Sol LeWitt’s passing yesterday has had me reviewing with gratitude the delight I have experienced with his handiwork. He lived outside of categorization, moving effortlessly as his desires morphed from Conceptualism to Minimalism to his own brand of glorious and retinally rich expressionism. His collaborative wall murals always felt fresh, immediate and irresistibly upbeat. My response to most of his work was joy and enchantment.
I also admired his plucky self confidence which never seemed to veer into the morass of solipsistic self-referential arrogance that plagues so many people in the public eye. Some time ago I read an apocryphal story of his encounter with a self-professed “color expert” who told LeWitt that his work did not demonstrate an understanding of color theory. “I don’t understand your color theory, but I understand my own.” Which he did.
In the New York Times obituary of LeWitt, Michael Kimmelman shares this story:
To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”
In another account, Kimmelman relates the following:
Asked about the switch he made in the 1980’s — adding ink washes, which permitted him new colors, along with curves and free forms — Mr. LeWitt responded, “Why not?”
He added, “A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience.”
