Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
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lasted only two years.13
There may have been more depth to her relationship with LeWitt than she acknowledged at the time. But that depth certainly comes across in a 1954 letter she wrote to LeWitt on Miami Herald stationery, while she was waiting for her divorce to become final. The letter also suggests, in a wry tone, an idea for art, absurd as it is:
It is with some reluctance that I take pen in hand, for thus occupied I cannot tear great shreds of skin off my back, my pastime of these last few nights. Fascinating, destroying myself on even a small scale…. I feel hurt, my sense of purpose lags and a grim anger for the elements…. Two girls, lately of the Herald, just stopped in and drank the rest of my beer. I forget what we talked about. Nothing is new with my divorce. I just sit it out for 80 days. The lawyer called me a few days ago to say my ex-boss had called him to ask how I was and how in Hell did I get a job on the Herald. Everybody is so nice. The lawyer said he’d buy me a drink later in the week and then didn’t call. If he weren’t charging me nothing, I’d take my business elsewhere…. Thank you for the temperance lecture. My god, I wish I had a bottle. When the hurricane comes, you shut all windows except one in the bathroom, fill the tub and sink with water or whatever you prefer, and sit and wait in darkness. I may just do that tonight. Who could have thought that a mind, blank non-directional me, was an eight ball? …
Why don’t you put the end tables in the middle of your living room, place a bottle of gin on one, Vermouth on the other, and tiptoe out of the room for seven or eight minutes. If, when you creep back in, and the room is empty and the skylight is broken, go up on the roof with a water pistol and squirt the hell out of any pigeon that can’t fly a straight course. Then make some more end tables and repeat the experiment but sell tickets.
It is hot and I am running out of cigarettes…. I have a date with a fellow sot tomorrow and Tuesday…. Three weeks in this town and I haven’t located a subway entrance yet. Entirely too above-board. Something fishy. Good night.14
How LeWitt could support a wife or a family had yet to be determined. He had come to New York because of its vitality, and specifically because it had become the new center of the art world, but unknown artists were at the bottom of a fixed hierarchy.
The movement toward New York began before World War II, when many prominent European artists and teachers emigrated to escape fascism. Among the most influential were Josef Albers, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, and Salvador Dali. This was followed by the emergence in the city of artists such as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock—all of them championed by the critic Clement Greenberg, whose influence was as outsized as his personality, and who argued that the art world was now in the hands and imaginations of about fifty abstract expressionists in studios south of Thirty-Fourth Street.
Some of the personality of the city that emerged during the period was captured by writers such as Mary McCarthy, who in a 1947 Partisan Review piece, suggested how she could explain the character and vitality of New York—particularly its cosmopolitan nature—to a French intellectual: “Sukiyaki joints, chop suey joints, Italian table d’hotel places, French provincial restaurants with the menu written on a slate, Irish chophouses, and Jewish delicatessens.”15
In addressing the flurry of creativity in New York, the poet John Ashbery wrote in an essay:
My arrival in New York coincided with the cresting of the “heroic” period of Abstract Expressionism as it was later to be known, and somehow we all seemed to benefit from this strong moment even if we paid little attention to it and seemed to be going our separate ways. We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing. But there were other things to attend to: concerts of John Cage’s music, Merce Cunningham’s dances, the Living Theatre, but also talking and going to movies and getting ripped and hanging, and then discussing it all over the phone.16
LeWitt was drawn in particular to the work of Kline and Willem de Kooning and the earlier work of Pollock. “But,” he said, “there weren’t too many second generation Abstract Expressionists who I thought were very good.”17 He never felt that he was equipped to be part of the movement—he described his attempts as complete failures. In addition, he professed disdain for many of its painters: “Most of them were so arrogant and loud. Because the Abstract Expressionist has a way of living and a way of talking and a way of arguing and a way of doing everything that was just so completely different from me that I just never could get with it.”
To make his rent payments, he had to find steady work. In 1954 he found a job at Seventeen, the first magazine founded specifically for a teenage audience. LeWitt’s primary task was to run the photostat machine. Rather than finding this work tedious, he discovered a way to occupy himself and to experiment with technology: “I used to do super imposing of photographs. They ended up looking like Rauschenberg’s. The kind of stuff he was doing later on. I would take whatever photographs were around and superimpose them on one another…. Then I would sometimes draw on it while it was still in the liquid. So that was the only kind of art I was really doing because I really wasn’t too interested in painting. I felt that I should or else there wouldn’t be any reason for my existence.”18
Eventually, other members of the magazine’s staff recognized that their photostat man had more to offer than making copies, and he was promoted to the art department. There he helped with production and was asked on occasion to draw small illustrations for feature articles.
In an interview he gave to the curator Gary Garrels in 2000, LeWitt revealed that some of the things he learned at Seventeen influenced his later work.
GARY GARRELS: Photography is something that you have come back to from time to time in your work….
SOL LEWITT: I learned something when I worked at Seventeen magazine. They had a man who would take pictures of objects and they used these as a kind of editorial idea of objects that were available to buy. The idea of photograph as a recorder of objects was something I thought was a basic premise of the medium, and I wanted to try to use it in different ways. Later I started to incorporate it into books because I started to be involved with the seriality…. I still make photo pieces, though I don’t think of myself as a photographer. In fact, I don’t think of myself as a painter or a sculptor. I think of myself as an artist who can use any of these media, materials and techniques as I wish, without pinning myself down to the name.19
A year before LeWitt came to Seventeen, the artist Eva Hesse (then seventeen) served as an intern there. Hesse and LeWitt, who would become the closest of friends, never met at Seventeen in person, though as the curator and author Veronica Roberts pointed out in 2014, they met “on the page.”20 After Hesse left the magazine, it did a feature article on her, calling her a young artist to watch. As a filler on the last page, LeWitt drew an elaborate birthday cake in pen and ink. It was his first signed professional piece. A few months later, he drew a writing desk using the same sort of elaborate design, making full use of classical patterns and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of ideas he would expanded upon one day.
In 1955, LeWitt was offered the position of art director of Fashion and Travel magazine—but for only one issue, as at the time the magazine rotated talent. He recalled: “They had very good people, like [Richard] Avedon, people like that doing photographs. Perfectly respectable, except the hiring and firing policy. But it was a good experience.”21
Afterward, he collected unemployment insurance until “I met someone who said the architectural firm of I. M. Pei was expanding its graphic design department, and ‘Why don’t you go?’”22 By then, LeWitt had developed a keen interest in layout and typefaces, so it seemed like a sensible idea. He secured a position in the firm in 1955, where he was one of five artists in the department, but he found it tedious and frustrating:
The first job that they asked me to do was to design a letterhead. So I just designed a very simple letterhead right across the page in small type, and the guy who was the head of the graphics department [Don Page23] told me I had to do something else. There were three or four people working on this, some of the most God-awful