Sol LeWitt Exhibit, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

SOL LEWITT, 1928-2007

Sol LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. Mr. LeWitt was born in 1928 and passed away in 2007, but his images and philosophies are as vibrant today as they have ever been. His background was varied from studying art at Syracuse, making posters for Special Services in the Korean War, illustrating paste-ups and Photostats for Seventeen magazine, to working as graphic designer for I.M. Pei. His greatest career influence was the book-counter job at MoMA where he met other young artists with odd jobs there, including Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold. Minimal art was yet unnamed but seemed a good place to start. Mr. LeWitt, throughout his career, reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes, colors, and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end “free to bend.” Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought to contemplate or plans that could be carried out by the viewer. He was focused on systems and concepts – volume, transparency, sequences, variations, irregularity – which he expressed in words that might or might not be translated into actual works of art. To him, “ideas are what counted.” Renowned critic Michael Kimmelman orated, “He took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition opening into a fresh question.”

“I didn’t want to save art – I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at the time, I didn’t know what I would do.”