recalled:
From London we took the train to the Channel, and then an overnight ferry to the hook of Holland. We bought the cheapest tickets so we had no bed, just chairs to sit on. So that night, Sol [and] I were determined to find a place to sleep. We went to the upper deck, where the staterooms were—which of course you had to pay extra for. We tried all the doors until we found one that was unlocked, and [the room] was unoccupied. We went in, locked the door, and went to sleep. The next morning we found Russ. He’d been sleeping downstairs, on a chair.
In Amsterdam, we went to the Rijksmuseum. For me, I was along for the ride. Sol stayed in the museum for hours.6
Nevas didn’t recall how long his companion spent with the museum’s many masterpieces, such as Van Gogh’s Self Portrait (1887), Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (c. 1642), Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (1663), and Fra Angelico’s Madonna of Humility (1434–35). But it was hard to get LeWitt out of the rooms that contained these paintings. His sketchbook shows no record of the museum visit but does contain many views of the city, including church steps, crowded streets, a canal, and a Newfoundland dog.
In Paris, the trio stayed in one room at the Hotel Noailles but often split up—LeWitt going to the Louvre or other museums or galleries; and Nevas and North assessing beauty in a different way, at the city’s cafes and bistros. At night LeWitt and North went to jazz clubs, while Nevas stayed at the hotel: “Sol and Marty saw [the clarinetist] Sidney Bechet perform at least five or six times.”7 LeWitt’s drawings show no Louvre masterpieces but include whimsical images of the visitors to the museum. There are many more sketches of Paris and its environs: Place Pigalle, a flea market, Versailles gardens and a sculpture in one of them, a Montparnasse scene, and a flamenco bar. He made no sketch, though, of a headline in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune that would affect him significantly.
There was startling news from the Korean peninsula. About 75,000 North Korean troops, aided by China and the Soviet Union, crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, the line that divided North and South Korea. Pressure mounted on the United States to react to what the United Nations termed an invasion. The action was seen in the United States as hard evidence of the Soviet plan to spread communism worldwide and, hence, required an armed response. President Harry S. Truman, articulating what eventually became known as the domino theory, said, “If we let Korea down, the Soviets will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.”8 The military draft, the infrastructure of which was still in force from World War II, began to target hundreds of thousands of young men. The three potential draftees from Syracuse tried not to dwell on the inevitable as they made their way via train toward the south of France.
In Nice they rented bikes and rode along the Riviera to Cannes. Nevas recalled: “We were riding along. Coming in the other direction were guys on bikes. They stopped when they saw us. One of them was Bob Sugarman, who was a friend of Sol and Russ. Imagine that. We all stayed together on the beach. It’s the first time we saw bikinis and topless women. As I recall, Sol wasn’t interested.”9 (This point, though, is undermined by the evidence of a sketch: LeWitt drew a woman in a revealing bathing suit, though most of his subjects were less titillating—such as a man on a motorbike, a market, and the view from the hotel window.)
“We’d talk to women, try to connect, but Sol would hang back,” Nevas added.10 This portrait of the young LeWitt as shy around women is in direct contrast to what would happen in later years.
The trio then took the train, stopping off in Florence to spend time at the Uffizi Gallery,11 and then going on to Rome and Venice. “Every city, we stayed at a cheap place,” Nevas recalled. “In Venice somebody sent us to this place, a dollar a night. We went to sleep and, during the night, we heard footsteps back and forth in the hallway. We realized it was a whorehouse, and the people going back and forth were customers.”12
Though Nevas offered no specific references to LeWitt’s art discoveries in Italy, there is evidence that this trip proved greatly influential. Le-Witt’s sketchbook shows more drawings from this part of trip than any other, including a visual accounting of a day in Assisi. At the Basilica di San Francesco, LeWitt saw the frescoes that many historians attribute to Giotto, who is considered the first of the great artists of the Italian Renaissance and who set, in the view of the awed young LeWitt, an unreachable standard.
Other works that stuck in LeWitt’s mind from his initial visit to Italy included many by Piero della Francesca and Sandro Botticelli. In an interview in 1993 he said, “Piero appealed to me for his sense of order, superimposed on which was a sense of passion and ritual.”13
From Venice (LeWitt, of course, sketched gondoliers), the three young travelers took the overnight train to Munich. In the morning they saw a bombed-out city, still in ruins five years after the end of World War II. The city gave Nevas chills, particularly when he heard a frequently used word, “Achtung!” That proved to be the last destination on his foreign tour before returning to Paris for the trip home. LeWitt and North went on to Scandinavia, as he headed back alone to the United States to get ready for his fall semester. Nevas recalled, “Somewhere along the way, I can’t remember where, we’d met some English girls, and they were planning to see them. When they got back to the States, they told me they did.”14
It was an ironic last party before heading off to a different war, because draft papers were indeed awaiting LeWitt.
By the end of 1950, the profound difficulties of the Korean War had become clearer—even to some hawks who, still brimming with pride about American accomplishments in World War II, had argued that the job could be finished in relatively short order. This view proved wildly optimistic. In November, US Marines and infantry troops were surrounded by Chinese Communist forces at the Chosin Reservoir. Three days later, at a press conference, President Truman admitted that the United States was considering use of the atomic bomb. Three weeks later he declared a state of national emergency, and by the end of the month the evacuation of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was being planned.
This was a situation that LeWitt and other draft-age men couldn’t escape. As with his comments on his education and his trip to Europe, LeWitt made matter-of-fact references to his life as a soldier. His New Britain classmate, Walter Friedenberg, who was drafted at the same time as LeWitt, prepared a more vivid account of the time for the purposes of this biography:
January 10, 1951, a cold morning. A special bus was parked in front of the Burritt Hotel just off the triangular main square in New Britain. Twenty or so men in their early 20s, shivering on the sidewalk. A couple of Army non-coms with a list of names. Induction Day.
And there was Sol LeWitt! We spotted each other right away. We had not seen each other since 1945, the year of our high school graduation. We greeted each other warmly and even before we boarded the bus began to get caught up. [I learned that] Sol had studied art at Syracuse. I had gone to Wake Forest College and was working as a reporter in Winston-Salem.
We discovered we had the same attitude toward being drafted. We had no dread of being killed, wounded or becoming a pow—that seemed distant and unlikely—but simply detested the idea of being in the army, with its regimentation and loss of freedom to continue the civilian work we each enjoyed. We gave no thought to—or I should say we did not discuss—the probability that the army intended to teach us how [to] use weapons and kill North Koreans and Chinese. We weren’t in the least bit patriotic about becoming soldiers, but neither could we claim to be conscientious objectors. So [we] were inducted. We shared a mood: reluctant and resigned.
We were bussed to Fort Devens, about thirty-five miles northwest of Boston, and got off into six inches of snow and the same biting cold. The rows of barracks, the headquarters buildings, the olive-drab trucks and jeeps, the olive-drab soldiers everywhere—we
