Connecticut topic or written by a
Connecticut author.
Sol LeWitt
A LIFE OF IDEAS
LARY BLOOM
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2019 Lary Bloom
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Rich Hendel
Typeset in Utopia and Owen fonts by
Passumpsic Publishing
The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by the
Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund
at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
Hardcover ISBN: 978–0-8195–7868–6
Ebook ISBN: 978–0-8195–7870–9
5 4 3 2 1
Front cover illustration: Sol LeWitt in his Hester Street Studio, August 1969 by Jack Robinson, courtesy of the Hulton Archive and Getty Images.
TO SUZANNE
CONTENTS
16. THE WORK OF A LIFETIME / 282
Illustrations 138
INTRODUCTION
In June 2011, four years after Sol LeWitt’s death, Vanity Fair published a short piece that became a call to biographical action. A photograph showed LeWitt in 1961 in his studio, a rundown heap of a place on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the neighborhood where he and his circle of rebellious peers tore art down to its basics and started over again. The text beneath the picture was written by Ingrid Sischy, the former editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine:1
Ask any artist who his or her secretly favorite artist is. Chances are the answer will be Sol LeWitt, a pioneer of both minimalism and conceptual art, whose wall drawings, photographs, and sculptures … have a commonsense beauty. When LeWitt died … there was a recognition among art-world insiders that one of the greats had gone, but the commendations were all very quiet—like the man himself. Prediction: Time will bring LeWitt the broader accolades that are his due … LeWitt was everything we expect of an artist but all too rarely get these days: stubborn, generous, iconoclastic, uninterested in money—other than giving it away to help other artists—suspicious of power, and as visionary as anyone who ever made art.2
Paradox is at work here. Reflecting its title, Vanity Fair lavishes attention on those who seek it, not on people such as LeWitt who avoid the limelight. In this case, though, limelight avoidance is what landed the artist on the magazine’s pages. Indeed, LeWitt himself created the primary obstacle to the level of recognition that Sischy argues he deserves.
The Connecticut native left us at least two contradictory legacies: a radiant body of work and a faint self-portrait. The latter—his refusal to participate in the culture of celebrity—is the