If you do a painting based on a set of instructions I give you, who gets to sign the painting? Artist Sol LeWitt’s answer just might surprise you.
“One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Sol LeWitt was a founder of minimalism and conceptual art and had a really prolific artistic practice which included painting, wall drawings, sculpture, photography, printmaking — pretty much every medium you can possibly think of,” noted Sarasota Art Museum Curator Lacie Barbour.
The principal tenet of conceptual art is that art lies within the idea or creative concept, not the object or the person who actually crafts a painting, fabricates a sculpture or makes a print.
“So, a very interesting part of Sol LeWitt’s artistic practice is sometimes he never even came in contact with the work of art,” Barbour explained. “What his practice was based on was a written set of instructions that he would provide to different printmakers.”
Even though LeWitt didn’t make the prints, their creation was nevertheless attributed to him.
“He likened his process to music and composers who would write a piece of music but would not be the people playing the instruments,” Barbour related.
The exhibition includes both the print and LeWitt’s written instructions, and part of the fun is seeing how the printmakers interpreted them.
With 140 prints, visitors can make a day of it by including a docent tour and a trip to the museum’s on-campus bistro.
“Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt” is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum through Oct. 25.
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“’Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt’ is a traveling exhibition organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, and curated by David Arford, who is the professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts Boston,” Barbour pointed out. “This exhibition is a celebration of the printmaking practice of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.”
LeWitt generated more than 350 print projects during his 40-year artistic career, including thousands of lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, and linocuts. Printmaking proved to be the perfect medium for LeWitt’s brand of conceptual art, in which the “idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
“He's really most well-known for his wall drawings and for his sculptures, but this exhibition focuses on a less exhibited part of his practice which was printmaking. This exhibition at Sarasota Art Museum features 44 of his printmaking projects and comes out to a total of 140 framed works,” Barbour said.
This exhibition begins with LeWitt’s earliest works and extends through his mature expressions in abstraction. It is organized in four thematic sections — ”Lines, Arcs, Circles, and Grids,” “Bands and Colors,” “From Geometric Figures to Complex Forms,” and “Wavy, Curvy, Loopy Doopy, and in All Directions.” As such, the exhibition reflects the bold geometric shapes and precise lines that defined LeWitt’s artistic style.
Early prints
“So, his early prints are nothing like the rest of his works,” noted Barbour. “They lean more into social realism. They fall somewhere between realistic and expressionistic depictions of normal everyday people and people like politicians and the working class — more so commentary on the living conditions that he was growing up in and working in between 1947 and 1951.”
LeWitt’s process at that time was primarily lithography. But his artistic pursuits were interrupted in 1951 due to his military service in California, Japan and Korea, where he was assigned to design recruitment and propaganda posters.
After his discharge, LeWitt moved to New York.
“He was working as a graphic designer for I.M. Pei, the architect [as a graphic designer and draftsman], but he was also working at the reception or information desk at the Museum of Modern Art,” said Barbour. “There, he met all of these different artists who were leaning more into what we now know as minimalism, artists like Dan Flavin, with whom he developed a really close working relationship.”
By the late 1960s, minimalism and conceptual art were on the rise as a rejection of abstract expressionism.
“And Sol LeWitt was one of the artists who helped to define conceptual art as a movement,” said Barbour. “So, in 1967 and then in 1969 he wrote these essays titled ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ and ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art,’ which defined in bullet points what conceptual art was and what we now understand conceptual art to be.”
At that point, his practice consisted of writing instructions or creating diagrams for a work of art, which was then executed or carried out by someone else.
“It didn’t matter who because the form, the material and the idea was the most important part of the process and the result,” Barbour said. “And he returned to printmaking because it really stood out to him as this medium that could relay all of these ideas pretty brilliantly just because of the inherent properties of printmaking.”
In printmaking, artists will work with different studios in collaboration with the master printmakers and other people who make the plates and print the works based on the artist’s concept and instructions (such as reversing a plate or rotating a plate).
Post-‘60s prints
The prints that LeWitt made from the 1960s forward are divided in the exhibition into four thematic rather than chronological sections.
LeWitt’s instructions for the prints in the section on lines, arcs, circles, and grids typically appear in the title of the print. For example, one states “straight lines not touching” and in response, the printmaker would draw a series of straight lines not touching and that became the artwork.
“So when you see the works in person and you read their titles, you start to understand the relationship between the instruction for the concept or the idea behind the work and the final result,” Barbour explained.
The second section is bands and colors.
“Here we see thicker segments of color that sometimes arc and are sometimes a little bit wavy,” Barbour added. “He starts to loosen up his restrictions a little bit when it comes to the instructions and he also starts introducing primary colors imposed on top of each other and the blending of those colors. So you get a lot of softer, warmer and cooler hues rather than just primary colors."
The third section contains an exploration of geometric forms and complex figures.
“He used circles, triangles and cubes as a foundation for distortion, so you see a lot of cubes in series that start to permutate, and you get all of these different wild shapes from that,” Barbour continued. “So, it's sort of mathematical, though LeWitt claimed he knew nothing about math but that was just how his brain worked."
The last section is “Wavy, Curvy, Loopy, Doopy.”
“Most of these prints came a little bit later in LeWitt’s career and appear much more painterly,” Barbour said. “So, all of these colorful brush strokes and on first glance you think oh maybe he's transitioned out of these very strict rules that he's set for his works, but the closer you get the more you realize that there are still a set of systems in place and so a lot of the brush strokes will be wavy and then he takes that plate and rotates it 180 degrees and puts it on top of itself so that you get this really different perceptual experience that just creates these beautiful prints. But it's still bound by this set of instructions.”
The instructions are not always simple or straightforward. Some are convoluted and, therefore, quite humorous, as if LeWitt was mocking the very idea of conceptual art in the first place, Barbour said.
“As you go through the exhibition, you begin to anticipate what the instructions are even without reading them,” said Barbour. “It's almost like a scavenger hunt and a guessing game in a way to try to figure out what the idea was behind the work of art.”
Separating the idea from the execution
Today, it’s not unusual for artists to separate an artwork’s conception from its execution. Barbour cites Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami in support of this proposition.
“These artists outsource the labor in order to make their works,” noted Barbour.
Many monumental sculptors today also send their drawings, diagrams and maquettes to someone who then fabricates and installs the artwork. Local examples of this include “Fire Dance” in Centennial Park and “Journey of Hope” on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in Fort Myers. Their creators, David Black and Cecilia Lueza respectively, designed the pieces, but had fabricators make and deliver the actual artworks.
“But back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, this was quite radical,” noted Barbour.
Docent tours and museum lectures
If all of this seems overwhelming, fear not. There are docent tours and museum lectures for those who would rather not rely on their own interpretative skills.
“For people who want to learn more about the exhibition. Sarasota Art Museum has quite a few programs,” said Barbour. “We have highlights tours given by our wonderful museum guides who really contextualize the exhibitions and take you through the individual works. We also have ‘Art at Noon’ and curators' tours, as well as tours given by the executive director of the museum [Virginia Shearer]. So, there are plenty of opportunities to learn more about the process and about art history and the artist himself. The tours are a great way to maximize your trip to the museum.”
And no visit to the museum is complete without a stop in the bistro and a walk around the grounds to take in the museum’s rotating program of outdoor artworks in its plaza and on the great lawn.
“I should also point out,” Barbour concluded, “that the building itself is historic. It used to be the former Sarasota High School. It was built in 1926, and a lot of those elements remain today.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
