Means and Ends

Sol LeWitt's distinctive oeuvre from his pioneering grids to the more novel high-powered wall works, is scaned in a 35-year retrospective arriving by and by at the Whitney Museum. The art's generosity and energy so at odds with the received view of LeWitt as an austere Conceptualist, invite afresh assessment of this late-modernist master.

It is easy to take Sol LeWitt for granted. Born in 928 he has been a fixture upon the international art scene since the mid-'60s, and his importance has not ever really been questioned. Them has been, however, a reticent quality to a great deal of of the work, a built-in freedom from presumption and politesse, that allowed it to retreat, for a like reason to speak, into the background. by the agency of eschewing subjectivity and only tangentially and subtly approaching the social, LeWitt's art side-stepped many of the arenas where public passions and their attendant celebrity-making played themselves without His full-fledged retrospective, organized by dint of Gary Garrels for the San Francisco Museum of novel Art (SFMOMA), should change that. LeWitt does not stand over against or shock, and he is scarcely a publicity inquirer but this exhibition makes abundantly clear that his work and his ideas have been central to the art of the last 35 years, in the way that thoroughly diffused into the fabric of our esthetic understanding that they have become virtually transparent. His givens have been taken, and now it appears as if they have always been them.

Particularly rewarding about this exhibition and the thorough catalogue that accompanies it is that in the way that many strands of LeWitt's work are made visible--from paintings and drawings to constructions and wall works, from photography and graphics to produce design and books. There is, as well, a material part of writings (notably, "Paragraphs upon Conceptual Art," first published in Artforum in 1967) that, while small in size, has been large in impact.

The present to view defines the compass of LeWitt's cast adding significantly to even a well-informed viewer's knowledge. With nearly 400 solo exhibitions since 1965 to take into account, really knowing LeWitt's work has been, up until now, a daunting task. Remarkably productive above the course of his career (there are, for example, above 900 wall drawings in existence in single form or another), LeWitt, if anything, has intensified his efforts in later years. He has become individual of the most sought-after artists for large-scale public and private commissions, and his wall drawings, increasingly playful, sensual and colorful, look to be sprouting up everywhere. The freshly installed Wall Drawing #896, its Matisse-like waves of bright primaries and secondaries (along with black and white) pushing at the confines of the ground-floor lobby space at Christie's of recent origin Rockefeller Center headquarters, is an example of LeWitt's increasingly noticeable public presence

The wall drawings are probably LeWitt's best-known material part of work (although the white, three-dimensional openwork grids might qualify as a shut second). SFMOMA installed over 40 of those drawings in its tall, airy, light-filled galleries, creating environments that ranged from the insinuating and austere, through the chromatically full-bodied, to the jazzily discordant. The wall works encapsulate a great deal of of LeWitt's thinking and highlight the conceptual and practical complexities of his larger throw out Issues of originality, ownership, scale, nearness authorial control and permanence arise; formal, perceptual and historical interests are also addressed.

LeWitt's wall drawings, while broadening in stylistic reach above the years, share certain lock opener elements. They all begin as largely realized works on paper, which are then execut upon the wall. LeWitt creates the initial paper drawing; the wall drawing, omit in rare instances, is carded on the outside by others. The heart of the piece lies in the initial drawing--the idea--and the San Francisco exhibit featured a wide range of these works upon paper, executed in ink, pencil or gouache. The drawing, when translated to the wall, can vary in size and placement; it can be painted above and re-created later, it can smooth exist in two places at one time (LeWitt allows exhibition copies to be made, thus a collector is in the fortunate position of being able to loan a piece on the outside and keep it on the wall at the same time). The work may be sold on the other hand what is bought is, to all intents and objects a license to produce a single (except for temporary exhibition copies) authentic wall drawing. The practical ends of these conceptual conditions are of interest. While individual execution of the wall dm-wing is ofttimes a painstaking affair, what you are paying for is the take away from of skilled labor, a relatively minor outlay compared to the purchase or level the conservation of more traditional works. This can lower insurance rates for theft and damage, and makes storage or transportation of work that can have possession of a hundred feet of wall space a relatively painless affair.

The integration of two-dimensional work into architectural space has a lengthy history, a history with which LeWitt is quite familiar. Twentieth-century art, particularly in its abstract manifestations, provides many examples of like integration. The Russian Constructivists and the artists of the De Stijl move and the Bauhaus were all involved in casts of this sort, as were (in a figurative vein) the Mexican muralists. Postwar American painting pushed scale into the architectural realm. Newman, Pollock and Still were followed in the '60 by means of artists like Stella, Poons and Held, who frequently worked at mural scale, as well as Warhol, whose 1966 subdue by fear Wallpaper installation plastered the walls of the Castelli Gallery with a modular report image. Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd with his wall stacks and progressions, and Dan Flavin, with his wall-based fluorescent works that washed light above large sections of both two- and three-dimensional space, also made the wall an esthetic participant rather than only a neutral supporting surface.