Sol Lewitt: A Retrospective - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0918471567 ISBN 13: 9780918471567

Publisher: San Francisco Museum, 2000

Synopsis

Sol LeWitt, one of the most important American artists of this century, has spent the past four decades creating artworks that explore the potential of ideas for the making of visual forms. LeWitt transforms these ideas into objects of exquisite beauty and elegance, deliberately introducing elements of chance, intuition, or irrationality into the systems that govern the creation of his works. LeWitt's delicate balancing act between thought and form, between order and disorder, between authorship and anonymity, has exerted an enormous influence on artists of subsequent generations. This book, the first retrospective of LeWitt's work in more than twenty years, fosters a deeper understanding of the artist's career and its significance to American art and thought. Including essays by Gary Garrels, Martin Friedman, Brenda Richardson, and other distinguished curators and art historians, the book charts the evolution of LeWitt's art from his groundbreaking work in Conceptualism during the early 1960s through his turn toward a more lyrical and sensual form of abstraction around 1980. With more than 350 images, the book provides a stunning visual survey of LeWitt's oeuvre from 1960 to the present, including sumptuous wall drawings, three-dimensional structures, and works on paper. This handsome book is the catalogue for an exhibition that will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 19 February through 30 May 2000, and will then travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from July to October and to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York from November to February 2001.

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Review

Sol LeWitt "is to art as Bach was to music," says conceptual artist Adrian Piper, indicating LeWitt's seminal importance to both the theory and practice of contemporary art. LeWitt's creations are the direct embodiments of his theoretical writings, abstract principles that he develops with supreme integrity into physical form. Recognizing his key role in the minimalist and conceptual movements of the 1960s and '70s, New York's MoMA gave LeWitt a major retrospective in 1978. Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective and the accompanying exhibition organized by Gary Garrels of the San Francisco Museum of Modern bring us up-to-date.

During the '80s and '90s, LeWitt's work moved from a cerebral asceticism toward rich color and surfaces and a more explicit sensuality and expressiveness. Nearly 500 carefully chosen and well-reproduced photographs and drawings document this evolution. Together with a sampling of LeWitt's own pithy statements, lucid essays by seven of America's leading curators analyze his contributions to contemporary art. Typical of his methods and attitudes are his signature large-scale wall paintings, their sense of movement and bright bands of color making them among the most gorgeous of his works. While articulating the designs of the wall paintings and the concepts behind them, LeWitt does not paint them himself. He is generous in welcoming anyone else to give physical reality to his designs: "It would be a compliment," he says. Sol LeWitt is a beautiful and substantial book, and its range of illustration and depth of scholarship make it the definitive study of this highly influential artist. --John Stevenson

About the Author

Gary Garrels, curator of the exhibition Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, is the Elise S. Haas chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

About this edition

• Publisher: San Francisco Museum
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0918471567
• ISBN 13: 9780918471567
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Garrels Gary