Sol LeWitt. Lary BloomЧитать онлайн книгу.
LeWitt was among the many artists that Robertson interviewed. The Times noted under the photo of the artist in his studio: “Sol LeWitt earned $1,000 last year, the first money he has ever taken from sales of his paintings.”22
When he applied to work at MoMA in 1960, LeWitt was thirty-one, near the end of the “young” range. He contacted his cousin, Pell LeWitt, who worked in the museum’s publicity department, and who helped arrange an interview.23 And the idea of entry-level work didn’t faze the artist. He recalled in 1993: “I asked for the job and got it. That was great. I wouldn’t have to come to work until 5:30 p.m., and I’d work until about 10 or 10:30 p.m…. This job was the best one I got because it was sitting at the desk in the office building part in the evenings and after the offices were closed. There was nothing to do but read and be there. So I saw every exhibition that they had at the time and saw a great deal of film.”24
In all, from 1960 to 1964, he served in a variety of capacities: bookseller, night receptionist and watchman, and all-around clerk. In the last year he worked at the museum, he was recruited to teach a class in drawing “to mainly suburban housewives” in a school run by Victor D’Amico, a tenant in the building: “I had all to do [my own work] and I made enough money, living very frugally, to live fairly well.”25
LeWitt recalled a time of great worry at the museum during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when it seemed as if the United States was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union. At the time, LeWitt was stationed at one of the desks. One night “they were taking paintings out, the Picassos, Matisses, Schwitters—all the great masterpieces—and substituting a sort of the second string. Alfred Barr was coming through and I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Barr, where these paintings are going, that’s where I want to go, too.’”26
The coterie of low-level MoMA employees banded together artistically. Others with entry-level positions (including serving as guards) included the young artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Gene Beery. The circle also included Lucy R. Lippard, who worked in the library and eventually became a writer and art critic who documented the minimalist and conceptual periods. Lippard wrote that MoMA became “the hub” and “the beginning of our art world lives.”27 In 1993 LeWitt said, “It was an important little cell of art at that time. The ideas that were talked about amongst ourselves turned out to be of some significance, because at that time art was changing a great deal, and some of the more important people of that generation happened to be here at that time.”28 In the same year he recalled: “The discussions at that time were involved with new ways of making art, trying to reinvent the process, to regain basics, to become as objective as possible.”29 This idea was in direct contrast to the highly subjective and self-aggrandizing abstract expressionist movement.
A different form of influence developed in this circle, which expanded beyond MoMA employees: artists wrote about each other’s work in art journals. Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, for example, wrote about LeWitt, who in turn wrote about Ruth Vollmer. Many of the artists curated shows in new downtown galleries that included the work of their colleagues.
Because these artists got to know each other and began to gather in their respective lofts, it is tempting to think of scenes from La Bohème, with young impoverished dreamers struggling for their art and love. Indeed, there was even a tragic Mimi figure, Eva Hesse. But reality offered its own drama. And the jobs the artists secured gave them living wages, even if low ones, and time during the daylight hours to tend to their own work and invite their museum colleagues into their studios.
One of LeWitt’s first close relationships from that period was with Flavin. Together they explored a simple idea: simplicity itself. This would be clearly manifested in Flavin’s work, in which he featured arrangements of fluorescent lights that baffled many viewers.
LeWitt recalled that Flavin often quoted philosophers when he wasn’t expressing his own opinions. LeWitt listened, apparently endlessly, to his new colleague: “One didn’t talk very much with Flavin; one listened.”30
LeWitt often went to Flavin’s house for dinner, as the latter’s wife at the time, Sonja Severdija, was an excellent cook. Flavin was “always interested in art and would talk about it. These weren’t always one-sided conversations, but his egotism was not fully developed at the time. He was working on it.”31
Loquaciousness aside, Flavin became a big influence on LeWitt, who in a 1993 interview said: “Flavin’s piece [Nominal Three] using a progression of one, one-two, one-two-three [fluorescent lights], was an important example for me. It was one of the first system pieces I’d seen. [Donald] Judd’s progression pieces of that time were also very important. I began to think of systems that were finite and simple. This was the basic difference between the idea of simplifying form to become less expressive, and the idea that the form was the carrier of ideas.”32
The LeWitt-Flavin relationship developed at the same time that pop artists, as they would be referred to, were producing work that—in contrast with the general response to what came before it—was crowd-pleasing stuff. In a self-contradictory recollection, LeWitt said: “I always liked [Roy] Lichtenstein, and I still do. And I like [Claes] Oldenburg and [Andy] Warhol, too…. On the other hand—the theoretical sense—I didn’t care for the whole idea of what they were doing, but I could see they were very serious people who were doing something really interesting.”33
The momentum of pop art and then op art,34 a spinoff that featured optical illusions and abstractions in contrast to the former’s recognizable images, helped create the belief (at least in some circles) that the art world was on the brink of nothing less than revolution. The critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, champions of the old ways, were passé. Pop art was among the phenomena that helped build a bridge from what had come before. As the BBC art critic and author Will Gompertz wrote in What Are You Looking At? a capsulized history of modern art, “Lichtenstein’s paintings were a very long way from Abstract Expressionism. Where the art of Pollock and Rothko had been all about existential feelings, Lichtenstein and Warhol focused purely on the material subject; removing all trace of themselves in the process.”35
Still, how would these young artists—LeWitt being the oldest, and something of a father figure to the others—contribute to this new momentum, as they weren’t interested in turning Brillo boxes into subjects? And how would they do it without falling prey to what they despised, the self-congratulatory, celebrity-driven marketplace that ranked the artists’ lives as more important than their work? How would the work of the LeWitt circle become noticed? A significant part of the answer would be in the slow and steady process of relationship building.
■ There is some uncertainty about how LeWitt met Eva Hesse. In Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, Veronica Roberts credits Robert Slutsky with introducing the two to each other. Lucy Lippard writes in Eva Hesse that Harvey and Ellen Becker did the honors. But there is no doubt that from the moment LeWitt met her, Hesse affected him deeply.
In some ways their work seemed very different from each other’s. His was primarily finished when the plan was finished. Hers depended heavily on decisions made during the process of putting pieces together. But they shared common goals otherwise and were intellectually in sync.
The art historian Kirsten Swenson argues that this relationship is a microcosm of change: “Throughout the 1960s Hesse and LeWitt were engaged in an ongoing dialogue and artistic exchange, navigating the era’s social and political upheavals as well as the changing values of the New York art world.”36 She also notes that “the work of Hesse and LeWitt insisted on open-endedness and ambiguity; irrational or absurd art rejected interpretation.”37 The two sympathized with each other about the difficulties of their formative years, and Hesse’s deeply affected her mentor.
As a child, she had emigrated from Germany with her sister in the Kindertransport and was later reunited with her parents, who came to America to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. Her grandparents, however, did not survive the Holocaust. And when Eva was twelve years old, her mother committed suicide. After