were shuttered, and particularly at night, there were few pedestrians on the sidewalks, except for the members of the growing community of artists.
It was during a walk to the hardware store that LeWitt met the artist Marjorie Strider. After a brief conversation about tools, he got right to the point: “Would you go out with me?” However, she was engaged to the artist Michael Kirby, who, like Strider, would become an important cultural figure in Manhattan. (In later years Strider’s work was often exhibited with that of pop artists Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein.) She told LeWitt, “You might consider my sister, Nancy.” Like her sister, Nancy Strider had come to Manhattan from Oklahoma. She had worked first for American Airlines as a stewardess (as the job was called then). “She was quite attractive,” Marjorie said of her sister, and added, “Not that I wasn’t.”49
As LeWitt learned, Nancy had gone through a difficult time emotionally. She had been engaged to be married and the reception had been planned. Then she discovered that her husband-to-be had been married before and had four children.
Nancy Strider recalled that in any case she wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to spend the rest of her life in Guthrie, Oklahoma: “So I followed my sister to New York. I came only because she was here, and [I] stopped working for the airlines.”50 She did this though her job had opened up, if not the world, a considerable part of the United States to her, a “girl who’d never been out of Oklahoma, except to visit my sister in Kansas City,” and she had found herself partying regularly in Santa Monica. You could get a job, she recalled, “if you were good looking. But there were restrictions. You weren’t allowed to gain weight and you had to wear a girdle, which I didn’t do.” When she’d had enough, Manhattan looked like a good alternative: “When you grow up in Oklahoma, New York is a very glamorous place.” She moved in with her sister on Green Street and got a job right away as a secretary at a construction company.
Living with her sister made Nancy almost a character out of a Broadway play. She was My Sister Eileen, transported from the backwater, seeing the city as a naïf, and trying to make it. She recalled:
All of my sister’s friends were artists. They had a much different lifestyle than I did. I always had a self-esteem issue. I had been brought up, in the fashion of those days, to be seen and not heard, to not have opinions.
To me these artists were intellectuals. That’s not quite totally true, but they had different interests than I did.
When she met LeWitt, he put her at ease:
He made fun of snobbery. He was so unassuming. Almost anti-intellectual, but he read widely, and was knowledgeable about many things. And he made me feel wonderful. He was dismissive of me feeling as if I was an inferior intellect. He introduced me to his friends, and to the films of [Ingmar] Bergman—I hated The Virgin Spring and I’ll never forget it. There was also Bob and Ray on the radio—I thought they were hilarious. And there were the records of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf—I had already become a fan of the opera.
Strider never met Sophie LeWitt, but she remembers that Sophie often sent her son homemade baked goods and other treats from New Britain. The food was something of an education for Strider, who had been brought up Presbyterian: “There was only one Jewish family in Guthrie.” And she had never tasted anything from a traditional Eastern European Jewish kitchen. Borscht and brisket were revelations.
The fact that she had been brought up in a town segregated by race and ethnicity left a mark: “It flabbergasts me that I never questioned it.” But the time with LeWitt opened her eyes to a world well beyond anything she had known: “New York is total diversity, which is wonderful.”
Strider remembers LeWitt experimenting with his work during this period: “He was painting with a flat palette knife, small paintings, with color put on thickly.” How his work developed after that remained a mystery to her. After two years, their relationship ended. She was ready to be married, and LeWitt, still smarting from his venture into matrimony, couldn’t bring himself to play the groom again.
Strider never saw him after that, though she followed his work—even, on one occasion, all the way to Bilbao, Spain, on a trip she made with her daughter (LeWitt had provided a work, Wall Drawing 831, Geometric Forms—for the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Bilbao). However, she retained an important souvenir from the time she’d spent with the man who showed her life’s possibilities.
LeWitt had just gotten a new job—one that would lead directly to the break he needed—but he hadn’t forgotten her. For her birthday, he sent her a drawing of plants in his loft with the word “Joy” on top of it. It would become a gift that she could eventually pass along to grandchildren—who, Strider hoped, wouldn’t have to wait as long as she had to take advantage of opportunities to grow.
SIX
STIRRINGS
While LeWitt and Strider were together, they saw the exhibition Sixteen Americans at MoMA. The featured artists1 challenged long-held assumptions about the very nature of art. The exhibition attracted large crowds and much negative criticism. In a letter to Dorothy Miller, the show’s curator, the New York Times critic John Canaday wrote, “For my money, these are the sixteen artists most slated for oblivion. There is not a single painting, and very little sculpture, that I could imagine living with.”2 But LeWitt reflected in 1974, “It was probably the most influential show of the decade, or of many decades, because it was the opening of many new ideas.”3
At the time, LeWitt was still trying to discover his own direction and vision but confined by the past, still copying Renaissance masters and thinking within strict artistic boundaries. Abstract expressionism was ebbing, but what would replace it? The answer took years to develop, and LeWitt would be in the middle of it. But in 1959, when Sixteen Americans opened, he was just a bystander, struck by what he was seeing.
Among the most notable works in the exhibition in terms of the attention they received and the impact they made were those by the young Frank Stella, who at that point had exhibited only two paintings in two New York City shows and who apparently considered black the new primary color. Jed Perl described it this way: “The very look of this downtown bohemian world—its streets, its homes, its style of dress—was anti-picturesque.”4 Ad Reinhardt, another artist who influenced LeWitt, had experimented with shades of black. But Stella’s work was more intense and stark, and it was eventually considered by critics to be the beginning of minimalism—though at the time it was considered by some to lack minimal qualities of art.
As the critic and historian Robert Rosenblum wrote twelve years later, “To most eyes [the paintings] appeared monotonously simple and inert, a bewildering impoverishment of art.”5 He quoted the critic Dore Ashton, who had asked, “Is it really important for the public to see the work of a 23-year-old boy who has been painting for three or four years?”6
Artists in attendance admired the work, as it seemed to signal a new freedom. Blackness was a theme that LeWitt would use in different ways over many decades.
The exhibition also featured Jasper Johns, whom LeWitt also held in high esteem. As he later said, in the 1950s he often went to Tenth Street, where galleries showed the new and unconventional, to see Johns’s work, and he remembered in particular seeing the early versions of American flags: “Of course I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t know what it was all about. [Even so] I was really a big fan of his.”7
A LeWitt work from the middle of his career, Wall Drawing 599,
