LeWitt, Sol

Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings

Sol LeWitt, who once worked as a draftsman for I. M. Pei, has said of his own directions for drawings executed by collaborators that, "The contribution brought by the draftsman may not be predicted by the artist, even when the artist is also the draftsman." This separation of the plan, the written score for a work, from its execution and the finished piece lies at the center of the work for which LeWitt is best known, whose execution he entrusts to strangers. Wall Drawings tracks the creation of one recent work, beginning with the plan, so spare that it looks as though it might have arrived at the gallery by fax, and continuing through to a schematic drawing on the wall, then figures on stepladders drawing intently, their faces clear but their pencils blurred. Close-ups of their scribbles and images of the completed work are followed by a picture of the triumphant cast, a curtain call.

LeWitt x 2

LeWitt x 2 offers a unique perspective on the work of renowned Minimalist and Conceptualist Sol LeWitt, documenting the arc of his career alongside his personal collection of contemporary art. LeWitt is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His geometric sculptures, groundbreaking wall drawings and striking works on paper have defined and pushed the limits of art-making for over 40 years. During that time, LeWitt and his wife Carol have further contributed to the art world by compiling and safeguarding a collection of contemporary art, just as they encourage the next generation of artists. LeWitt x 2 presents a selection of work from the LeWitt collection, featuring Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Dan Flavin, Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Mario Merz, Shirin Neshat, Adrian Piper and Robert Ryman. This remarkable body of work demonstrates the dynamic dialogue between LeWitt and his esteemed contemporaries.

Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes

Begun in 1974, Incomplete Open Cubes is a sophisticated and elaborate expression of conceptualist art-making by Sol LeWitt, one of the most influential abstract artists of his generation. No other serial project by LeWitt or his contemporaries embodies with such eloquence so many of the central artistic concerns of the period.

Incomplete Open Cubes exemplifies the deployment of a single idea to become, in LeWitt's words, "a machine that makes the art." The work forges a new way of making art in its ambitious use of a serial system that enables a kind of "noncompositional composition." The translation of the same idea into different scales and media is another key aspect of the work. All 122 variations in the series exist in three dimensions, from a set in which each cube is 2 1/2 inches square to the 40 inches square human-scaled versions. There are also entire sets of photographs, drawings, working sketches and notes, and an artist's book.

This publication, which accompanies an exhibition of Incomplete Open Cubes, is the first sustained critical examination of this body of work. The book features much previously unpublished material, including working drawings, schematic drawings, and models, in addition to photographs of the installed structures.

Copublished with the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Sol Lewitt: A Retrospective

Sol LeWitt "is to art as Bach was to music," says conceptual artist Adrian Piper, indicating LeWitt's seminal importance to both the theory and practice of contemporary art. LeWitt's creations are the direct embodiments of his theoretical writings, abstract principles that he develops with supreme integrity into physical form. Recognizing his key role in the minimalist and conceptual movements of the 1960s and '70s, New York's MoMA gave LeWitt a major retrospective in 1978. Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective and the accompanying exhibition organized by Gary Garrels of the San Francisco Museum of Modern bring us up-to-date.

During the '80s and '90s, LeWitt's work moved from a cerebral asceticism toward rich color and surfaces and a more explicit sensuality and expressiveness. Nearly 500 carefully chosen and well-reproduced photographs and drawings document this evolution. Together with a sampling of LeWitt's own pithy statements, lucid essays by seven of America's leading curators analyze his contributions to contemporary art. Typical of his methods and attitudes are his signature large-scale wall paintings, their sense of movement and bright bands of color making them among the most gorgeous of his works. While articulating the designs of the wall paintings and the concepts behind them, LeWitt does not paint them himself. He is generous in welcoming anyone else to give physical reality to his designs: "It would be a compliment," he says. Sol LeWitt is a beautiful and substantial book, and its range of illustration and depth of scholarship make it the definitive study of this highly influential artist. --John Stevenson

This is the catalogue for a major retrospective organized by SFMOMA and celebrating the work of one of the most important and influential conceptual artists of the century. Sol LeWitt's career has been defined by a series of groundbreaking explorations into the basic building blocks of form and their relationship to philosophical and mathematical concepts. (Some critics have seen his work as visual manifestoes of the ideas of Descartes and Kant.) The fact is, however, that LeWitt's works transform these abstract principles and formulas into objects of beauty and grace, introducing elements of chance, intuition, or irrationality into the scientific systems that inspired their creation. While his thoroughly documented work of the 1960s was firmly fixed in the realm of conceptualism, his turn toward a more lyrical and sensual form of abstraction since then has never received adequate critical attention. This catalogue will chart the evolution of LeWitt's art from the sixties through to the present to show the enormous influence that his delicate balancing act between thought and form, order and disorder, has exerted on younger artists.

Sol Lewitt

Sol Lewitt Critical Texts

Sol Lewitt: Bands Of Color

Artwork by Sol Lewitt.

Sol Lewitt: Wall Drawings 1984-1992

Sol Lewitt : Wall Drawings 1968-1984

pictorial wrappers 23.5 x 29 cm.; glue bound; black-and-white & color; edition size unknown; unsigned and unnumbered; offset-printed; Exhibition catalogue for show held at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1984. Writing by Alexander van Grevenstein, Jan Debbaut, Andrea Miller Keller, David Shulman, and Michael Harvey. Profusely illustrated in black-and-white and color. Text in English and Dutch

Sol LeWitt: Seven Basic Colors and All Their Combinations in a Square Within a Square

Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt are split by fundamentally different understandings of their work, but united by a powerful, overarching and defining goal, the avoidance of emphatic ideas of authorship and the de-emphasis, even, of the star system inside an author's own oeuvre. Both keep their works from getting uppity by making each one part of a serial long-term study, rather than an individual potential masterpiece. LeWitt acknowledges and pays tribute to Albers's significance in his artistic development, and to the two men's connections, in Seven Basic Colors and All Their Combinations in a Square Within a Square, the title wall drawing, installed in the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop and reproduced here in its entirety.