Sol LeWitt

Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1968

Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, Prospekte 68, 1968
Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, Sol Lewitt, Sculptures and Wall-Drawings, October - November 1969, inside back cover, illustrated
Krefeld, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Sammlung Helga und Walther Lauffs - Amerikanische und europäische Kunst der sechziger und siebziger Jahre, November 1983 - April 1984, cat. no. 221, p. 156, illustrated

Karin Thomas, Bis heute: Stilgeschichte der bildenden Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert, Cologne, 1971, no. 78, p.186, illustrated

By the  mid-1960s, the cube became widely recognized by the New York avant-garde as a structure possessing an enormous capacity for succinctly conveying the tenets of Minimalism: independence from craftsmanship and intellegibility. For Sol LeWitt, the open structure of modular cubes was the ideal format for clarity and endless variation. Beginning with his earliest works from the mid-1960s, LeWitt would return to the form throughout his career, and elaborate on the purity of the square open cube in a myriad of permutations. In 1966, Mel Bochner pointed out in regard to LeWitt's modular cubes that: "Old art attempted to make the non-visible (energy, feelings) visual (marks). New art is attempting to make the non-visual (mathematics) visible (concrete)." (Mel Bochner, "Primary Structures," Arts Magazine, New York, June 1966, p. 34) LeWitt's adoption of serial procedures, integral to his work as a structurist, was an approach shared by other contemporary painters and sculptors. Along with Andre, Flavin, Bochner, Smithson, and Hesse, LeWitt is noted for embracing compositional elements equally, for prioritizing the structure itself, and materializing the arrangement of form over opticality.