Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007)
1987
Color ink wash
Gift of the LeWitt family in honor of Richard and Ronay Menschel; Installation made possible by the Charina Endowment Fund
Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings
In 2018, the family of artist Sol LeWitt donated to the Morgan Wall Drawing 552D. The gift included detailed instructions for the creation of the drawing, which was executed by a team from LeWitt’s studio.
LeWitt first became known in the mid-1960s for his modular sculptures based on the cube. In 1968, he made his first wall drawing by tracing lines directly on the wall according to a pre- established system. Over the next forty years, he conceived more than 1,200 wall drawings in pencil, colored ink, and acrylic. Although the wall may ultimately be painted over, each drawing exists as a set of instructions that can be re-created on another wall by another person.
In the early 1980s, inspired by the rich colors of Italian Renaissance frescoes, LeWitt began using colored ink wash applied with rags, mixing wiping and pounding techniques. He limited his palette to four colors—gray, yellow, red, and blue—which he layered and superimposed to produce variations. This wall drawing was first created in 1987. The artist described its motif as “not quite a cube.” The tilted form produces an illusion of volume while the black border that interrupts it preserves the sense of flatness of the wall.
See time-lapse video of installation