Sol LeWitt, whose ground-breaking art works often had titles like "two cubes" or "irregular vertical bands and horizontal bands," died yesterday after a lifetime of convincing artists and art-lovers to see the sublime in ordinary shapes. Above, you can see one of his late works, *Structure 2 for Madison Sq. Art *(2005). Famous for tweaking conventional ideas about what counts as "art," LeWitt painted conceptual geometric shapes on museum walls, only to paint them over when the show was concluded. Or he would create piles of white cubes and call them a sculpture, inviting viewers to figure out how to find aesthetic meaning in structures that shared more with architecture and mathemetics than traditional art.
In his early career, LeWitt worked for both *Seventeen *magazine and avant-garde architect I.M. Pei. Perhaps these early influences helped shape his work, whose colorful, abstract patterns were nearly the perfect opposite of a fashion spread -- and a perfect hommage to the public spaces we inhabit. Most of all, LeWitt will be remembered for popularizing conceptual art, which is devoted to ideas rather than to-be-looked-at-ness. He is famous for saying, "Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions." By his own definition, then, LeWitt was a success.
New York Times article on Sol LeWitt [via NYTimes]
