of friends, never met at Seventeen in person, though as the curator and author Veronica Roberts pointed out in 2014, they met “on the page.”20 After Hesse left the magazine, it did a feature article on her, calling her a young artist to watch. As a filler on the last page, LeWitt drew an elaborate birthday cake in pen and ink. It was his first signed professional piece. A few months later, he drew a writing desk using the same sort of elaborate design, making full use of classical patterns and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of ideas he would expanded upon one day.
In 1955, LeWitt was offered the position of art director of Fashion and Travel magazine—but for only one issue, as at the time the magazine rotated talent. He recalled: “They had very good people, like [Richard] Avedon, people like that doing photographs. Perfectly respectable, except the hiring and firing policy. But it was a good experience.”21
Afterward, he collected unemployment insurance until “I met someone who said the architectural firm of I. M. Pei was expanding its graphic design department, and ‘Why don’t you go?’”22 By then, LeWitt had developed a keen interest in layout and typefaces, so it seemed like a sensible idea. He secured a position in the firm in 1955, where he was one of five artists in the department, but he found it tedious and frustrating:
The first job that they asked me to do was to design a letterhead. So I just designed a very simple letterhead right across the page in small type, and the guy who was the head of the graphics department [Don Page23] told me I had to do something else. There were three or four people working on this, some of the most God-awful things, embossing and, you know, logotype things. After six months they went back to the very first design. That was the one that was accepted. I was so pissed off at that, and it was such a waste of time. The whole thing was like that. Everything was just done, and redone, and overdone. Usually the first solution was best.24
In general, the working atmosphere was tense. LeWitt recalled, “Architects and artists are mortal enemies (at least many architects think so).”25
LeWitt also produced brochures and did specialty work on projects such as the Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall, in East Garden City, Long Island:26 “The only thing that I did was to make a directory to be placed throughout the shopping center. You would push a button and the store … would light like a big pinball machine.”27 He also worked on symbols to be put in storefronts, illustrating what that store sold (a shoe, for example), but they were never installed: “The head of the department had this kind of idea, and then he just sent everybody to work on it. That kind of treadmill just turned me off: doing stupid things endlessly.” There were other stupid things, however, aside from the work, one of which involved an impersonation.
Martin Greenberg recalled that during their conversations on East Thirty-Fourth Street, LeWitt revealed that Pei, who became one of the world’s most acclaimed architects, was also “a notorious scofflaw”—in that he accumulated dozens of parking tickets, and never paid the fines. “The police were after him and he had to go to court.” LeWitt often told the story to friends, and always had a laugh over it. He said Pei refused to go and sent instead an intern of Italian descent to pay the fines, instructing him, “When they call my name tell them, you’re me.” When he got in front of the judge the intern was very nervous. The judge asked, “Is your name I. M. Pei?” The intern said he was. The judge said, “Are you Italian?” The intern said, “No, I’m Chinese.”28
Over the years, interviewers asked LeWitt whether his I. M. Pei experience (it lasted just one year) had a strong impression on the work he would eventually do. The question seems pertinent enough. LeWitt has often been compared to an architect in that, in particular for his wall drawings, he conceived the plan, did the preliminary sketching and wrote the instructions, and then let other people carry out the work. But LeWitt played down this notion. However, many decades later, while reflecting on that time in an interview for his 2000 retrospective, he surmised that the Pei experience must have affected his thinking.
During his time there, LeWitt became close friends with Tony Candido, a staff architect who was also a painter in his spare time. Candido had studied architecture under Mies van der Rohe, but he wanted to get back to his first love, seeing what he could create at an easel. The two became what Candido described as “painting buddies—there was a time we saw each other every night.”29
As LeWitt later described it, Candido provided the impetus for his own ultimately unfulfilling return to painting: “So I got really turned on to doing art again. I started painting. And I got really interested in Abstract Expressionism. I did it long enough to discover I couldn’t do it. But at least it got me going.”30
LeWitt persuaded his old college acquaintance, Hilton Kramer, now a critic for the New York Times, to come to Candido’s studio to see his work—the sort of generous gesture he would later become famous for among artists. LeWitt and Candido went to exhibits on Fifty-Seventh Street, and down to the Cedar Tavern on University Place, a hangout for the likes of Kline, Rothko, Pollock, and other art luminaries. LeWitt talked to none of these artists at the time, but the bar was nevertheless a source of inspiration. As the sculptor Tom Doyle recalled, “This was the artist’s living room.”31 The artist Mercedes Matter later called it “the cathedral of American culture of the ’50s.”32 It didn’t look much like a cathedral. Nor did it have the amenities of most bars—there wasn’t even a jukebox. It did have a clock on the wall that sometimes ran backward. In his description of the place (always referred to by patrons as the Cedar Bar, rather than Tavern), the art historian Jed Perl listed it among the hangouts that “offered opportunities for friendships and love affairs to begin or flourish or end, for careers to get going or jump forward or derail.”33 The writer Robert Katz described it, in part, by saying that artists could “breathe the same boozy oxygen once breathed by Pollock and still breathed by Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline, where in art salons Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg handed down the immutable laws of flatness, inscribing in extravagant prose meant to be eternal how utterly marvelous it was.”34
It was at the Cedar Bar, that LeWitt met his mentor, Earl Kerkam. Candido remembered Kerkam as “an original Damon Runyon character with a slouched hat, swaggering torque, a New Yorker through and through, unpretentious. Earl knew his stuff. He had a bad arm but he drew like an angel. He was a strange guy. I got the impression he was lonely.”35 By then, Kerkam had shown his work at important galleries (including the galleries of Betty Parsons and Charles Egan, and the Poindexter on East Fifty-Seventh Street), but he was known to other artists primarily as a fixture on a bar stool and a man of wisdom and good counsel.
Thomas B. Hess, the editor of ARTnews, wrote as a tribute to Kerkam that he was “an old man who can nurse a beer for hours at the Cedar Bar, listening to the conversation of his newly famous artist friends.”36
Even well-established artists turned to him for approval. Pollock had already become a New York icon when he received a postcard from Paris written by Kerkam that praised the younger artist for his canvases displayed in the City of Light. The painter Louis Finkelstein, writing about Pollock in ARTnews, quoted his reaction: “Overjoyed, he waved it under the noses of the boys at the Cedar Bar, shouting, ‘Earl says it’s not bad.’”37
LeWitt described Kerkam as “an old man. He was really very independent. He hated the Abstract Expressionists for one thing. He would paint—he had a flower in a Coke bottle, and he would be painting that all the time. Very funny. He wasn’t much of an artist, but he certainly was a personality. He really helped me a great deal, not in any specific way, but he was very encouraging. He said he liked what I was doing.”38
This was so, even though the work that LeWitt was doing at that point was derivative and unsatisfying to its creator. For a time, inspired by Giacometti and others, he experimented with still life, but with an abstract bent.
