Sol LeWitt, an American artist whose modular sculptures and systematic murals rank among the most innovative works of the last 40 years, changing the direction of art internationally, died Sunday in New York City after a lengthy struggle with cancer. He was 78 and lived in Chester, Conn., a short distance from his birthplace in Hartford.
In 1966, LeWitt made his first modular sculpture and first masterpiece. The open framework cube, 6 feet on a side and resting on the floor, was composed from 27 two-foot cubic modules made of white-painted wood. (The original sculpture's whereabouts is unknown, although two subsequent versions were made.) The methodical structure pulled the plug on subjective taste as a criterion for making and evaluating art.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday April 18, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
LeWitt obituary: In the April 10 California section, a caption with the obituary of Sol LeWitt said a photo that showed the artist with a wall work was taken at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The photograph was taken at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles.
Two years later, in October 1968, LeWitt made his initial wall drawing. First in graphite, then in crayon, later in colored pencil and finally in chromatically rich washes of India ink, acrylic and other materials, the wall drawings are a unique contribution to the history of art. Like the modular sculptures, they are composed from precise sets of logical, often mathematical instructions that anyone could be trained to execute.
The instructions are somewhat like musical scores, with the artist assuming the role of composer. "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art," LeWitt once wrote.
Direct evidence of the artist's hand had been a central value in Western art for 500 years, at least since the Renaissance. LeWitt developed an intimate acquaintance with the murals of Piero della Francesca during a 1958 trip to Arezzo, Italy. He made numerous pen-and-ink drawings based on them, as well as studies of paintings by Botticelli, Velazquez, Goya, Rubens and Ingres.
Among his earliest surviving paintings is 1961's thickly painted oil "Embarkation for Cythera (After Watteau)," which simplifies the courtly figures of French aristocrats into chunky smears of brown, gray and violet paint. Each study seems an exercise in learning to see in two dimensions.
LeWitt's art values the artist's mind over the artist's hand. He referred to his wall works as drawings rather than paintings or murals, regardless of the materials that were employed, because drawing is the medium that most closely tracks the movement of artistic thought. A proposal for a wall drawing was included in "Information," an important 1971 survey of younger international artists at the Museum of Modern Art.
