The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt died at the beginning of April of this year. Sez his NYTimes obit:
Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, on Sept. 9 1928, the son of immigrants from Russia. His father, a doctor, died when he was 6, after which he moved with his mother, a nurse, to live with an aunt in New Britain, Conn. His mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He would draw on wrapping paper from his aunt’s supply store.
At Syracuse University, he studied art before he was drafted for the Korean War in 1951, during which he made posters for the Special Services. After his service he moved to New York to study illustration and cartooning. For a while he did paste-ups, mechanicals and photostats for Seventeen magazine. He spent a year as a graphic designer in the office of a young architect named I. M. Pei.
Meanwhile, he painted, or tried to. For a while, he hired a model to draw from life and copied old masters. He felt lost. An aspiring artist in New York during the waning days of Abstract Expressionism, an art squarely about individual touch, he thought he had no particular touch of his own and therefore nothing to add.
But then he took a job at the book counter at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met other young artists with odd jobs there, including Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold. He noticed the nascent works of Flavin and also absorbed early art by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. Minimalism, a yet-unnamed movement, seemed like a fresh start. Mr. LeWitt was meanwhile intrigued by Russian Constructivism, with its engineering aesthetic, and by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs, sequential pictures of people and animals in motion, which he came across one day in a book that somebody had left in his apartment. From all this he saw a way forward. It was to go backward.
That’s a relatively stupid phrasing of what LeWitt’s work accomplishes, but I mean this is the Times they almost thought Susan Sontag wasn’t gay.
He has many large, inoffensive works that have taken up magnificent spaces in large museums. It is very hard to object to LeWitt’s work, but I find myself most interested in his painting. Because they use such simple lines and technique, the artistry required is impossible to ignore. It is like looking into a mind.
The funny thing about LeWitt is that he was sort of using a simple palette…he was actually quite a conservative artist when it came to risk-taking. And yet it’s strange to think of the work without the context around it. He’ll probably get lumped in with the pop people like Lichtenstein.
“West Bound and Down (with dialogue)” — Jerry Reed
“Join Our Lusty Chorus” — Alasdair Roberts
“When A Man’s In Love He Feels No Cold” — Paddy Tunney
From Laurel at a site that I read alllll the time:
Amazon.com is still having a big Spring TV DVD Sale
right now (click that link to see the full list of stuff). Thanks to everyone who has ordered stuff at amazon via my links here– it’s very much appreciated. The money I get when you buy via those links keeps this site online.
Some more of my picks from this sale:
Nowhere Man – The Complete Series
Nero Wolfe
Boomtown – Season One
Rescue Me
Jeeves & Wooster – The Complete Series
The Prisoner – Complete Series Megaset (40th Anniversary Edition)
The Avengers – The Complete Emma Peel Megaset (2006 Collector’s Edition)
Crime Story
Deadwood
Hogan’s Heroes
Pee-wee’s Playhouse
The Greatest American Hero
Soap
21 Jump Street
Buffalo Bill – The Complete First and Second Seasons
and lots more stuff.
Buffalo Bill was kind of good. I have The Prisoner series, and it doesn’t hold up very well. Too British. Have you seen those Rescue Me ads?
Nice. Seriously though we have to stop making fun of gingers. For instance, this isn’t funny, it’s hateful.
That’s not really ginger bashing actually but surely this is.
This Recording 
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