Sol LeWitt is a conceptual artist whose concepts sound as dry as dust. But he produces art that has been described in anything but dry terms.
His titles alone won't provoke a stampede to the show of his drawings opening today at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Sample: "Bands of Color in Four Directions (Horizontal)," "The Location of Several Lines" and "A Square Divided Horizontally and Vertically Into Four Equal Parts, Each With Lines in Four Directions, Superimposed Progressively."
But here's what New York art historian Robert Rosenblum wrote about LeWitt's work on the occasion of a major 1978 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: "His art has turned out to be stunningly beautiful. . . . The experienced truth is that the finest of LeWitt's work elicits . . . an instant response to its sheer visual excitement and daring."
His work has become even more visually exciting in the intervening years.
LeWitt, 63, himself is wary of such praise. "I hope it comes out well instead of badly," he says, simply. "Of course, beauty isn't a very precise word. It means different things to different people."
Viewers will have ample opportunity to judge whether LeWitt's work "comes out well" from the BMA show, which features about 300 drawings spanning the artist's work from 1958 to the present. The earliest ones are studies after paintings by famous artists such as Velazquez and Botticelli, and drawings of everyday objects, such as a stove or a bedsheet. But by the late 1960s, he had developed the conceptual program -- what he calls "serial imagery" -- in which he has worked ever since.
"Serial imagery" involves taking a set of things, then executing a series of drawings involving permutations of that set. For instance, he takes four squares of different kinds of lines -- horizontal, vertical, diagonal slanting left to right and diagonal slanting right to left -- then draws them in combinations: from the simplest one of a square of each, to combinations in which up to all four types of lines are superimposed.
A virtually endless array of sets presents itself with this concept of working -- lines, cubes, pyramids and other forms and shapes. Add colors, as LeWitt began to do about 1970, and the possibilities become vastly increased.
"It seems to me that he's invented a vocabulary and then created a language out of it," says Brenda Richardson, the BMA's curator of modern painting and sculpture. "He set the terms of the vocabulary out, and then for a lifetime, without variation, he has created thousands of drawings."
For LeWitt, the important part of the work is the concept behind it, not the finished product. As he wrote in a now-famous 1967 essay in Artforum magazine called "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art": "What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something if it has physical form. No matter what form it may finally have, it must begin with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned."
But that doesn't mean the concept should be the most important thing to the viewer. LeWitt himself has stated: "It doesn't really matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by seeing the art. . . . Different people will understand the same thing in a different way."
According to Richardson, viewers don't need to understand the concept in order to get something out of the art. "It doesn't matter to me at all what visitors take out of that work," she says. "That's very personal to them. I think a lot of visitors will come in, and they'll see these brilliantly colored, breathtaking works; they'll just think they're gorgeous and they won't know there's any kind of 'system' behind them. I don't think Sol would mind that, either."
However, some will focus on the concept, she says, "and the beauty comes out of that because they realize that what they're looking at and reading forms a whole that's really very beautiful."
As LeWitt says, "Everyone understands things to their own limits, their own level of understanding based on what they know and what they've seen and how they perceive things. It's like seeing a building. You don't have to know how the plumbing works to know that it's a successful or beautiful building. If
it's successful, it'll have an immediate and non-intellectual effect on a person as working well."
With LeWitt, the later the work, the more immediate and satisfying the viewer's response. In the 1970s, working with pencil and colored inks, he produced works that could approach the dazzling, especially a group of 1971 and 1972 works in yellow. Then, in the early 1980s, he began working with gouache, a form of watercolor, which produced a richer, looser, more fluid effect than his earlier work.
Since then, the approach has remained rigorous and the forms austere -- a cube, or bands of color -- but the effect has often been positively sensuous. "It is important to note here that LeWitt's more recent work, since about 1984, has clearly been . . . emphasizing the visual effect," writes Franz Kaiser, curator of the museum's show.
"His works since the early 1980s often have many different colors that seem more complicated and emotionally laden than his earlier ink drawings," writes Trevor Fairbrother, curator of contemporary art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and co-author of the show's catalog. "LeWitt's involvement with gouache and with more complex visual imagery has led him to rich, colorful and painterly effects, and to the kinds of expressive surfaces that he eschewed thirty years ago."
The artist himself is more reticent about the development of his work. "It evolved in its own track," he says. "If you look at some of my very earliest drawings, . . . they are much looser than some of the later ones. It's not entirely new in my thinking."
There is also a humorous side to some of these works, especially those that combine imagery and writing. LeWitt, for instance, draws a series of lines on a piece of paper and then writes a paragraph of 45 lines -- hundreds and hundreds of words -- about what a single one of those lines is: "A line drawn between two points which are found where two sets of lines cross if the first line of the first set is drawn from a point ('1') halfway between the upper left corner and a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and a point halfway between . . . "
So, there's a lot more to Sol LeWitt than titles such as "Form Derived From a Cubic Rectangle (Steps)" or "Irregular Horizontal; Bands of Color Superimposed" would lead one to think.
"It's always so remarkable with Sol LeWitt, because [his art] always seems so straightforward and dry in conception. But in reality, it's nothing like that," says Jan Howard, the BMA's associate curator of prints, drawings and photographs, and co-curator of the museum show.
Adds Richardson: "It's infinitely inventive. And infinitely beautiful."
VISUAL EXCITEMENT
What: "Sol LeWitt Drawings"
Where: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Art Museum Drive near Charles and 31st streets
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through April 23
Admission: $5.50 adults, $3.50 seniors and students, $1.50 ages 7 to 18
Call: (410) 396-7100