Sol Lewitt

Sol LeWitt

(1928–2007)

One of the interesting things about living through a period is that you know where the neat and tidy hindsight of recorded history and the happenstance of the moment diverge. I have known LeWitt since my days as an art student in New York in the ‘60s. At that time he was one of the hard core of Minimalist artists that included the sculptors Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Robert Smithson as well as the painters Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, and Robert Mangold. Their works were characterized by an austere industrial aesthetic and reductivism that made their pieces seem highly impersonal, intellectual, and urban. Yet as LeWitt moved from making systemic objects to wall drawings and eventually what can only be called murals, his use of plans, diagrams, and instructions emphasized the ideas that circumscribed his work and the nature of those decisions that constitute an artist’s taste and aesthetic vision—or in LeWitt’s case, those of the people hired to execute his work.

Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour (1977)

“Minimalism wasn’t a real idea—it ended before it started. Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends. Almost every artist of the ’60s and ’70s took off from Minimalism in different directions. There was no other place to start if you weren’t involved with Duchampian-type thinking or Pop art. Those lines of escape were what eventually became classic Conceptual art. In the end all these things melded together during the ’80s and ’90s, mainly due to Bruce Nauman, who combined the two ways of thinking.”

"I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. There is no reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer. It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed, that would deter the viewer from perceiving this art."

Distorted Cubes (C), AP-1 (2001)

Wall Drawing (1975)

In 1975, Sol LeWitt created Wall Drawing, a conceptual artwork defined by a set of instructions for drawing red, yellow, and blue lines on a wall. Key features include its focus on instruction-based creation, the use of primary colors, and its conceptual nature, prioritizing the idea over physical execution. The work's reproducibility allows it to be recreated by anyone, enabling multiple iterations across different locations and times.

Sol LeWitt

Inspired by his initial encounter with photographer Eadweard Muybridge's work in the late 1950s, Sol LeWitt began creating several large oil paintings in 1960, incorporating a loosely structured grid based on Muybridge's motif of a running man. By 1962, LeWitt had refined this approach, removing figurative elements and simplifying the grid format. By 1964, he was producing his first wall-mounted grid structures. When he introduced his wall drawings in 1968, the grid became their foundational structural framework. From that point onward, grids became a recurring motif across all the mediums LeWitt explored, including his three-dimensional "structures," drawings and gouaches, photographic series, artist's books, furniture designs, and wall drawings

Schematic Drawings for Muybridge II (1964)

He began making wall drawings in 1968. The earliest consisted of pencil lines—in systematized arrangements of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals on a 45-degree angle—drawn directly on the walls. Later wall drawings included circles and arcs and colored pencil. LeWitt would eventually use teams of assistants to create such works. In sculpture, LeWitt mapped out all possible permutations—he found 122—of a cube with one or more sides missing in Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). From 1966, LeWitt’s interest in seriality led to his production of several artist’s books. Among them is Autobiography (1980), which documents in photographs everything in his studio on Manhattan’s Hester Street, his home for twenty years. In 1976, with Lippard and others, LeWitt founded Printed Matter, an organization established to publish and disseminate artist’s books.

Wall Drawing #1081 (2003)

Autobiography (1980)

Steps (1992)

[no title] (1982)

This website features works and articles on Sol LeWitt.