Sol LeWitt, 78; sculptor and muralist changed art

It was his sculptures, however, that initially brought him attention, when they were included in the pivotal 1966 exhibition "Primary Structures" at New York's Jewish Museum. The show is commonly credited with introducing Minimalist art to the public. Minimalism replaced representational imagery with geometric form. The pedestal, which had long elevated sculpture above the plane of daily human experience, was banished. Industrial fabrication eliminated individual gesture, which represented the equally elevated touch of the artist's hand.

Precedents in early 20th century Russian and Dutch Constructivist art influenced Minimalism's development. LeWitt also took a keen interest in the sequential studies of animal motion made by the English-born California photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). But Minimalism was a watershed partly because it represented something entirely new: It was the first art movement of international significance forged exclusively by American-born artists.

Perhaps the artist's own maturity explains the resilient clarity in his groundbreaking work. LeWitt was 38 when he made "Modular Cube" and, despite the MOMA survey of "younger artists," was older than 40 when he did his first wall drawing. The resonant simplicity of his art is not representative of an artist just starting out.

LeWitt was born Sept. 28, 1928, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. His father was a doctor, who died when the boy was 6. His mother, a nurse, moved the family from Hartford to her parents' home in nearby New Britain. As a child he took art classes at Hartford's Wadsworth Athenaeum, America's oldest public art museum and a leading center for avant-garde art in the 1930s. The same year that LeWitt's father died, the Wadsworth hosted America's first major Picasso retrospective and mounted the world premiere of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera "Four Saints in Three Acts."

After graduating from New Britain High School, LeWitt enrolled at Syracuse University, where he studied art. Service during the Korean War saw him stationed in noncombat duty in California, Japan and Korea. When he returned to the United States, he moved to Manhattan and set up a studio on the Lower East Side, in the old Ashkenazi Jewish settlement on Hester Street. He kept the studio for two decades. To support himself, he did production work for Seventeen magazine and, in 1955 and 1956, was a graphic designer in the office of young architect I.M. Pei.