Allan Appel Photo
Lary Bloom with his new biography of LeWitt.
Sol LeWitt was so self-effacing that when an Italian magazine asked him for a picture, he sent a photograph of his dog.
His colorful geometric drawings take up the walls of an entire 27,000 square foot factory building, comprise the longest-running temporary exhibition in American art history, going on for 25 years. But it may well be painted over or destroyed, like a Tibetan sand mandala, when the show concludes.
Those factoids, and insights about the nature of art, emerged in an interview with longtime Connecticut journalist Larry Bloom, who has written a newly released biography entitled Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas (Wesleyan University Press).
Bloom, a retired Hartford Courant Sunday magazine editor who now lives in New Haven, discussed his new book Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
Lewitt hailed from Hartford, New Britain, then Chester. He became internationally famous as the founder of the conceptual art movement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
“LeWitt’s primary impact on contemporary art was his insistence that the role of the artist is that of a thinker instead of a craft master, and that the product of the mind is more significant than that of the hand,” Bloom writes in his introduction the biography.
Bloom’s book takes you on a tour of how scrappy New York artists like LeWitt and his friends Eva Hesse and Chuck Close navigated pay-the-rent jobs (he was a guard at the Museum of Modern Art) and the gallery scene. Bloom’s approach is far less art history than human history, the history of one unusual — and beloved — human named Sol Lewitt.
We get to know LeWitt’s mother Sophie, who was widowed when her husband Abraham, a prominent New Britain surgeon, died suddenly when Sol was 5 years old.
Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing No. 1136, 2004
The father was no ordinary doctor/surgeon; he invented several surgical devices and techniques. Bloom speculated that the young “Solly” might have gotten the pursuit of the next new thing from Abraham LeWitt.
As a young woman, Sophie traveled to the front as a nurse in World War I. Bloom suggested in the WNHH interview that LeWitt’s empathy for others — especially his struggling artist colleagues — might have derived from the impressive main woman in his young life.
As he developed as an artist, LeWitt championed women artists at a time when that was unusual. He was also dedicated to buying his fellow artists’ work to help keep body and soul together … until some of them made it, and a number, like LeWitt, became well established and even famous.
Bloom said for LeWitt, art was never about money. In many ways, an artistic child of the 1960s, he turned down many commissions, especially if the corporate donor was making products that killed people.
Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Cubes, 1974.
A labor of love that has taken 11 years to research and write, the new biography is Bloom’s attempt to understand a man who was also his close friend. In the last 20 years when they were both members of Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Tzedek.
Bloom said he sees a connection between the arc of LeWitt’s career — moving from serial photographs as his inspiration to cubes to wall drawings to structures and designs for buildings, like the Chester synagogue — and the artist’s character and values.
Bloom writes how LeWitt was inspired by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s technique of stripping things down to their very core, to the basics, and then keeping on doing that working through all complexities to produce a simple and comprehensible result.
Bloom’s extensive research took him even to LeWitt’s New Britain High School yearbook.
The Syracuse University-bound 17-year-old had won an English prize. Young LeWitt’s comment: “Let us search continually for Beauty … If we are unable to find Beauty in the Arts, we should keep searching and perhaps it will appear in the commonplace. Let us always try to enrich our thoughts through new experiences: for thought is really Life’s only reality.”
Asked what this most celebrity-shy artist of all time would make of his biography, Bloom said, “He’d turn to page 87 and say, ‘Why’d you put this in there?!’”
Bloom is touring Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas around the country, with a publication day party Tuesday at 7 p.m. at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison.
Click on the video to watch author Lary Bloom discuss his new biography on Sol LeWitt with Allan Appel on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
