In the catalog for his 1978 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Bernice Rose, Curator of Drawings, says that his innovative work drawing directly on walls “was as important for drawing as Pollock’s use of the drip technique had been for painting in the 1950s.”
Although he has worked extensively in drawing and printmaking, he is usually considered to be primarily a sculptor. LeWitt’s most characteristic sculpture works are based on connected open cubes and have titles like “Modular Wall Structure” and “Double Modular Cube.” Because he works with modules and systems, and his early wall drawings are based on grids, he is sometimes described as a Minimal artist, but his work, especially his recent work, is usually colorful and often quite complex. It is also optimistic and beautiful.
In 1980 he published his “Autobiography” which contained hundreds of photographs of every object and nook-and-cranny in his New York apartment.
“Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn…”
Continue reading SOL LEWITT,Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78: New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman reports.
Pictured above: His 1993 Stars is a series of eight aquatint prints, beginning with a three-point star and ending with a ten-point star. It illustrates the artist’s ongoing concern with seriality, a concept that allows him to explore the rich possibilities of a single motif in all its variations. Wedded to the expanding complexity of the star patterns and their positioning on the sheet is LeWitt’s use of intense, saturated color. As he has done in his earlier lithographs, he used separate plates for the limited number of colors in his prints: black, grey, and the primary colors – red, yellow, and blue. However, instead of the crystalline purity of each color reading as a separate hue, found in his earlier work, Stars is the result of overprinting the plates, a process which yields complex collaborations with a muted, lustrous, and mysterious quality. Source: University of Michigan, Museum of Art