Sol LeWitt, 78; sculptor and muralist changed art

Jobs as a night receptionist and clerk at MOMA were to have a greater influence, partly because of daily contact with its outstanding collections of painting and sculpture and partly because of the people he met there. Among his fellow workers were the then-unknown young artists Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, each of whom would be instrumental in the Minimalist revolution of the 1960s, and art critic Lucy Lippard, who would write many of the most influential critical essays of the period. The frontispiece dedication to Lippard's landmark 1973 book, "Six Years: The Dematerialization of Art (1966-1972)" is "For Sol."

With Robert Smithson, Donald Judd and several others, he was among a number of artists who also wrote about art. An 80-word press release written by Smithson for LeWitt's 1966 show at Virginia Dwan Gallery notes: "The entire concept is based on simple arithmetic, yet the result is mathematically complex. Extreme order brings extreme disorder."

LeWitt wrote two widely influential pieces for art magazines: 1967's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" and 1969's "Sentences on Conceptual Art," which further stripped down the already concise but provocative ideas offered in the earlier essay. The first of his "paragraphs" began, "The editor has written me that he is in favor of avoiding 'the notion that the artist is a kind of ape that has to be explained by the civilized critic.' This should be good news to both artists and apes."

He also wrote, "I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as Conceptual art," thus introducing the term to the art historical lexicon. His first two sentences on Conceptual art contend, "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."

The objective clarity of rational thought in LeWitt's modular sculptures and systematic wall drawings arose in opposition to two primary developments, one artistic and the other social. Heroic personal posturing characterized the tired subjectivity of Abstract Expressionist painting, which had settled in as art's establishment. And seeing clearly was at a premium in the chaotic 1960s, an era marked by political assassinations, multifarious civil rights movements and the debacle of Vietnam. Minimal and Conceptual art represented a distinctly democratic, deeply American impulse to sweep all that away.

LeWitt always said that he did not make art to change society. However, his work was made in relation to the political, moral and aesthetic realities of their time.