Sol LeWitt Biography Quotes 25 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Sol LeWitt (born Solomon LeWitt in 1928) grew up in Connecticut and came of age as an American artist shaped by drawing, architecture, and the idea that art could be generated by rules. His parents were immigrants, and he spent his childhood in Hartford and nearby New Britain. He studied art at Syracuse University, earning a BFA in 1949. Early exposure to European art, including Renaissance frescoes, sharpened his sense of how a work might be conceived independently of the hand that executes it, a theme that would recur throughout his career. After college he served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War era, experiences that broadened his sense of structure, order, and repetition.

New York and Early Career
LeWitt settled in New York in the 1950s, taking jobs that trained his eye for clarity and systems. He worked in graphic design, including a stint at Seventeen magazine, and took classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts). He also worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where the atmosphere of postwar experimentation and the presence of other artists on staff created a fertile community. There he encountered peers such as Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold, and he followed the breakthroughs of artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. A period as a draftsman in the office of architect I. M. Pei clarified his fascination with modular form and the discipline of building from units, lessons he soon transferred to sculpture and drawing.

Conceptual Turn
By the mid-1960s LeWitt began calling his sculptures "structures", emphasizing idea over material. He participated in the New York conversations around Minimalism and the nascent movement of Conceptual Art, alongside artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre, and in dialogue with critics including Lucy Lippard and artists like Mel Bochner. Works such as Serial Project I (ABCD) demonstrated his reliance on permutation and sequence. His essays "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1967) and "Sentences on Conceptual Art" (1969) articulated a new position: the centrality of conception over fabrication. He wrote that the idea "becomes a machine that makes the art", a formulation that empowered many artists to see instructions, documents, and scores as primary.

Wall Drawings and Structures
In 1968 LeWitt realized his first wall drawing, presented at Paula Cooper Gallery in a benefit exhibition. The concept was radical: the work existed as a set of instructions that others could execute directly on the wall. He would provide a certificate, a diagram, and a text specifying lines, arcs, grids, or colors; draftspeople rendered the image on site. This approach joined the fresco tradition he admired with a modern emphasis on procedures, and it insisted that authorship resides in the plan rather than the hand. Over subsequent decades, in exhibitions with gallerists such as Virginia Dwan, John Weber, and Paula Cooper, the wall drawings evolved from austere graphite lines to exuberant fields of color, even as their logic remained crisp. In parallel, his free-standing structures used open cubes, progressions, and stacked modules, converting architectural thinking into sculpture.

Books, Teaching, and Community
LeWitt was a devoted maker of artists' books and a supporter of artist-run systems. With Lucy Lippard and others, he helped catalyze Printed Matter in the mid-1970s, the nonprofit devoted to artists' publications. He also taught at the School of Visual Arts, where he clarified procedural methods and treated drawing as a form of instruction. His wall-drawing teams often included students and young artists, who learned to translate concise directions into precise murals. The trust he placed in collaborators, and the rigor he demanded, modeled a generous yet exacting studio culture. His friendships were consequential: with Eva Hesse he shared encouragement and candid advice; with peers such as Ryman, Mangold, Judd, Flavin, and Andre he pursued parallel investigations of seriality, material economy, and the poetry of systems.

International Years and Return
LeWitt's reputation grew internationally through the 1970s, and he lived for a time in Italy, immersing himself in historic cities whose walls and spaces suited his approach. The move deepened his interest in color and arc-based compositions. He later returned to Connecticut, establishing a studio in the Connecticut River Valley while continuing to install large-scale projects worldwide. Public works, including structures made of stacked concrete blocks and major outdoor pieces, joined museum commissions. He also produced memorial and site-specific works, engaging the social memory of places while holding fast to his procedural methods.

Honors, Late Work, and Legacy
By the 1990s and 2000s, LeWitt's vocabulary expanded into vivid, hand-drawn and brushy color planes executed according to intricate rules. Museums across Europe and the United States collected his structures and wall drawings, and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and Tate organized or hosted significant installations. He balanced privacy with generosity, supporting colleagues and younger artists, and working closely with curators, installers, and dealers who understood his emphasis on clarity and consistency.

Sol LeWitt died in 2007, leaving a body of work that redefined what it means to make art. In the year following his death, a monumental, long-term retrospective of his wall drawings opened at MASS MoCA in collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery and Williams College Museum of Art, realized by teams of draftspeople following his instructions. That project epitomizes the achievement of a life spent turning ideas into enduring forms through shared labor. His procedures continue to guide new installations, and his writings remain a touchstone for artists and writers. The constellation of people around him, curators, critics, fellow artists, gallerists, students, and the many hands who drew his lines, was inseparable from his practice, and it amplified his conviction that thought, articulated plainly, can generate a lifetime of art.

Our collection contains 25 quotes who is written by Sol, under the main topics: Wisdom - Art - Reinvention.