Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
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believed that novels could be collaborations—as LeWitt would later believe about art. Butor worked with painters, musicians, and photographers on projects that defied boundaries and categories. This kind of thinking and breaking the mold intrigued LeWitt. (Many years later, he may have been thinking of Butor’s work when, for example, he collaborated with the choreographer Lucinda Childs and the composer Philip Glass.) Influences such as Butor, Beckett, and others inspired LeWitt.
He made a decision that is necessary for almost anyone who would create art. Yes, Wallace Stevens could be a bond surety executive for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in the daytime and create poetry on his way to and from work, and Charles Ives could hold an unrelated full-time job and write music at the same time. But for ordinary mortals, working and succeeding in any art field requires immersion during the most creative hours of the day. LeWitt understood this and came to the realization that working in graphic design offered him a highway to nowhere. He thought: “I don’t really want to do this. I don’t like it. So I just quit, and went back on unemployment and started painting.”40
Even so, he struggled—or, as he put it, “I was floundering.”41 Abstract expression still held no interest for him and did not suit his talents. As he later said, after achieving some measure of success, “Abstract Expressionism was the most simpleminded kind of art imaginable.”42 Besides, the movement had had its day, and that day was ending. Recalling his fascination with the Italian masters, LeWitt decided to create work based on some of their canvases but with his own distinctive touches. Indeed, a drawing after Piero della Francesca that he finished in 1958 attracted a good deal of attention and comment more than four decades, later when LeWitt’s work was celebrated in his San Francisco, Chicago, and New York retrospective.
The reason the drawing was included was that the work of Piero turned out to be a crucial influence on LeWitt’s development as an artist who could discern a disciplined sense of order in narrative scenes. For example, when LeWitt worked on his own version of Story of the True Cross, one of Piero’s frescoes in Arezzo, Italy, he saw the creator of the original as partly a mathematician devoted to geometric laws. The art historian Horst Janson put it this way: “This mathematical outlook—we read of Piero—permeates all his work. When he drew a head, an arm, or a piece of drapery, he saw them as variations or compounds of spheres, cylinders, cones, cubes and pyramids, endowing the visible work with some of the impersonal clarity and permanence of stereo metric bodies. We may call him the earliest ancestor of the abstract artists of our own time.”43
■ LeWitt’s downbeat recollections of his time at I. M. Pei may have been partially the result of the domestic crisis he faced at the time.
In the summer of 1955, he had gone with other artists to Fire Island, off the southern shore of Long Island—which had become a destination not only for gay city residents escaping the heat of the summer but also for many artists.
It was during that summer that LeWitt met Alma Reilly, who what was what they called in those days a “looker.” Candido referred to her as “an Ava Gardner type.”44 A native of New Rochelle, New York, she was then twenty-seven, the same age as LeWitt. However, she had been married before for a short time and had gotten a divorce on the ground of mental anguish (unlike incompatibility, an accepted reason for divorce at the time).
Then as in his later years, LeWitt did not speak about the details of this part of his life, except to refer to a brief marriage (he never mentioned the name of his first wife in interviews), and his friends could only speculate about how and why the union occurred. The best witness might have been LeWitt’s old friend Russell North, who served as an official witness at the marriage ceremony at New York’s City Hall on August 22, 1956, but who died many years before LeWitt.
On one of the very few comments LeWitt ever made about his first marriage was to the photographer Vera Lutter many decades later. She recalled: “I asked him if he had ever been married. He said, ‘It was summer, and we shared a house, and then we were doing our thing, and we thought ok, now you’ve got to get married.’”45 Others remember him saying something like, “I didn’t know what else to do at the time.”46 That is, he saw no alternative to succumbing to the convention of marriage. A biographer playing psychologist might suggest that LeWitt was rebounding from the end of his relationship with Evans and wanted to be sure his solitary days were over—or that, as certainly was the case later in his life, he found some deep sense of purpose in the rescue of a needy lover. What is known for certain about the first marriage, which lasted officially for two years but in effect was over after a few months, was that the couple lived on Avenue C, in the Manhattan neighborhood of Alphabet City, during this time; that the husband and wife were ill-suited for each other; that LeWitt’s friends were surprised that he had taken this step; and that his mother, who seldom disapproved of his actions, did so in this case. Sophie LeWitt expected the best for her son, and in her view the best bride—a Jewish woman—was still out there somewhere. LeWitt later lamented that he had found himself lonelier as a husband than he had been as a single man.
After his stint at I. M. Pei’s office, LeWitt worked briefly as promotion art director at Barker Levin and Company, a marketer of Lassie coats for women, but he later offered no recollections of this time. During these months, he tried to get professional representation for the work he was doing, and he eventually found Charles W. North Studios, a producer of promotional materials for businesses. His arrival as a client was announced in hyperbolic fashion, in an advertisement that listed new artists and applied lavish adjectives to each. Robert J. Berenson was a “photographer of unusual talent.” Haskell Goldberg was a “distinctive illustrator.” Sol LeWitt was “a prize-winning painter and graphic designer.”47 This connection lasted only a few months.
LeWitt’s personal living circumstance improved if only in that he was able to find a place that suited only him. After the failure of his marriage, he moved to a loft on West Broadway in the neighborhood that would later become famous as SoHo.48 At the time it was a rundown section that had none of the busy character of uptown. Many buildings were shuttered, and particularly at night, there were few pedestrians on the sidewalks, except for the members of the growing community of artists.
It was during a walk to the hardware store that LeWitt met the artist Marjorie Strider. After a brief conversation about tools, he got right to the point: “Would you go out with me?” However, she was engaged to the artist Michael Kirby, who, like Strider, would become an important cultural figure in Manhattan. (In later years Strider’s work was often exhibited with that of pop artists Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein.) She told LeWitt, “You might consider my sister, Nancy.” Like her sister, Nancy Strider had come to Manhattan from Oklahoma. She had worked first for American Airlines as a stewardess (as the job was called then). “She was quite attractive,” Marjorie said of her sister, and added, “Not that I wasn’t.”49
As LeWitt learned, Nancy had gone through a difficult time emotionally. She had been engaged to be married and the reception had been planned. Then she discovered that her husband-to-be had been married before and had four children.
Nancy Strider recalled that in any case she wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to spend the rest of her life in Guthrie, Oklahoma: “So I followed my sister to New York. I came only because she was here, and [I] stopped working for the airlines.”50 She did this though her job had opened up, if not the world, a considerable part of the United States to her, a “girl who’d never been out of Oklahoma, except to visit my sister in Kansas City,” and she had found herself partying regularly in Santa Monica. You could get a job, she recalled, “if you were good looking. But there were restrictions. You weren’t allowed to gain weight and you had to wear a girdle, which I didn’t do.” When she’d had enough, Manhattan looked like a good alternative: “When you grow up in Oklahoma, New York is a very glamorous place.” She moved in with her sister on Green Street and got a job right away as a secretary at a construction company.
Living with her sister made Nancy almost a character out of a Broadway play. She was My Sister Eileen, transported from the backwater, seeing the city as a naïf, and trying to make it. She recalled:
All of my sister’s friends