Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom
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made by human beings, not machines,” and therefore is subject to all human frailties.43 Scholars certainly would point out that, in regard to notable achievers, image and reality are often at odds. One might even cite a line from Tom Stoppard’s Travesties in which the characters clash over art’s meaning, and one of them remarks cynically, “The idea of the artist as a special kind of human being is art’s greatest achievement.”44 Yet in the case of LeWitt, the adoration of colleagues seems not only lavish but genuine.
Some of LeWitt’s frailties, to be sure, came to the fore in his romantic relationships, most significantly in his very brief first marriage. And the artist offered an unsparing self-assessment to one of his lovers, referring to himself as “old, bald, deaf, fat, pig-headed, clumsy and at times self-absorbed.”45 Yet he attracted as romantic partners some of the most accomplished women in Europe and the United States. And though much has been written about the deep friendship between Le-Witt and Hesse and his influence on her work, nothing has been published that makes any significant reference to his many love interests or how they affected him.
To be sure, dozens of exhibition catalogues in a variety of languages about his work contain scholarship and ruminations about key issues of modern art. LeWitt’s own writings and interviews illuminate a great number of key points about the process of making art in the modern age. But the human element makes only cameo appearances.
I subscribe in this biography to the idea I have always practiced as an editor and writer—that is, to humanize subjects and articulate the personal stakes involved in their pursuits, an approach that can make even the most arcane subjects accessible and compelling to readers.
In the case of a man at the center of a complex art revolution, such an approach seems indispensable. The critic Robert Rosenblum began his 1978 Museum of Modern Art catalogue essay for LeWitt’s first retrospective this way: “Conceptual Art? The very sound of those words has chilled away and confused spectators who wonder just what, in fact, this art could be about or whether it’s even visible.” Rosenblum also wrote, “LeWitt’s art may be steeped in his cerebral, verbal and geometric systems, as was that of so many great, as well as inconsequential, artists before him, but his impact is not reducible to words.”46
But what is reducible to words is a story of obstacle and triumph. The artist, after all, led a purposeful and generous life. He overcame setbacks and doubt—phenomena that are nearly universal—and he mastered the delicate balance of sticking to his principles while using flexibility to his advantage. Sometimes, however, the line between sticking to principles and flexibility seemed blurred.
You will read in chapter 14 about LeWitt’s seventieth birthday celebration, an event he didn’t want to attend. That night at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, stunned guests watched as the guest of honor did all he could to ruin the party. During the low point of the evening, when the artist sabotaged the planned tributes, most invitees didn’t know whether to laugh, be outraged, admire the man’s singular personality, or feign concentration on their strawberry dacquoises.
Afterward Carol said to me, “You’ve got to write about this.” However, I hadn’t attended the event in my professional capacity at the time (as editor and columnist). Nonetheless, what had just happened ranked with other significant events in the history of America’s oldest public art museum.
So I wrote a draft piece on the party and called LeWitt to tell him I had done so. His response was gruffly authentic: “Why?” I replied, “Well, I had the instinct to do so,” thinking that the word “instinct” might resonate with him. But then he asked, “Do you always follow your instincts?” I thought that was an odd question, coming from a man who had a reputation for doing just that. Perhaps sensing that the question was full of irony, he changed his approach: “Well, if you’ve written it, the least I could do is read it.” I didn’t mention that journalism ethics discourage giving subjects of pieces access to advance copies to protect the work’s integrity. But as it seemed unlikely that the column would ever run, considering LeWitt’s outrage over it, what was the harm in showing it? I went to his studio the next morning and delivered the piece. He said he would read it in due course.
Days later, having by then embarked on a trip to Israel, I discussed the matter with our rabbi, Doug Sagal. Though much younger than Le-Witt and me, Sagal was widely respected for his wisdom. At the time of our conversation, we were in Jerusalem, in the midst of a congregational tour (the LeWitts were not among the group). Sagal and I had a private moment in the hotel lobby, and I explained the background of the seventieth birthday piece and that I was wrestling with competing forces. He was silent for a moment and looked out of the window in contemplation, in the way that rabbis do. Then he turned to me and said, “Well, maybe you will publish the piece. When the right time comes.” I knew what he meant.
When I next saw LeWitt several weeks later, he asked, “Are you going to run that story you wrote?”
I said, “No, I don’t think so.”
He replied, “Why not? I thought it was pretty good.”
Welcome, then, to the world of Sol LeWitt.
Sol LeWitt
ONE
THE LIFE OF STUFF
In 1980, a book was published that can’t be read. Though it consists of 128 pages, Autobiography1 contains not a single word of narrative, and there is no hint on its cover as to its author. Bookstore browsers, then, can only satisfy their curiosity by opening the volume to the title page, where the mystery is solved. Sol LeWitt is the author. However, a second enigma soon becomes apparent. What is the significance of the 1,125 black-and-white photographs that follow? None of them bears a caption. Most are of ordinary items that would be found in a house or artist’s studio. Each photo is the same size, three inches by three inches. There are nine on each page, in a grid formation that mirrors the artist’s reliance throughout his career on the cube—a form that he admitted was uninteresting in itself, which he decided made it ideal as a building block for art.
Autobiography is the life story in pictures of the artist Sol LeWitt (what he referred to as his only self-portrait) until the age of fifty-two. In this effort, he was influenced by a relatively new literary movement beginning in the 1950s, the Nouveau Roman, which abandoned all of the accepted tenets of storytelling.2 His contribution to the effort was to tell a story wordlessly.
This is a record of much of LeWitt’s personal inventory at the time—his way of telling his own story without the intrusion of the English language or sitting for interviews that never turned out to be accurate, in his view. In these photographs, he lets the reader make sense of where he came from and where he was going. He does this without the usual documentation and mention of his milestones to that time.
For example, there is no mention of his being born in Hartford in 1928 to immigrants prominent for their achievements—his mother having been a nurse in World War I, and his father becoming one of the most respected physicians in Connecticut. To be sure, there are visual elements that refer to Abraham and Sophie LeWitt. But there is no accounting of what befell his father when his only child was just five years old, or the greatly reduced circumstances that followed in an industrial city far from Hartford not in distance but in culture. A “reader” of Autobiography won’t come across anecdotes about Sol LeWitt’s childhood in New Britain, the industrial town that spurned modern art; his years at Syracuse University, starting in 1945, when he tried to learn what he didn’t want to learn; or his first trip to Europe in 1950, when his eyes were opened to the Renaissance masters Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and he saw in each ideas for the future. LeWitt surely had good stories to tell about being shipped off to the Korean War and, along the way, finding inspiration in Japan; and his first years in New York City, when he felt, as usual, an outcast yet met and dated a string of beautiful and accomplished women. At the same time, he joined the staff of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),