plane to Chuchon, where I live (temporarily).
Tomorrow I go to Inchon to order and draw the division PX supplies. Will see my Ong Dung Po concubine if she hasn’t run off with the captain I am sharing her with…. Things could be worse.
*Cuttah Sipcio,
Edgar
*Go way, please (Korean)
Nov. 3, 1952
CPL Arnold Libner, Camp Drum, NY
Dear Libber,
As things stand now I’ll be out of here in nineteen days which isn’t bad when you consider that I started counting days at 140. Since I’m shortly to rotate I haven’t done “dick” in the last month.
… I’ll be home by Christmas and I hope that we’ll be able to get together for New York and have a ball, so to speak.
Yours for smaller armies,
Sol
The letters to Libner obviously serve a different purpose than analyzing the influence of the war on a supply corporal. Eventually, LeWitt reflected on that experience, notably in 1974 when he was asked in an interview about the effect his service had had on his work and way of thinking. He offered two responses, one of them general: “I think everything we do has some effect if you want to look into it.” The other specifically related the impact of Asian culture on him. He said of Japan: “It was really just a beautiful way of life that the people had. They still have quite a bit of the old tradition, class, dress, manners. There was a very aesthetic sense of life and … everything had a certain rightness to it and there was a simplicity, and everything was done with the most high sense of beauty. Which is kind of a relief from our civilization, which is quite the opposite.”18 Or, as he would write in more succinct fashion to a girlfriend twenty years later, “Japan makes Europe seem like New Jersey.”19
It was while he was in Japan that he began to collect art. He bought woodblock prints there wherever he could find them and shipped them back to New Britain. At that point he didn’t know much about them, but he thought they were exquisite—which was enough for him.
In all, LeWitt’s experiences in war and on its fringes of war provided him with training if not for military victory, at least for survival in his next tour of duty—trying to make a living as an artist in New York City.
FIVE
LOST IN THE CITY
LeWitt didn’t often speak of his early years in New York City. But the impression he left with friends and in interviews is that it was a deeply frustrating period artistically and, from a personal point of view, a lonely one. Not that he was isolated. He developed friendships, pursued romances, and even succumbed—if briefly and exasperatingly—to the institution of marriage. But in recalling those days in conversation, Le-Witt was uncharacteristically downbeat.
In 1953, he rented his first apartment—at 115 East Thirty-Fourth Street, near Lexington Avenue, in an affordable building. There was enough space to work, though at first he had no idea what work he would do. By then, abstract expressionism had been the primary movement in modern art for nearly a decade, but he soon discovered that he had no interest or skill in producing works in that style.1 Indeed, many other young artists descending on New York at the time felt the same way. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, then in their late twenties, found it very difficult to sell their work and had to make livings designing store window displays, among other tasks. The work they were developing—Johns featuring common symbols such as the American flag and bull’s-eyes, and Rauschenberg focusing on “combines,” for which he used materials and images not usually associated with art—were sometimes referred to as “anti-art” by critics. More charitable observers called their output Neo-Dadaist,2 considering it to reflect elements of the prominent international avant-garde period early in the twentieth century that was known for its irrationality, humor, and elements of protest.
LeWitt, who had not yet found any ism that he could embrace, recalled later: “I spent all the money I saved and went through unemployment…. I also went to a school, and that was kind of a fiasco.”3 The school was what was then called the Cartoonist and Illustrators School.4 Though eventually LeWitt would later teach there, as would others of his circle, his experience as a student on the East Twenty-Third Street campus proved unsatisfactory: “I really wasn’t interested in being an illustrator, but it was the closest school to where I was living, and I just wanted to survive, I guess. I wanted to get the GI Bill money, which wasn’t very much, but at least I could live on it. It was the same sort of academic bullshit I had [at Syracuse and Illinois], so I got tired of that very quickly.”5 In a 1977 interview, he summed up his art training, saying that he “probably would have been better off studying something else.”6
However, one advantage of the route he took was that he could make enduring friendships. He kept in touch with old friends from Syracuse, for example. Martin Greenberg, Russell North, Alan Nevas, and Deborah Faerber often got together in the city to see movies or go to a bar, to enjoy Greenberg’s cooking, or indulge in whatever cheap entertainment was available. At the time Greenberg and Faerber were dating. As Greenberg recalled, “Everyone fell in love with Debbie. She was darling—short, cute as the dickens, an All-American girl, smart, funny, easy going.”7 And she was soon intimate with LeWitt, making Greenberg jealous—though he said, many decades later, “It didn’t come between me and Sol.”
In the spring of 2007, Deborah Faerber Evans read an obituary of Sol LeWitt in the Miami Herald. She hadn’t known that he had been ill, so the news of his death came as a shock. A few minutes later, she went through her LeWitt inventory, rediscovering memories. She kept letters from LeWitt on the top shelf of a closet with a piece of art, albeit informal, that had never been shown in a gallery.8
Evans thought back to “the coterie of Syracuse pals” who had stayed close in the years after graduation, and to her own days in New York before moving to southern Florida. She thought, “How young I was. How immature.”9 And she thought, too, about the choices she had made.
She and LeWitt had gone to plays, museums, and bars together. One memory in particular had stuck with her. One night they were having drinks in Greenwich Village,
when some guy tried to hit on me. Sol objected, and the guy left. I said, “I wonder what that guy does for a living.” Sol said, “He’s a horse’s ass. That’s what he does for a living.”
I knew that Sol was creative, and that he thought in ways that other people didn’t. I was drawn to him, but I was too much of an idiot to recognize that. We were talking marriage but I was not mature enough to even say I wasn’t interested in marriage.10
Instead, she decided to let her travel itinerary send a clear message. She bought a ticket on an ocean liner bound for Europe, where she planned to spend four months. LeWitt gave the impression that he supported the journey and, using his 1950 experience as inspiration, gave her a creative going-away gift.
It was an eight-page letter with drawings and commentary in the vein of some of the work he had done aboard the Breckenridge a few years earlier, but more pointed and clearly showing affection for the recipient.
The first page shows an ocean liner with an American flag and the words: “So … now you too are going to Europe.
