David Lasry on Sol LeWitt

Posted on July 3, 2012September 19, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Sol LeWitt, W, 1995, relief print on handmade Twinrocker paper, 9 x 12 ½ inches (22.9 x 31.8 cm). Special edition published by Two Palms, New York. © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Two Palms had been open for less than a year when I was invited to produce this small series of embossed prints with Sol LeWitt in 1994. Sally Kramarsky called me and asked if there was an artist with whom I could secretly produce a print for Wynn Kramarsky’s 70th birthday. Since Wynn and I were both in love with Sol’s work, it seemed natural to approach Sol for this project. He readily agreed, with his usual economy of language: he said yes, and the matter was settled.

Having recently embarked on a print project with Mel Bochner, my former professor at the Yale University School of Art, I was thrilled to be working simultaneously with two revered pioneers of minimal and conceptual art. Seasoned pros at project-oriented collaborations, both artists instantly knew how to take advantage of the new set of tools I offered and to make something unique within their oeuvre.

Sol LeWitt, W, 1995, relief print on hand dyed, handmade Twinrocker paper, 9 x 12 ½ inches (22.9 x 31.8 cm). Special edition published by Two Palms, New York. © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

The first time he visited my studio, Sol quietly ambled about, feeling paintbrushes and picking up printing plates. He was fiercely intellectual, but notoriously reserved. After a few minutes, he stopped and gazed at the monolithic industrial hydraulic press occupying an altar-like position in the room. “Could you show me how it works?” I ran the press up and down so he could see how the lower platen came straight up and contacted the top platen, the needle on the pressure gauge climbing slowly to 350 tons.

Sol went to the edge of the room and peered through his glasses at a freshly printed Bochner piece pinned to the wall. The print had deep embossment and was caked with juicy red ink. Sol couldn’t resist the impulse to feel its surface. Of course the ink was wet, and he smeared the line. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry,” I replied, handing him a paper towel. “I should have warned you it was wet.” (I still have the smudged Bochner print.) Sol looked around a bit more while wiping his hand, and he felt through the raw slabs of thick white handmade paper made especially for us by Twinrocker. “I have some ideas; I know what I want to do,” he said.

A few days later, I arrived at the studio early in the morning, and a drawing lay waiting in the inbox of my fax machine. It had arrived at around 6 A.M. Wavy lines formed a W with color notations inside the lines. Instructions were added in the lower margin, along with his signature: solwith a circle drawn around it. We were to dye paper certain colors, create a deeply engraved plate based on his drawing, roll the plate with colored ink, and print it on the hydraulic press. Sol knew the colored paper would push down into the engraved grooves and, when hung on the wall, would physically pop off.

Producing the plates was a problem; this was before the use of lasers to cut plates was a practical consideration. Hand carving plates from wood was an option, but tests showed us that the wood would break down quickly under pressure from the hydraulic press. It was not a solution for an edition. Finally, we had an engineer make computer-aided design (CAD) renderings of Sol’s drawings, and using these he generated a tool path for a computer-controlled milling machine. The plates were precisely and deeply milled out of aluminum. Today our in-house laser engraving machines allow us to achieve the same results, only faster and cheaper.

Sol LeWitt, W, 1995, machine milled aluminum plate, 8 ¾ x 11 ¾ inches (22.2 x 29.8 cm). Published by Two Palms, New York. © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Sol made use of our unique press and our custom paper to add physicality to the visual opulence of his original drawing. When he came to see the proofs, he again ran his hand over the surface of the print, feeling every crevice and raising it up to his nose, smelling the dye. The materiality of the object seemed to give him pleasure. He told me he was also working on an installation project for the Lighthouse International, a research center for the blind in New York City, and he wanted to make a piece that we could see and the blind could feel.¹

In light of his earlier rational, ordered, idea-driven works, with written instructions referencing the path from idea to artwork, I asked Sol if he was now somehow embracing a kind of chaos theory in all its intelligible disorder. Perhaps, in his wizened years, he was appealing more to the eye than to the mind? He responded simply, “No.”

1. Sol constructed his Styrofoam Installation #32 behind the information desk at the Lighthouse on East 59th Street in 1996.

Sol LeWitt Biography

Sol LeWitt (b. 1928, Hartford, CT; d. 2007, New York, NY) earned his BFA at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York (1949). LeWitt’s work was first publicly exhibited in a group show at the Kaymar Gallery, New York (1964), and has since been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions. The most recent retrospective of the artist’s wall drawings was installed in 2008 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, in partnership with the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, and with the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and will be on view for 25 years. His work is represented in museum collections worldwide, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dia:Beacon, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; and the National Museum of Serbia, Belgrade. LeWitt lived and worked in New York City, where an installation of his three-dimensional structures, organized by the Public Art Fund, was on view in City Hall Park through 2011. Pace Gallery has represented the estate of LeWitt since 2007.

David Lasry Biography

David Lasry received an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. In 1994, he founded Two Palms, a collaborative studio in New York City that publishes and produces prints, multiples, sculpture and other objects. Two Palms has worked with artists such as Mel Bochner, Chuck Close, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Carroll Dunham, Ellen Gallagher, Per Kirkeby, Sol Lewitt, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, Matthew Ritchie, Dana Schutz, Jessica Stockholder and Terry Winters. Two Palms works have been acquired by numerous institutions including the Albertina, Vienna; The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, University of California, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Joan Witek on Sol LeWitt

Posted on July 3, 2012September 19, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Sol LeWitt, Postcard, 1996, felt-tip marker on postcard, 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott — Sol LeWitt, *Postcard*, 1996, felt-tip marker on postcard, 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Verso of Sol LeWitt, Postcard, 1996, felt-tip marker on postcard, 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott — Verso of Sol LeWitt, *Postcard*, 1996, felt-tip marker on postcard, 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

It was said that Sol didn’t like vacations. His pleasure was being in his studio. He explained that he had worked out his life as he wanted it to be, so why take a vacation from it?¹

Perhaps this postcard to Wynn Kramarsky from October 1996 may have been sent during Sol’s slip from a life of rigorous non-vacationing.

Sol and Carol LeWitt sent this postcard from the Brazilian town of Ouro Preto (Portuguese for “black gold”), just over 500 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Ouro Preto is a well-known historic center, famous for its 17th- and 18th-century art and architecture. Grand monuments were created here as testaments to the town’s wealth, which was derived from the rich gold deposits in the area.

The mid 18th-century font pictured on the front of Sol’s postcard is located in the Chapel of Padre Faria, and it echoes the Pre-Columbian style within a Baroque format — the bastard child of these two prominent movements in the Americas.

The elaborate curves of the font, twirling alongside an evocative, fearsome carved face, seem to have intrigued Sol. If we imagine his work prior to this period of the mid-1990s — a stricter geometry of straight lines–perhaps we can see that it would not have complimented the font as well as the loose drawing here does. Now, the images speak to one another through the screen of many centuries.

When the stamp was placed on this postcard, did Sol put it there, or did the post office? We notice that the classical head on the stamp is staring at Sol’s drawing, enraptured!

Sol LeWitt Biography

Joan Witek Biography

Joan Witek (b. 1943, New York, NY) earned her BFA from Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York (1964), and continued her studies at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York (1964-1968), and the Art Students League, New York (1969-1973). Witek was a Curatorial Assistant at the Brooklyn Museum in Primitive Art and New World Cultures (1964-1968) and she worked as an Assistant Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the Rockefeller Wing (1971-1978). Witek attended City University and Hunter College, New York, for graduate coursework in Art History (1977-1981). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1984); Rosa Esman Gallery (1984, 1985); 560 Broadway, New York (1997); Sean Scully Studio, New York (2000); CDS Gallery, New York (2001); and Gallery Niklas von Bartha, London (2000, 2003, 2005, 2009). Witek’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1991); the PS1 Museum, Long Island City (1977, 1992); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1982, 1983, 2003, 2007); the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (1996); the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1997); the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2005, 2007, 2008, 2009); the San Diego Museum of Art (2008); the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain (2009); Bartha Contemporary, London (2009, 2012); Gallerie Weinberger, Copenhagen (2010); Sammlung Schroth, Kloster Wedinghausen, Arnsberg, Germany (2011, 2012); and Kunstmuseum Wilhelm-Morgner-Haus, Soest, Germany (2013). She lives and works in New York City. More information about her work can be found at www.joanwitek.com.

Delia Solomons on Sol LeWitt

Posted on June 29, 2011September 19, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Sol LeWitt, 6 Variations/ 1, 2, 3, (1), 1967, ink on paper, 12 x 10 inches (30.5 x 25.4 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Peter Muscato — Sol LeWitt, *6 Variations/ 1, 2, 3, (1)*, 1967, ink on paper, 12 x 10 inches (30.5 x 25.4 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Peter Muscato

Since the 1960s, Sol LeWitt has used language as a vehicle to shift the conventional parameters of art. Descriptive and notational text appears in his drawings, in titles for his three-dimensional structures, and as instructions for others to execute his wall drawings. He wrote the highly influential treatises “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) and “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969), which proffer concise maxims about the new Conceptual art then emerging in galleries and art magazines. LeWitt’s diagrammatic drawings and hard-edge abstractions even elicit a distinct type of language from his viewers; in the presence of such work the traditional art-world vocabulary of shading, composition, emotion and skill becomes irrelevant and inadequate. The viewer is instead tasked with a novel experience of art, one that prioritizes the deciphering of a system over an aesthetic experience of a beautifully rendered object.¹

The two drawings included in this exhibition relate to the two fundamental forms LeWitt’s art has taken: modular cubic structures and wall drawings. In the earlier drawing, 6 Variations/ 1, 2, 3 (1967), LeWitt has plotted several permutations of the subject that preoccupied him for nearly a decade: the open cube. The artist explained, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is that it is relatively uninteresting…the cube lacks any aggressive force, implies no motion, and is least emotive.”² In the 1960s, by which time the art world had abandoned nearly all rules, the demand that a work be “interesting” seemed to be the only parameter left. LeWitt flirted with defying this tenet when he described the cube as uninteresting; however, he employed the inexpressive shape so as not to distract from the interesting idea at the core of his work. LeWitt explored the open cube in linear diagrams, axonometric drawings and three-dimensional constructions ranging from diminutive models to large-scale structures. These varied representations are often exhibited alongside one another as a means to address the different ways a singular subject may be rendered. The drawing 6 Variations relates to this large body of work, juxtaposing textual description, diagrammatic representation and the implied yet absent three-dimensional manifestation of these ideas. In 6 Variations, while the language is rudimentary and the overall concept simple (these are types of cubes), the viewer confronts the much more obtuse project of making sense of his system of Xs and imagining all variations possible in addition to those offered on the page.

Sol LeWitt, The Location of Geometric Figures: A Blue Square, Red Circle, Yellow Triangle, and Black Parallelogram, 1976, graphite and colored ink on paper, 17 ½ x 17 ½ inches (44.5 x 44.5 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott — Sol LeWitt, *The Location of Geometric Figures: A Blue Square, Red Circle, Yellow Triangle, and Black Parallelogram*, 1976, graphite and colored ink on paper, 17 ½ x 17 ½ inches (44.5 x 44.5 cm). © 2013 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

The relationship between simplicity and complexity is further explored in the later drawing, The Location of Geometric Figures: A Blue Square, Red Circle, Yellow Triangle, and Black Parallelogram (1976). While the free-floating shapes are precise and clear, in the vein of mechanical drawing or children’s educational tools, the text bound within them is circuitous and prolix. The handwritten sentence nestled into each shape describes the location of that shape and its relationship to the neighboring forms. LeWitt employed just such language as instructions for his wall drawings, geometric systems carried out by others according to his directions. The text is sometimes, but not always, written adjacent to the wall drawing; when the text appears, it underscores the original idea and the process utilized to carry it out. In The Location of Geometric Figures, written and drawn articulations of LeWitt’s idea are intimately mapped onto one another. They become redundant in this shared space on the page, provoking us to question the difference between textual and visual representations and their validity as artistic tools.

The period spanning these two drawings was a remarkably rich phase of LeWitt’s career, both in the quantity of works he produced and the quality of innovations he devised. LeWitt interrogated the relationship between the idea and its realization, between what is present and absent, between complexity and simplicity, and between different modes of representation. Language, as its own closed system riddled with these very tensions, operates at many levels of LeWitt’s work. As viewers, we are prompted to reconsider the role of language—both the words we see on the page and the ones we use to discuss art.

1. While LeWitt emphasized that his conceptual art is “made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye,” many maintain that one cannot disregard aesthetics entirely. After all, it is nearly impossible to ignore the elegance of LeWitt’s softly stenciled geometric wall drawings. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs of Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), 79-83.
2. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Sol LeWitt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 172.

Sol LeWitt Biography

Delia Solomons Biography

Delia Solomons (b. 1984, Savannah, GA) is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, specializing in twentieth-century art from Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Her dissertation examines the 1960s boom of Latin American art in the United States as sparked by the Cuban Revolution. She has worked as an Adjunct Instructor at New York University, Writer/Researcher/Editor for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. She lives in New York City.