Sol LeWitt: Early Drawings (1968-1975), Related Structures, and Prints

Today, Sol LeWitt is equally known for his two- and three-dimensional works, but in the late 1940s, through about 1960, the artist focused on painting as well as drawing, and printmaking. By the mid-1960s, his paintings had transitioned through deeply impastoed paint, to paint on dimensional supports, to a focus on fully three-dimensional form. With this new-found focus, LeWitt began engaging skilled craftspeople to assist in the construction of his pieces (he called the works, “structures”). In order to communicate what he wanted, he drew fabrication diagrams using simple perspectival lines. Horizontal, vertical, and diagonal (in two directions) lines served LeWitt’s purpose of communication. Shortly after he started using this sort of diagram, he also began exploring drawing with these same four directions of lines (first on paper, then on walls) but now as the imagery with no external referents. With some time, he came to call this simplified imagery, “Lines in Four Directions.” The current exhibition focuses on early works made between 1968 and 1979 that speak to his exploration of “Lines in Four Directions” and that imagery’s relationship to concurrently-made three-dimensional works.

Throughout the exhibition, works are arranged so as to provide both context and counterpoint for each piece. Several examples are below:

A three-dimensional 1979 metal open cube structure has a grid of 3×3 cubes within it, so that it makes not just the 27 individual cubes but one larger overall cube, as well. Depending upon how one views the piece, one sees a dynamic arrangement of lines in four directions in space. Paired with this work, a 1971 etching consists of a dense field made entirely from lines in four directions. While the etching exists in two dimensions and the cube in three, the aesthetic and the exploration are deeply entwined.

A surprising work to be included in a solo exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s is an 1887 collotype by Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s series of photographs, breaking down the stages of human motion from multiple equally-important vantage points, informs the grids of LeWitt’s works, which utilize Muybridge’s scientific method for LeWitt’s formally-reduced investigations. LeWitt gave this particular example of Muybridge’s work to a friend and colleague in a frame of his own making. Flanking this piece are two iconic works of LeWitt’s. A 1974 single open cube (defined by the 12 edges of a cube, rendered in metal that has been painted white) stands to the left of the Muybridge. To the right is a 1969 drawing, “Four Varieties of Line Direction.” Both works speak to LeWitt’s reductivist inclination. For the cube, while it initially appears simple, there are infinite ways to experience the defining border lines as well as what the cube “frames” through it. For the 1969 drawing, as described above, what once had been used merely as tools to describe something else, have become the focus of the exploration and now stand as an elegant drawing of quadrants of four different “sets” of parallel lines where the balance between the hand-drawn and the ordered, along with the contrast between the different directions of the lines, co-exist and provide quiet tension.

These juxtapositions are arranged in honor of LeWitt’s own methodology of presentation. “Straight Lines in Four Directions & All Their Possible Combinations,” a suite of etchings from 1973, exemplifies this gesture. Over fifteen sheets of paper, the artist presents lines in four directions and (and per the title of the work) all their combinations. The sixteenth sheet (the “colophon”) provides a diagram of the 15 in their proper arrangement and in the space of the 16th, places the text describing the project, so that when one hangs the work as illustrated on the 16th sheet, there is a set of nesting “images” where each smaller version is, in a way, equal to the larger one (the overall project is the same as the image of the 15 arranged on the 16th sheet, the text on the 16th sheet is equal to the entire project, etc.).

With all of these comparisons, differences, and relationships, it becomes clear that a key to an understanding of LeWitt’s work is his sense of equality. Three-dimensional and two-dimensional, open and closed, dense and sparse, big and small, imagery and text, idea and object, etc. were treated by LeWitt as equally significant. This exhibition presents the audience an opportunity to celebrate the eye and mind with which LeWitt approached life.