Sol LeWitt, 78; sculptor and muralist changed art

For the 1987 Sculpture Project in Muenster, Germany, he made a rectangular wall of black concrete blocks for the center of a plaza in front of an elegant, white Neoclassical government building. The sculpture, "Black Form: Memorial to the Missing Jews" is composed in the same systematic manner as his other work. It is neither figurative nor descriptive, but its modern rationalism contrasts sharply with that of the architecture's Neoclassical orders.

The context lent specific meaning to LeWitt's otherwise nonrepresentational form. "Being Jewish," he explained of his first visit to Muenster, when the sculpture was commissioned for the Plaza of the Republic, "I noticed the absence of Jewish artists and curators, Jewish bakers and candlestick makers." The sculpture registers as a blunt opposition to its surroundings, yielding a profound and immovable presence that draws a passerby to it.

Eight years later, at the Los Angeles opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art's "Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975," the first important historical survey of Conceptualism, LeWitt took a more conventional path. He joined a dozen other artists in endorsing a statement written by artist Hans Haacke to protest the show's sponsorship by tobacco company Philip Morris.

For a two-gallery exhibition in Los Angeles in 2001, LeWitt gave assistants instructions to construct a long concrete block wall that bisected a room without rising all the way to the ceiling. Encountering the unexpected spatial partition, he told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, "You think of what you're not seeing" on the other side.

Four years after a 1978 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, LeWitt moved to Spoleto, Italy, with his second wife, Carol Androccio. A gallery frenzy was being fueled by a resurgent American economy, and private money was flooding the art world for the first time since a market collapse at the end of the 1960s.

As an artist whose work had specifically removed the expressive individual from center stage, LeWitt had prospered in a 1970s milieu that focused on the work that was made. But now, artists were becoming celebrities. LeWitt, famously reticent in public, once explained to an approaching newspaper photographer as he covered his face at a museum opening, "I am not Rock Hudson."