The unknown side of Sol LeWitt
“Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line,” the American artist Sol LeWitt once said. It was true for his entire oeuvre, but an exhibition in Brussels now marks an unknown side. In addition to his wall drawings, the Jewish Museum of Belgium also discusses his Jewish heritage.
In 1928, Solomon LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He would become famous as a pioneer of conceptual art and Minimal Art, the movement of artists who renounced all emotionality, the expressive gesture and figuration in their work in the 1960s. LeWitt is developing a geometry-based idio with seriality as the guiding idea.
In reality, he was an iconoclast who rejected any form of narrative figuration and symbolism. This does not necessarily come from the Jewish image, in which representation of the convention is prohibited from continuing, but it does involve a closing attitude. The Jewish Museum of Belgium displays the design drawings LeWitt made for the synagogue of the Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester, Connecticut. It is the only building he ever built (1996-2001).
LeWitt defined seriality as all parts of a whole are the result of one basic idea, all separate parts are similar to each other. For example, he makes many things on the cube, such as a series of white panels of enamelled sheet steel, composed in contour, black isometric figures of the cube are screen-printed. The series was created for the university hospital in Liège, where it was made in 1987 as paneling in the hallway.
Useful architecture
Throughout his life, LeWitt was interested in the relationship between visual arts and architecture. In his ‘Paragraphs’ (1967) he wrote that they ‘are each other’s complete opposite. Architecture must be useful, otherwise it will fail altogether. When three-dimensional art becomes utilitarian, its function as art”. He sought the tension between these two opposites, just as he raised the tension between spatial illusion and the flat surface.
Also read: Where do LeWitt’s values remain?
The latter especially in the wall drawings, of which he designed approximately 1,350.Wall drawing #138 (1972) shows a gossamer web of thin pencil lines, made with the aid of a huge compass. It was performed in Brussels by students from various art academies. Grids, circles and arcs are drawn from the midpoints of the four sides of the plane, overlapping each other and creating visual patterns. This complex opens on the wall a transparent universe drawing of harmony and order.
LeWitt designed Chester’s synagogues as a simple structure with an octagonal dome chosen over traditional Polish synagogues, all of which were destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. It is a pity that the documentation on the synagogue in Chester is rather sparse. In the interior of the synagogue, LeWitt painted a mural of an exuberant, colorful, six-pointed star. The painting can slide into two parts to divide the Torah. Even though the star can be seen as one of the many geometric shapes from LeWitt’s visual vocabulary, it seems that there is a certain symbolism involved.
The star is common in his later work. On a wall in Brussels, a deep black, six-pointed star is surrounded by luminous bands of color spreading across the image plane (Wall drawing #780, 1995). Gradually, LeWitt’s (wall) drawings became freer and more focused, with loops and organic lines; but always based on the principles of seriality and geometry.