"Wall Drawing 915” is composed of arcs, circle and irregular bands. It was conceived September 1999 and first drawn in acrylic paint by Dana Carlson, Christina Hejtmanck, James Sheehen and Emily Ripley and installed in the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City. Courtesy of the estate of Sol LeWitt.
:Since the dawn of time, people have drawn on walls. Take, for instance, the wall drawings of the Lascaux Cave or the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Now, fast forward a few thousand years and adjust your sights on the walls of Building 7 in the heart of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) campus. The interior walls of the three-story structure — nearly an acre of space — resonate with the line and color of Sol LeWitt (1928–2007).
The retrospective of 105 wall drawings displays and preserves 40 years of work by the Minimalist innovator — famous for declaring the genre "dead" and moving on to explore the extremes of Conceptualism. In doing so, LeWitt advanced the notion of how art is made by separating the act of conceiving a work from the act of executing it.
"Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective" is the apotheosis of that approach. The drawings, which LeWitt conceived and laid out in diagrams, were executed over a six-month period by 24 of the artist's own assistants and 30 students from Yale, Williams College, the Massachusetts College of Liberal arts and other institutions across the country.
The concept for the exhibition itself was born during a 2003 conversation between LeWitt, his wife, Carol, and Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II director of the Yale University Art Gallery, as the three explored ways as to how the wall drawings might best be documented, preserved and re-drawn in years to come.
"Wall Drawing 90, color bands and black blob.” The wall is divided vertically into six equal bands — red, yellow, blue, orange, purple, green. In the center is a black glossy blob. May 1999, acrylic paint. "Wall Drawing 1081, planes of color,” March 2003, acrylic paint. Courtesy of the estate of Sol LeWitt.
LeWitt was interested in gifting a teaching museum with his work. Ultimately, it took collaboration between Yale, Williams College Museum of Art and Mass MoCA to realize the project.
Typical of the process attached to the wall drawings, LeWitt was actively involved in structuring the installation. He selected the building at Mass MoCA and dictated specifications for its restoration, including a series of "flying bridges" and newly created courtyard spaces. According to Mass MoCA director Joseph Thompson, "Sol's understanding of architectural space was as masterful as the wall drawings themselves."
LeWitt's career may have culminated in a generation-spanning exhibition that will delight as well as teach, but it began rather more humbly. A Hartford, Conn., native, LeWitt studied at the Wadsworth Athenaeum as a young artist. After serving in the Korean War, he moved to Manhattan in 1953, took classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrator's School, did paste-ups for
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magazine and worked as a graphic designer in I.M. Pei's offices. During the first half of the 1960s, he supported himself by working as a night receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met the future critic Lucy Lippard and fell in with the group of groundbreakers that included Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman.
