more than hints at the influence of Johns’s bull’s-eyes. Just as important, perhaps, was Johns’s artist’s statement in the catalogue for Sixteen Americans, especially when taking into account LeWitt’s later pronouncements about the making of art. Johns related how he created his paintings: “Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.”8 The comment signaled his freedom from traditional thinking and exposes the folly of explanation—a view that LeWitt often expressed.
None of the negative comments about the exhibit in the press mattered to LeWitt or to other young artists who saw it. The question of inspiration is of course an important one. There is the kind of inspiration that comes from seeing the work of Johns, Stella, and fourteen others at MoMA, in the studios of friends, or on Tenth Street. This sort of inspiration can include the charge, earned or not, of stealing ideas. Indeed, such a charge would be leveled at LeWitt many years later when, as may be inevitable in art, the lines blurred between inspiration and piracy.
There is also the kind of inspiration that is intensely private, a product of the artist’s mind and heart when they are free to roam into dark or light corners whenever the mood strikes. And there is the unpredictable phenomenon of happenstance and good luck. What would have happened to LeWitt as an artist, for example, if he hadn’t had certain pieces of luck? For example, would he ever have gotten himself out of the doldrums if a person he had never met hadn’t left behind a rare book in the crevices of a couch while moving out of his furnished downtown apartment?
It was LeWitt’s old Syracuse pal Russell North who found the book after he moved into the apartment. He showed it LeWitt, who in later recounting the episode, said, “I borrowed it. I should return it. I hate to return it.”9
The book was a first edition of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer with the camera who had been born in England but lived most of his life in America. The volume showed photographs as LeWitt had never seen them before: in series, creating a narrative structure. For example, there was a horse running in several sequential frames. LeWitt had been born in an era when the motion picture was well established, but he knew that it was composed of still frames, and that Muybridge’s work seemed to have been a precursor. Indeed, he was sometimes referred to as “The Father of the Motion Picture.”10
In the 1880s, at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge worked on a series of photographs that would make up a sort of encyclopedia of motion. This included photographs of 20,000 positions assumed by men, women, and children, sometimes clothed and sometimes naked, and by birds and other animals. All this and much more was done before Thomas Edison began his experiments with motion pictures in 1888.
“At that time [North gave him the book] I had never heard of Muybridge,” LeWitt said in an interview in 1999, but after that he was “always trying to think of ways to incorporate [some of Muybridge’s ideas] into the making of art.”11
“I think that Muybridge was really the biggest influence on my art of any older artist,” he told Paul Cummings in 1974. “The logic of the serial image was the important thing to me. At first it was the image, but then it became the fact of seeing things from three different angles, as they emerged and changed. It had a beginning and an ending. A kind of philosophical realism…. He called his work a figure in action, in motion, or animals in motion. Of course they were still photographs…. It was right on the edge of photography and motion pictures.”12
In the early 1980s, LeWitt expanded his view of Muybridge’s influence, when he told Andrea Miller-Keller, curator of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s new Matrix Gallery, that the photographer offered a way of creating art “that did not rely on the whim of the moment but on a consistently thought-out process that gave results that were interesting and exciting…. [It was] a precise way of making art which was logical rather than rational” He said that up until then there had been two systems of making art: making decisions at every moment—“a circle here, a square there”—or spreading painting everywhere (as in the work of Jackson Pollock, for example). But “Muybridge offered a third system.”13 In short, the most important part of the artist’s anatomy is not the hand but the brain. And to the brainy LeWitt, this was a revelation that, after a period of failure that made him question his abilities, gave him a new path to pursue.
What struck him, as well as other members of the circle that developed around him, was that somehow art was at a dead end. They felt that the role of artist was to invent, not copy. But invent what? As LeWitt explained to Gary Garrels in 2000, what happened next—the development of what was called minimalism—was not some new advance on what had come before but, in a sense, a going backward, stripping art down to its bare essentials.14 In effect, it was a process of looking at art, and the idea of art, as if it had never been invented.
In the early 1960s, LeWitt experimented with the idea of applying Muybridge’s ideas to his own developing interests. It was the first time he had had a sense that, though inspired by the work of another artist, he could create something all his own.
In 1961, he made several pieces, including Muybridge 1 and Muybridge 2, using photographs. For the first one he made a box about ten feet long, one foot high, and ten inches deep. He divided this into ten compartments, and in each he inserted a photograph of a model walking toward the viewer in sequence. “It was a process of enlargement,” he explained.15 (The process and the result would become notorious three decades later in a prominent public debate.)
He started expanding his work that featured one figure in action. A running figure, for example, was repeated, and often in three-dimensional paintings that included words of explanation and symbols such as arrows. In the documentary film by Michael Blackwood, Sol LeWitt: 4 Decades, the artist describes the conception of the work. He started with the running figure by Muybridge but added elements of depth and dimensionality: “Receding color, something introduced by Joseph Albers, was important here. In this piece, color and form played with one another in terms of recession and advance, the idea of objectivity rather than subjectivity, in three-dimensional forms.”16 As a result, what the viewer saw in this piece and others that followed was not a flat canvas but one that receded or came forward toward the viewer at various points in the work. Even so, this was just a step on the way to a more inventive use of this process.
Early structures, attached to walls, were simple. LeWitt used basic forms. The idea of seriality developed as time went on and was represented in Autobiography and so much of his work later on, with “the idea that each individual part was equally important, and that all parts were equal, with nothing hierarchal. A man running in Muybridge was the inspiration for making all the transformations of a cube within a cube, a square within a square, a cube within a square, etc.”17
The cube became the primary building block of LeWitt’s structures, which in itself created something of a visual riddle. As he would write in 1966, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is it is relatively uninteresting. Compared to any other three-dimensional form it lacks any aggressive force, implies no motion, and is least emotive. Therefore it is the best form to use as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed. Because it is standard and universally recognized, no intention is required of the viewer.”18
In terms of evolving images, the process by which LeWitt turned ideas of Albers and Johns into his own involved addition and subtraction, though his explanation seems like a riddle:
The thing about Albers that I couldn’t grasp was that if he has colors that were receding they should, I thought, physically recede … rather than [serve as] an illusion. This, I think, was partially from [my] understanding of what Johns was doing…. Then I thought, well [Johns] should be applied to Albers. In the meantime I had all these Muybridge ideas in my head, so it actually came off much more
