In June 2011, four years after Sol LeWitt’s death, Vanity Fair published a short piece that became a call to biographical action. A photograph showed LeWitt in 1961 in his studio, a rundown heap of a place on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the neighborhood where he and his circle of rebellious peers tore art down to its basics and started over again. The text beneath the picture was written by Ingrid Sischy, the former editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine:¹

Ask any artist who his or her secretly favorite artist is. Chances are the answer will be Sol LeWitt, a pioneer of both minimalism and conceptual art, whose wall drawings, photographs, and sculptures … have a commonsense beauty. When LeWitt died … there was a recognition among art-world insiders that one of the greats had gone, but the commendations were all very quiet—like the man himself. Prediction: Time will bring LeWitt the broader accolades that are his due … LeWitt was everything we expect of an artist but all too rarely get these days: stubborn, generous, iconoclastic, uninterested in money—other than giving it away to help other artists—suspicious of power, and as visionary as anyone who ever made art.²

Paradox is at work here. Reflecting its title, Vanity Fair lavishes attention on those who seek it, not on people such as LeWitt who avoid the limelight. In this case, though, limelight avoidance is what landed the artist on the magazine’s pages. Indeed, LeWitt himself created the primary obstacle to the level of recognition that Sischy argues he deserves.

The Connecticut native left us at least two contradictory legacies: a radiant body of work and a faint self-portrait. The latter—his refusal to participate in the culture of celebrity—is the

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