Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
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fashion of those days, to be seen and not heard, to not have opinions.
To me these artists were intellectuals. That’s not quite totally true, but they had different interests than I did.
When she met LeWitt, he put her at ease:
He made fun of snobbery. He was so unassuming. Almost anti-intellectual, but he read widely, and was knowledgeable about many things. And he made me feel wonderful. He was dismissive of me feeling as if I was an inferior intellect. He introduced me to his friends, and to the films of [Ingmar] Bergman—I hated The Virgin Spring and I’ll never forget it. There was also Bob and Ray on the radio—I thought they were hilarious. And there were the records of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf—I had already become a fan of the opera.
Strider never met Sophie LeWitt, but she remembers that Sophie often sent her son homemade baked goods and other treats from New Britain. The food was something of an education for Strider, who had been brought up Presbyterian: “There was only one Jewish family in Guthrie.” And she had never tasted anything from a traditional Eastern European Jewish kitchen. Borscht and brisket were revelations.
The fact that she had been brought up in a town segregated by race and ethnicity left a mark: “It flabbergasts me that I never questioned it.” But the time with LeWitt opened her eyes to a world well beyond anything she had known: “New York is total diversity, which is wonderful.”
Strider remembers LeWitt experimenting with his work during this period: “He was painting with a flat palette knife, small paintings, with color put on thickly.” How his work developed after that remained a mystery to her. After two years, their relationship ended. She was ready to be married, and LeWitt, still smarting from his venture into matrimony, couldn’t bring himself to play the groom again.
Strider never saw him after that, though she followed his work—even, on one occasion, all the way to Bilbao, Spain, on a trip she made with her daughter (LeWitt had provided a work, Wall Drawing 831, Geometric Forms—for the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Bilbao). However, she retained an important souvenir from the time she’d spent with the man who showed her life’s possibilities.
LeWitt had just gotten a new job—one that would lead directly to the break he needed—but he hadn’t forgotten her. For her birthday, he sent her a drawing of plants in his loft with the word “Joy” on top of it. It would become a gift that she could eventually pass along to grandchildren—who, Strider hoped, wouldn’t have to wait as long as she had to take advantage of opportunities to grow.
SIX
STIRRINGS
While LeWitt and Strider were together, they saw the exhibition Sixteen Americans at MoMA. The featured artists1 challenged long-held assumptions about the very nature of art. The exhibition attracted large crowds and much negative criticism. In a letter to Dorothy Miller, the show’s curator, the New York Times critic John Canaday wrote, “For my money, these are the sixteen artists most slated for oblivion. There is not a single painting, and very little sculpture, that I could imagine living with.”2 But LeWitt reflected in 1974, “It was probably the most influential show of the decade, or of many decades, because it was the opening of many new ideas.”3
At the time, LeWitt was still trying to discover his own direction and vision but confined by the past, still copying Renaissance masters and thinking within strict artistic boundaries. Abstract expressionism was ebbing, but what would replace it? The answer took years to develop, and LeWitt would be in the middle of it. But in 1959, when Sixteen Americans opened, he was just a bystander, struck by what he was seeing.
Among the most notable works in the exhibition in terms of the attention they received and the impact they made were those by the young Frank Stella, who at that point had exhibited only two paintings in two New York City shows and who apparently considered black the new primary color. Jed Perl described it this way: “The very look of this downtown bohemian world—its streets, its homes, its style of dress—was anti-picturesque.”4 Ad Reinhardt, another artist who influenced LeWitt, had experimented with shades of black. But Stella’s work was more intense and stark, and it was eventually considered by critics to be the beginning of minimalism—though at the time it was considered by some to lack minimal qualities of art.
As the critic and historian Robert Rosenblum wrote twelve years later, “To most eyes [the paintings] appeared monotonously simple and inert, a bewildering impoverishment of art.”5 He quoted the critic Dore Ashton, who had asked, “Is it really important for the public to see the work of a 23-year-old boy who has been painting for three or four years?”6
Artists in attendance admired the work, as it seemed to signal a new freedom. Blackness was a theme that LeWitt would use in different ways over many decades.
The exhibition also featured Jasper Johns, whom LeWitt also held in high esteem. As he later said, in the 1950s he often went to Tenth Street, where galleries showed the new and unconventional, to see Johns’s work, and he remembered in particular seeing the early versions of American flags: “Of course I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t know what it was all about. [Even so] I was really a big fan of his.”7
A LeWitt work from the middle of his career, Wall Drawing 599, at the Jewish Community Center on New York’s Upper West Side (his twentieth New York public installation), more than hints at the influence of Johns’s bull’s-eyes. Just as important, perhaps, was Johns’s artist’s statement in the catalogue for Sixteen Americans, especially when taking into account LeWitt’s later pronouncements about the making of art. Johns related how he created his paintings: “Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.”8 The comment signaled his freedom from traditional thinking and exposes the folly of explanation—a view that LeWitt often expressed.
None of the negative comments about the exhibit in the press mattered to LeWitt or to other young artists who saw it. The question of inspiration is of course an important one. There is the kind of inspiration that comes from seeing the work of Johns, Stella, and fourteen others at MoMA, in the studios of friends, or on Tenth Street. This sort of inspiration can include the charge, earned or not, of stealing ideas. Indeed, such a charge would be leveled at LeWitt many years later when, as may be inevitable in art, the lines blurred between inspiration and piracy.
There is also the kind of inspiration that is intensely private, a product of the artist’s mind and heart when they are free to roam into dark or light corners whenever the mood strikes. And there is the unpredictable phenomenon of happenstance and good luck. What would have happened to LeWitt as an artist, for example, if he hadn’t had certain pieces of luck? For example, would he ever have gotten himself out of the doldrums if a person he had never met hadn’t left behind a rare book in the crevices of a couch while moving out of his furnished downtown apartment?
It was LeWitt’s old Syracuse pal Russell North who found the book after he moved into the apartment. He showed it LeWitt, who in later recounting the episode, said, “I borrowed it. I should return it. I hate to return it.”9
The book was a first edition of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer with the camera who had been born in England but lived most of his life in America. The volume showed photographs as LeWitt had never seen them before: in series, creating a narrative structure. For example, there was a horse running in several sequential frames. LeWitt had been born in an era when the motion picture was well established, but he knew that it was composed of still frames, and that Muybridge’s work seemed to have been a precursor. Indeed, he was sometimes referred to as “The Father of the Motion Picture.”10
In the 1880s, at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge worked on a series of photographs that would make up a sort of encyclopedia of motion. This included photographs of 20,000 positions assumed by men, women, and children, sometimes clothed and sometimes naked, and by birds and other animals.