Sol LeWitt, Loopy Doopy, Blue/Red, 2000, woodcut on paper Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of the artist, 2001 © The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Sol LeWitt, Isometric Form, 1982, screenprint on paper Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of the artist, 1983 © The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Sol LeWitt, Lines in Four Directions with Alternating Color and Gray, 1993, woodblock on paper Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of the artist, 1996 © The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Sol LeWitt, Cubic Modular Piece No. 2 (L-Shaped Modular Piece), 1966, baked enamel on steel Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Purchased with a grant from Museum Purchase Plan, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1974 © The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave.
612-375-7600
Minneapolis
Sol LeWitt: 2D+3D
November 18, 2010-April 24, 2011

When the Walker Art Center opened its new Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building in 1971, it ushered in exciting new possibilities for exhibiting and collecting the art of its time. The Barnes building, with its sweeping, rectangular galleries and white terrazzo floors, was one of the first U.S. museums designed to showcase sculpture and other works that abandoned the pedestal to be shown directly on the floor, resulting in a more direct relationship between viewer and object. Many of these works were made by artists associated with American Minimalism and Conceptualism, two areas in which the Walker was steadily building its collection.

As a major figure in both movements, Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was one of the first artists whose work graced the Barnes building. LeWitt and the Walker enjoyed a relationship that spanned more than 35 years. It began with the museum’s purchase of sculptures (LeWitt called them “structures”) in the mid-1960s and includes approximately 200 pieces donated by the artist during his lifetime. His work is featured prominently in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and his enduring wall drawings have graced the Walker’s public spaces since the early 1980s.

The exhibition Sol LeWitt: 2D+3D, presents for the first time the full range of the Walker’s LeWitt holdings, highlighting the artist’s three-dimensional structures, wall drawings, models, unique works on paper, prints, and artist’s books.

Carefully conceived geometric arrangements were the basis for LeWitt’s earliest work. In 1966, he wrote: “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is that it is relatively uninteresting. Compared to any other three-dimensional form, the cube lacks any aggressive force, implies no motion, and is least emotive. Therefore, it is the best form to use as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed.” Often stacked in grids and columns, the cube became an essential element in many of the artist’s structures. On view will be a wide range of LeWitt’s meditations on the cube, from the 1966 painted metal structure Cubic Modular Piece No. 2 (L-Shaped Modular Piece) to the monumental Three x Four x Three, an enamel on aluminum piece from 1984 that stands more than 14 feet high.

Though conceptually simple, these structures offer different encounters depending on one’s vantage point: cubes overlap, depth perception is challenged, and the arrangements often become visually and physically immersive experiences. LeWitt’s work in this mode soon evolved into a concern with other primary shapes, with lines and various mechanisms for combining them, and with the systematic use of color, from subdued hues to vibrant gestures. Over the course of his long relationship with the Walker, LeWitt generously gave the museum many works on paper that together track the diversity of his visual thinking. From delicate screenprints from the early 1970s that investigate the precision of fine line to bold, gestural, and riotously colorful gouache drawings of the late 1990s, these works amplify his endeavors in other media, providing an important link between the structures and wall drawings.

In 1967, Artforum magazine commissioned LeWitt’s now-legendary statement on his work, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, in which he coined the term for a movement that would tip the scales from an orientation toward objects to an idea-based art. He proposed that “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 the machine that makes the art.” His radical pronouncement defined a new mindset and way of working that continue to be profoundly relevant to a current generation of artists.

The following year, LeWitt drew a combination of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines directly onto a wall at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery and called it Wall Drawing #1. Reasoning that it seemed “more natural to work directly on walls than to make a construction,” he began conceiving more wall drawings, works that took the form of instructions (written, spoken, and/or drawn) executed by assistants or other individuals in any location. These would become a major part of LeWitt’s artistic production until his death, and the Walker owns three of them, two of which are included in the exhibition. Wall Drawing No. 224, a 1973 pencil and crayon piece given to the museum by the artist in 1996, will be exhibited for the first time. Along with more than 100 other works on view, it presents an artist passionately committed to his carefully defined practice, and to the Walker.

Wall Drawing #422, November 1984, The room (or wall) is divided vertically into fifteen parts. All one-, two-, three-, and four part, combinations of four colors, using color ink washes. Color ink wash, Courtesy Estate of Sol LeWitt, First installation: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, First drawn by: A. Sansotta, M. Schouten, W. Starkenburg, W. Wolff, photographer Martin Runeborg.

Wall Drawing #422, November 1984, The room (or wall) is divided vertically into fifteen parts. All one-, two-, three-, and four part combinations of four colors, using color ink washes. Color ink wash. Courtesy Estate of Sol LeWitt, First installation: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, First drawn by: A. Sansotta, M. Schouten, W. Starkenburg, W. Wolff, photographer Martin Runeborg.

Wall Drawing #123, 1972, Copied lines. The first drafter draws a not straight vertical line as long as possible. The second drafter, draws a line next to the first one, trying to copy it. The third drafter does the same, as do as many, drafters as possible. Then the first drafter, followed by the others, copies the last line drawn until both, ends of the wall are reached, Pencil, Courtesy Addison Gallery of American Art, Philips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. 1991.20 gift of the artist, Addison Art Drive.

Wall Drawing #51, June 1970, All architectural points connected by straight lines. Blue snap lines. Courtesy LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT, First installation in Sperone Gallery, Turin, Italy and Museo di Torino, Turin, Italy, First drawn by: P. Giacchi, A. Giamasco, G. Mosca, photographer Martin Runeborg.

Magasin 3
Stockholm Konsthall
Frihamnen, SE – 115 56
+46 8 545 680 40
Stockholm
Sol Lewitt
Seven Wall Drawings
October 2, 2009-June 6, 2010

It’s all about the drawn line. 10 000 straight lines, 22 meters of scribbles and indigo snap lines cover the walls from floor to ceiling at Magasin 3. For six weeks 14 artists and art students have drawn full time. They have realized this exhibition of seven wall drawings by the American artist Sol LeWitt. The exhibition includes drawings executed in pencil as well as ink washes mixed to the deepest of purples and burnt umber.

Every drawing is based on verbal or written instructions; no decisions are made in the process. LeWitt’s role can be likened to that of a composer, the person from his studio in charge of the work is the conductor and the artists executing the work make up the orchestra.

”The descriptions and instructions sound bone dry but the result is startling. It is beautiful, chaotic and overwhelming. The finished wall drawing shows the inadequacies of language in describing what we can expect to see”, says the curator of the exhibition, Elisabeth Millqvist.

With his wall drawings rendered directly onto the wall LeWitt changed our concept of what art is — its appearance and who creates it. He succeeded in the challenging task of combining art that puts the idea first with an exciting visual form and continues to be a central figure for young artists to this day.

LeWitt was a pioneer among the Minimalists and Conceptual artists who were so groundbreaking at the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s. In 1968 he made his first wall drawing in graphite and restricted himself to horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. Right up to his death he investigated every line combination imaginable while over the years expanding his formal language to encompass geometric shapes and color.

This is the most extensive exhibition of LeWitt’s wall drawings in Scandinavia to date. The American artist was born in 1928 and passed away in 2007. A number of retrospective exhibitions focusing on his wall drawings have taken place in the USA since 2000, most notably at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000), Dia Beacon, New York (ongoing) and the ambitious large-scale presentation at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2008-2033). In Europe the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam presented a retrospective with LeWitt’s wall drawings in 1984, which was followed by an exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern in 1989. In Sweden individual wall drawings have been shown at Galleri Aronowitsch, Stockholm (1982), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1984), Galleriet, Lund (in 1983 and 1987) and at the Nordic Watercolour Museum, Tjörn, Gothenburg (2002) amongst others.

Wall Drawing #715, February 1993, On a black wall, pencil scribbles to maximum density, Pencil, Courtesy Estate of Sol LeWitt, First installation: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, First drawn by: S. Abugov, S. Cathcart, A. Dittmer, F. Dittmer, L. Fan, C., Hejtmanek, S. Hellmuth, D., Johnson, A. Moger, A. Myers, J. Noble, G., Reynolds, A. Ross, A. Sansotta, J. Wrobel. (Varnished by John Hogan).

Wall Drawing #85, June 1971, Four color composite/pencil. A wall is divided into four horizontal parts. In the top row are four equal divisions, each with lines in a different direction. In the second row, six double combinations; in the third row, four triple combinations; in the bottom row, all four combinations superimposed. Courtesy LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT, First installation: LeWitt residence, New York, First drawn by: Sol LeWitt.

Wall Drawing #111, September 1971, A wall divided vertically into five equal parts, with ten thousand lines in each part: 1st) 6" (15 cm) long; 2nd) 12" (30 cm) long; 3rd) 18" (45 cm) long; 4th) 24" (60 cm) long; 5th) 30" (75 cm) long. Pencil, Courtesy Estate of Sol LeWitt, First installation: John Weber Gallery, New York, NY, First drawn by: R. Cutrone, P. Graf, S. Kato, J. Marasco, J. Nyeboe, M. Stamos, B. Walker, R. Watanabe, M. Wheeler, photographer Martin Runeborg.

Scale model of Building 7 where the three floors of LeWitt's wall drawings are installed.

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 146A, All two-part combinations of arcs from corners and sides, and straight, not straight, and broken lines within a 36-inch (90 cm) grid, June 2000, White crayon on blue wall, LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut.

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 766, Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes, each with color ink washes superimposed, September 1994, Color ink wash, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Barbara and Gerson Bakar, Emily Carroll and Thomas Weisel, Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., Evelyn D. Haas, the Modern Art Council, Phyllis and Stuart G. Moldaw, Robin Wright Moll, Norah and Norman Stone, Danielle and Brooks Walker Jr., and Judy and John Webb. 2000.301.

Building 7 on Mass MoCA's campus houses the LeWitt wall drawings.

Sol LeWitt, wall drawing installation.

Sol LeWitt, wall drawing installation.

LeWitt assistants at work on wall drawing.

MassMOCA
87 Marshall Street
413-662-2111
North Adams
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Open November 2008

After nearly six months of intensive drafting and painting by a team of some 65 artists and art students, Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective was fully installed. The historic exhibition opened to the public at Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), in North Adams, Massachusetts, on November 16, 2008, and will remain on view for 25 years. Conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in collaboration with the artist before his death in April 2007, the project was undertaken by the Gallery, Mass MoCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective comprises 105 of LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawings, spanning the artist’s career from 1969 to 2007. These occupy nearly an acre of specially built interior walls that have been installed — per LeWitt’s own specifications — over three stories of a historic mill building situated at the heart of Mass MoCA’s campus. The 27,000-square-foot structure, known as Building #7, was fully restored for the exhibition by Bruner/Cott & Associates architects, which has closely integrated the building into the museum’s main circulation plan through a series of elevated walkways, a dramatic new vertical lightwell, and new stairways.

The works in the exhibition are on loan from numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, to which LeWitt designated the gift of a major representation of his wall drawings, as well as his wall-drawing archive.

Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, said, “Watching this grand installation of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings progress over the past six months has been nothing short of thrilling. In addition to providing an enduring exhibition of great beauty, this retrospective will enable visitors to behold for the first time the full trajectory of a major aspect of Sol’s artistic career. Until today, the only way to view multiple LeWitt wall drawings has been to travel far and wide, pursuing them individually in situ or in temporary museum exhibitions. Now, visitors will be able to return to Mass MoCA again and again to experience this visual feast of Sol’s wall drawings in a single location, doing so at their leisure over the next twenty-five years.”

LeWitt — who stressed the idea behind his work over its execution — is widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of Minimalism and Conceptual art, and is known primarily for his deceptively simple geometric structures and architecturally scaled wall drawings. His experiments with the latter commenced in 1968 and were considered radical, in part because this new form of drawing was purposely temporal and often executed not just by LeWitt but also by other artists and students whom he invited to assist him in the installation of his artworks.

Each wall drawing begins as a set of instructions or simple diagram to be followed in executing the work. As the exhibition makes clear, these straightforward instructions yield an astonishing — and stunningly beautiful — variety of work that is at once simple and highly complex, rigorous and sensual. The drawings in the exhibition range from layers of straight lines meticulously drawn in black graphite pencil lead, to rows of delicately rendered wavy lines in colored pencil; from bold black-and-white geometric forms, to bright planes in acrylic paint arranged like the panels of a folding screen; from sensuous drawings created by dozens of layers of transparent washes, to a tangle of vibratory orange lines on a green wall, and much more. Forms may appear to be flat, to recede in space, or to project into the viewer’s space, while others meld to the structure of the wall itself.

Mass MoCA Director Joseph C. Thompson said, “With this exhibition, Sol LeWitt has left an amazing gift for us all. Great art draws upon previous artists, but also contradicts and contravenes. And the most essential art argues for new ways of seeing, even as it is almost immediately absorbed into the work that surrounds and supersedes it. As I believe will be evident in this landmark exhibition, LeWitt’s wall drawings rise to those highest of standards. We look forward to having this amazing collection of works on long-term view as a sort of proton at the center of our museum around which our program of changing exhibitions and performances will orbit with even more energy.”

The impetus for Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective was a 2004 conversation between Reynolds and LeWitt. This evolved and resulted in a commitment by the artist to give a substantial number of his wall drawings and his entire wall-drawing archive to the Yale University Art Gallery, which already owned an extensive array of LeWitt’s art in multiple mediums. Realizing that the Gallery did not have enough space to install and maintain a large number of the artist’s wall drawings at any one time, Reynolds suggested to LeWitt that Mass MoCA, with its historic mill complex, growing audience, and history of realizing ambitious new works of art, might be able to accommodate an extended retrospective of the works.

Reynolds and LeWitt then met with Thompson, who introduced the artist to Building #7. The structure, situated at the center of Mass MoCA’s multi-building complex and featuring large banks of windows that open onto two flanking courtyards, appealed to LeWitt as an ideal site for a multi-floor installation of his work. In addition to the new interior walls, which he designed in consultation with Bruner/Cott & Associates, his specifications for the space included a plan that would leave nearly all of the existing exterior masonry walls and large windows intact, providing direct side lighting and offering beautiful views to surrounding courtyards and the Berkshire Hills beyond. Bruner/Cott integrated the galleries with Mass MoCA’s existing plan by re-activating existing elevated connector-bridges and adding new ones, and by creating a new three-story lightwell. The design thus links the building to Mass MoCA’s signature Building #5 and provides vertical circulation and handicapped access.

“Detailed,” “painstaking,” and “strangely liberating” are terms that have been used to describe the experience of creating Sol LeWitt’s monumental wall drawings. The drawings at Mass MoCA were executed over a six-month period by a team comprising twenty-two of the senior and experienced assistants who worked with the artist over many years; thirty-three student interns from Yale University, Williams College, the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and fourteen other colleges and universities; and thirteen local artists and recent graduates and post-graduates from many of the nation’s leading studio-art programs. Mass MoCA’s North Adams location, just five miles from Williams College, offers a unique educational opportunity for Williams’s undergraduates and those enrolled in its graduate art-history program at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute to participate in this special exhibition. Like Yale, Williams is among the primary training grounds for professionals in the field of art history, and the LeWitt collaboration, to be accompanied by a variety of educational programs, will offer students many opportunities to study the work of this important artist.

In conjunction with the project, the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is creating a series of programs and shorter-term companion “teaching exhibitions” in a space at the entrance of Building #7 and at the WCMA. The first of these, The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt, opens at WCMA on November 14, 2008. It includes important works from LeWitt’s private collection that help elucidate the underlying grammar of the artist’s work and ideas.

WCMA Director Lisa Corrin says, “Our goal is to have Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective serve as an extension of the Williams campus—a classroom of sorts for our students and those from other colleges and universities. LeWitt’s art offers challenging teaching opportunities for faculty from across academic disciplines. The WCMA staff will help professors craft curricula related to the exhibition. All three of the museums partnering in the retrospective play a major role in the training and support of many of the artworld’s future leaders, and this adventurous collaboration will offer a new generation of students unprecedented firsthand exposure to the work of a major artist of our time.”

On the occasion of Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, Mass MoCA and Yale University Press are producing Sol LeWitt: 100 Views, a hardcover book with 100 new essays. Contributors are drawn from a wide array of expertise and fields of specialization. Authors include critics and scholars Lynne Cooke, Chrissie Iles, Lucy Lippard, Saul Ostrow, Ingrid Sischy, and Robert Storr, and visual and performing artists John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Lucinda Childs, Chuck Close, Steve Reich, Matthew Ritchie, and Dorothea Rockburne, among many others. The publication, which will include 150 color plates, will be available in June 2009, and may be ordered through Mass MoCA.

In 2010, the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press will co-publish Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonné. The basic design for this three-volume scholarly resource, a project of the Gallery, was created by the artist during his lifetime. The book will contain descriptive texts, diagrams, installation photographs, and more for all of the 1,261 wall drawings that LeWitt realized from 1968 to 2007. A DVD illustrating both the proper uses of materials and drawing techniques to be employed in realizing LeWitt’s basic “families” of wall drawings will also be included, providing a helpful guide to their proper future installation, as well as to the drawings’ long-term care and conservation.

To additionally preserve the artistic legacy of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings in perpetuity, the Yale University Art Gallery has endowed a position for a drawing conservator through the generosity of Yale alumnus Theodore P. Shen, b.a. 1966, and his wife, Mary Jo Shen. In time, this conservator will oversee the LeWitt wall-drawing archive and other works on paper at Yale and will train new assistants to install the artist’s wall-drawing collection at Yale as well as those owned by individuals and public institutions worldwide.

To date, the Yale University Art Gallery and Mass MoCA have raised more than $10 million in funding for the project from an array of devoted board members and other notable arts patrons who are supportive of Sol LeWitt’s work. In December 2007, Williams College announced a $1.5 million contribution to the project that will fund teaching exhibitions and public programs during the twenty-five years that the LeWitt wall-drawing retrospective is extant.

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 1152, Whirls and twirls (Met), detail, April 2005, Acrylic paint, LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut.

Sol Lewitt, Wall Drawing 958, Splat, detail from Mass MoCA, November 2000, Acrylic paint, LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut.

Sol Lewitt, Wall Drawing 766, detail from Mass MoCA, Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes, each with color ink washes superimposed, September 1994, Color ink wash, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Barbara and Gerson Bakar, Emily Carroll and Thomas Weisel, Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., Evelyn D. Haas, the Modern Art Council, Phyllis and Stuart G. Moldaw, Robin Wright Moll, Norah and Norman Stone, Danielle and Brooks Walker Jr., and Judy and John Webb. 2000.301.

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), ABCD 9 (Row), 1966, refabricated 1994, Painted steel, Platform, and nine elements, 20.375 x 102.25 x 30.5", The LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT, Photo by R.J. Phil.

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), The Location of Six Geometric Figures, 1974, Ink and pencil on paper, 22 x 30", The LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT, Photo by R.J. Phil.

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), All Combinations of Arcs From Corners and Sides, Straight Lines, Not-Straight Lines, and Broken Lines, 1975, Ink and pencil on paper, 22 x 22", The LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT, Photo by R.J. Phil.

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), Complex Form #3, 1987, White painted wood, 41 x 61.5 x 34", Courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt.

Williams College
Museum of Art
15 Lawrence Hall Drive
413-597-2429
Williamstown
The ABCDs of Sol Lewitt
November 14, 2008-
May 17, 2009

The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt features important works from the private collection of Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007) that explores the underlying grammar of the artist’s work and ideas. The exhibition complements Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, made possible by a partnership between Mass MoCA, Williams College Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt examines the visual vocabulary and aesthetic principles LeWitt employed throughout his 40-year career. One of the pioneers of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, LeWitt emphasized the idea underpinning a work over its material realization. Early texts such as “Serial Project No. 1,” published in Aspen Magazine in 1966, established predetermined regulations that guide the arrangement of squares and cubes in the configuration of a corresponding structure (or three-dimensional object). Likening these shapes to a work’s “syntax” and later to its “grammar,” LeWitt defined forms as organizational components. As with language, which is often constituted by sets of rules and words, the artist’s body of work expresses ideas that can be both complicated and straightforward in their verbal and formal permutations. The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt considers how expansive LeWitt’s fundamental methods are when paired with basic elements like the cube and square.

In the 1960s Sol LeWitt began creating artworks that explored the ways in which line, color, and images could be organized and expressed through what Lewitt’s close friend, the artist Mel Bochner, described as “The Serial Attitude.” As such, LeWitt became one of the leading exponents of Minimalism and Conceptual art, engaging painting, drawing, photography, language, performance, printmaking, sculpture, and eventually wall drawings through his well thought-out philosophy. In writing for Artforum in 1967, he proposed: “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 the 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 . . . There is no reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer.”

In 1968, LeWitt made his first wall drawing, which consisted of thousands of graphite pencil lines organized in systematized arrangements of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals drawn directly on gallery walls. Over the next 40 years, LeWitt’s oeuvre grew to comprise 1,254 wall drawings. In their entirety, they richly explore many ways of using lines and geometric forms, free-form shapes, countless color combinations, numerous materials, and a variety of architectural sites across the globe. Throughout this time, LeWitt’s wall drawings have been executed by a legion of trained assistants, artists, and students, hundreds of whom have learned how to execute his work according to the artist’s specific diagrams and directions.

Writing in The New York Times in 2007, Michael Kimmelman said of LeWitt, “A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews … With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute … he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others — their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever — remained part of the art.” And in a profile in The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “It isn’t just the physical scale of a museum wall that LeWitt’s elegantly adaptable art matches, but the social and spiritual scale of our relations with museums themselves.”

The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt highlights the conceptual process LeWitt articulated in the 1960s but developed and reinterpreted over the course of decades in his production. The exhibition begins in the museum’s Aaron Gallery with an ABCD row (a variation from “Serial Project No.1”) and a selection of the artist’s writings, working drawings, and works on paper. Also on view is a group of Complex Forms, including an example given to the museum by Sol and Carol LeWitt, installed in the museum’s neoclassical rotunda. Although LeWitt stated in 1966 that “A more complex form would be too interesting in itself and obstruct the meaning of the whole,” he would use this term twenty years later when he developed these multifaceted structures, derived from numerical points that specify the works’ various heights.

The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt was organized by Lisa Corrin, Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, and Erica DiBenedetto, Williams College Graduate Student in the History of Art. “We are thrilled to be collaborating with the LeWitt Collection on this exhibition,” said Director Lisa Corrin. “The unprecedented presentation of 105 wall drawings at Mass MoCA provides a timely occasion for the Williams College Museum of Art to investigate the work of such an important figure in contemporary art and will lay the groundwork for teaching across the disciplines in years to come. The ABCDs inaugurates a series of annual programs and teaching exhibitions that WCMA will organize during the twenty-five-year run of the Retrospective at Mass MoCA. The two openings launch a long-term resource for our faculty and students at both institutions.” DiBenedetto added, “As a graduate student at Williams, studying LeWitt’s process with such proximity has been a challenging and rewarding project. LeWitt remained in dialog with his foundational ideas as he made new and stunning work later in life. That practice demonstrates the aesthetic and conceptual potential of these principles.”

Wall Drawing in the process of installation at Mass MoCA.

Installation view of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #260 at The Museum of Modern Art, 2008, Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), Wall Drawing #260, 1975, Chalk on painted wall, Dimensions variable, Gift of an anonymous donor, © 2008 Sol LeWitt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photo: © Jason Mandella.

Installation view of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #260 at The Museum of Modern Art, 2008, Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), Wall Drawing #260, 1975, Chalk on painted wall, Dimensions variable, Gift of an anonymous donor, © 2008 Sol LeWitt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photo: © Jason Mandella.

Installation view of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #260 at The Museum of Modern Art, 2008, Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), Wall Drawing #260, 1975, Chalk on painted wall, Dimensions variable, Gift of an anonymous donor, © 2008 Sol LeWitt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photo: © Jason Mandella.

Museum
of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Gallery, fourth floor
Focus: Sol LeWitt
December 5, 2008-
June 29, 2009

Over the course of his prolific, influential career, Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007) produced more than 1,200 wall drawings. The installation Focus: Sol LeWitt features one of the artist’s celebrated examples from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection, Wall Drawing #260: On Black Walls, All Two-Part Combinations of White Arcs from Corners and Sides, and White Straight, Not-Straight, and Broken Lines (1975). First shown at MoMA in the Museum’s 1978 LeWitt retrospective, this wall drawing, composed of white lines on black walls and measuring in this installation approximately 1,500 square feet, was carried out by a team of trained assistants based upon LeWitt’s written directions. LeWitt compared his role to that of a composer who creates a score that may be played by musicians for generations to come. The concept — or score — remains constant, but the wall drawing, like a musical performance, varies slightly each time it is realized anew. On view from December 5, 2008, through June 29, 2009, in The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Gallery on the fourth floor, the exhibition is organized by Cora Rosevear, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, with Veronica Roberts, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.

LeWitt wrote: “The black wall gives a feeling of enclosure. The white lines maintain their grid and by changing offer clues to the system. The plan is always presented so that the viewer will know that the changes are not capricious but systematic, becoming a language and a narrative of shapes.”

In addition to this wall drawing, LeWitt’s large, three-dimensional structure Serial Project, I (ABCD) (1966), based on squares and cubes, is on view in the Museum’s fourth floor galleries. His six-color Wall Drawing #1144: Broken Bands of Color in Four Directions, conceived and executed in 2004, is on view in the lobby of the Museum’s Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building.

Installation view of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #260 at The Museum of Modern Art, 2008, Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), Wall Drawing #260, 1975, Chalk on painted wall, Dimensions variable, Gift of an anonymous donor, © 2008 Sol LeWitt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photo: © Jason Mandella.