Yesterday, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced the acquisition of Wall Grid (3 x 3) (1966), an important early work by Sol LeWitt, one of the key artists of the postwar period.
LeWitt was one of the key artists of the 1960s, pioneering both minimal and Conceptual art, movements that abandoned the emphasis on psychological content and gestural form typifying Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. In a seminal text written in 1967 entitled "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," LeWitt emphasized his view of art: "No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. ...When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."
In 1964, LeWitt made his first open, modular structures exploring permutations of the grid and the cube, quickly deciding to paint them white so that the work would become more visually integrated with the wall or room.
The work would no longer be a self-contained, self-sufficient object but rather one that would mediate between environment, space, and the viewer's movement and vision in an attempt to re-engage both classical humanism and the romantic utopianism of the pioneers of abstract art. These works are among the primary achievements of minimalist art. Wall Grid (3 x 3) is a key example of LeWitt's early structures.
The acclaimed SFMOMA-organized exhibition Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (2000) traced the evolution of LeWitt's work—including wall drawings, structures, works on paper, photographs, and books—from the austere, reductive aesthetic of the 1960s to the sensual and boldly colored works of more recent years.
In conjunction with the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, SFMOMA now has one of the largest and most significant collections of LeWitt's work of any museum or collection in the world. The Fisher Collection includes 24 works by LeWitt, and SFMOMA holds 48 works. Until now, the most significant absent type of work has been one of the minimal structures from the mid-1960s.
Wall Grid (3 x 3) was purchased through the Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions.
Biography plus links from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_LeWitt
Video of his last public wall drawing: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/03/sol-lewitt-fina.html
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