Art” and then obliterated his first wall drawing—to the horror of the gallery owner. In Autobiography there is no mention of the harsh criticism of his bold idea that ideas are what matters in art, not the finished piece itself. He does not document how his work caught the eyes of international dealers or when he fell in love with Italy—and then, at the age of fifty, as if right on time, was given a MoMA retrospective that had visitors raving about what they saw. And he surely does not provide details about why, in frustration, he was about to leave the city.
The book instead provides visual memories and practical details about his studio on Hester Street, in New York’s desolate Lower East Side—where, illegally, he also slept. The timing of the publication was no accident. The book appeared just as LeWitt and his future wife, Carol Androccio, were planning to take up residence in Spoleto, Italy, where the artist already owned a house, and where their two daughters would be born. His life in New York City had become increasingly complex and nearly intolerable because of many professional demands. As Carol LeWitt recalled, “Sol was driven out of New York by graduate students who told him, ‘I’m writing my thesis on you.’ By then, he was hellbent on Italy.”3 The artist was a little more expansive, but he focused more on what he saw as New York’s professional limitations. But one thing he could manage at the time was to portray a sense of order. Autobiography, then, provides clues about the details of the first half of his long career and of his way of living up to that point.
A man whose private life had always stayed private displayed much of it on these pages in black and white, even though not a single easily recognizable image of the author is present. Readers, then, are free to draw conclusions about the life that these pictures represent. Here are nine such conclusions:
LeWitt didn’t lack for organization. There are pictures of neat shelving; cans of goods placed on top of each other; and, it might seem, enough tools to stock a small store. There is a portrait of a Stanley box cutter made in “The Hardware City,” where LeWitt grew up. Pencils sit inside a Three Fruits Marmalade jar. Art pens fill a Japanese tin—a relic, perhaps, of LeWitt’s first trip in 1951 to a land that inspired him. The compass surely came in handy in LeWitt’s mathematical schemes for wall drawings, and the gesso may have been left over from his attempts, with hideous results (by his own accounting), at abstract expressionism.
He wasn’t exactly a starving artist. His kitchen yields but a hint of his developing taste for haute cuisine. Here are Japanese tea, brewer’s yeast, and Olio Castelvetrano. There are mugs on hooks, sponges in buckets, an Italian coffeemaker, a colander, an array of pots, and a nutritional chart showing “Correct Food Combining.” Also, a hint—a bottle of Brunello—of his interest in Italian red wine.
He had a well-worn wardrobe. There are a slicker, a rain hat, two pairs of ice skates used in Central Park, moccasins, sneakers; slippers, boots, woolen socks neatly rolled, a backpack, and the sport coat that his cousin bought him so the artist could have something appropriate to wear to his own 1978 MoMA retrospective.
He owned no early American furniture. But he had a simple wooden chair with paint drippings all over it, an original LeWitt, an original Mies van der Rohe, and an old armchair—the kind that his physician father sat in while fretting over bills related to his real estate holdings or dreaming up another tool for surgery.
Looking at the overstuffed bookshelves, one can understand why LeWitt spent every afternoon reading. He admired the dialogue of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and the sturdy histories of Barbara Tuchman and William Manchester. He was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s imagination in Alice in Wonderland. And he had two helpful tomes, The New York Times Complete Guide to Home Repair and one that indicated his handicap in the anticipated move to Spoleto, Parla Italiano.
Ephemera endured. These included postage stamps (another boyhood passion); the Manhattan telephone number of Mimi Wheeler, a flame of his in the late 1960s and early 1970s; a chart of typefaces in alphabetical order; invitations to his exhibit openings; a front page of the New York Daily News featuring the tragedy at Chappaquiddick of Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne; a list of books from the nonprofit company he had founded that promotes the works of artists; and an old copy of the leftist French publication La Liberation, edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, for which LeWitt raised money.
For a man who was hard of hearing, he heard music. The composers included Bach, whose work occupied much space, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, and other famous ones, but also those less often collected: Smetana; Bloch; Villa-Lobos; Boccherini; Gluck; Britten; and the edgy ones such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who benefited from LeWitt’s largesse.
Inspiration was all around him, including the work of Eadweard Muybridge, whose serial photography influenced LeWitt’s thinking; a clipping about Robert Rauschenberg’s being given an award; a poster with the wording “If you cut your foot a dead cockroach will draw out the infection”; Italian calendars; a text painting by his friend Gene Beery (“Watch this canvas. Appearing SOON an amazing painting to revolutionize visual experience, start preparing yourself to dig NOW!”); and a mezuzah on the doorpost. There are no photos of automobiles, as he never bought one for himself.
He left very personal things that could intrigue a future biographer, such as the office sign from his father’s practice, saying “Doctor A. LeWitt. Walk In.,” and a photo of Carol LeWitt. By 1980, the artist had been with Carol for nearly two years. Not long afterward they would have two daughters: Sophia and Eva. There is no photograph indicating LeWitt’s earlier (brief and exceptionally unhappy) marriage.
Though much can be read into Autobiography that may stray from what LeWitt had in mind, evidence shows that he thought the work explicit enough. In an interview, he said that a much better picture of him emerges from the photographs of his Hester Street life than could be gained in any other way. If that is so, then one can surmise what also might be obvious from so much of his art—that in a world of chaos, where everything cries out for attention, artists can restore order. In Autobiography, for example, Carol gets as much space as a Stanley hammer. As he wrote in “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” “To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.”4
If Autobiography II had ever been published—say, in the year of his death—LeWitt might have included photos that would only have heightened public curiosity. Perhaps there would be some of his studio in Spoleto, where he hosted many of the most creative people in the art world. There might be photos of his banned “peep show” installation at the Smithsonian or of the logos of the Philip Morris Company, 3M, Nestlé, or other conglomerates that offended him with their policies to the point where he rejected their huge checks. He might have shown the instructions for a piece of art that represented the first time that Christie’s auctioned art with no physical presence. Or there could have been a photo indicating his challenging Germany to examine, through the lens of art, its Holocaust legacy. He might have included the design that led to his being rejected by his hometown or photos of some of the young artists he employed or influenced—including one he never met, a Portuguese man who testified in an international art magazine that LeWitt had literally saved his life. There could have been photos of intimate corners of the house in the country where he and Carol lived during the last years of his life; of the studio he built there; and of his little shadow—Eva, his younger daughter. The photos could have shown his only architectural work, the synagogue that he designed and where he became, against all of his instincts, a member of the design committee. There might have been photos of the many artists, composers, and photographers whose work he championed, such as Chuck Close, Pat Steir, Mel Bochner, Robert Ryman, Lawrence Weiner, Eva Hesse, Vera Lutter, and Romare Bearden; or of the authors who affected him personally and professionally, including Michel Butor, Karen Armstrong, and Samuel Beckett. He could have shown the experimental pills or special brownies he relied on during the advanced stages of colon cancer, evidence of the enormous art collection he and Carol had built, or a dollar bill (representing the idea of making money by not caring about making money). There might have been photos of the old friends who rallied around him during his final days or evidence of how to create art after death.
TWO