the word, and the symbol, and just started doing three-dimensional things…. I just had to make decisions and the main decision was that one had to simplify things rather than make things more complicated. One had to figure out what one wanted to do and then simplify it in that direction.19
Simplicity, he thought—what a remarkable concept, particularly after the anything goes, look at me and what I’m doing abstract expressionist period.
■ At the time of Sixteen Americans LeWitt was once again collecting unemployment benefits, or the Rockefeller grant, as they were sometimes referred to by the cultural crowd. The reference was to New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who by then had also earned the unofficial title of governor of the arts.
The city entered a new cultural era in terms of infrastructure and momentum. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, twenty years in the planning, finally opened on Fifth Avenue. Lincoln Center was in its nascent stage and eventually would become the home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. And the Rockefeller family collectively gave about half of the $25 million needed to expand MoMA, the cultural temple that the family had helped found and fund in 1929.
MoMA had earned a reputation of connecting modern life to art. It elevated the idea of design—industrial, graphic, and so on—allowing it to be recognized as a legitimate art form. The museum had architecture, photography, and film departments, which was unusual for the time. As Thomas B. Hess wrote in 1957 in ARTnews, “The Museum is the sum of its Christmas-cards and upholstery-fabric competitions, Mondrians, automobiles and Pollocks, Latin-American watercolors and Picassos.”20 Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s founding director, was still there, and its employment policies helped promising young artists willing to take entry-level jobs.
In that time, making a living as an artist in New York was an arduous task, even for some of those at the top. For example, though Pollock’s canvases eventually sold for millions of dollars, during his lifetime they seldom were sold for more than $1,500. For younger artists, the economic outlook was far worse.
LeWitt was first mentioned in the New York Times in an article by Nan Robertson that was published in July 1961. Robertson wrote:
The public view of painters and sculptors often focuses on two extremes, both sentimental. One is the glamorous beatnik sipping espresso into the late hours on Macdougal Street. The other is the artist struggling, starving and suffering alone in abject, but poetic, poverty.
The truth is that even the most dedicated artists in New York waiting for discovery must and do work part-time as teachers, illustrators, museum guards, house painters, carpenters, salesmen, antique restorers, truck drivers, waiters, bakers, barbers, masseurs, plumbers and fashion models.21
Robertson’s piece cited a study made by Bernard S. Myers, a professor at the City College of New York. Myers had discovered that over a five-year period only 8 of the 112 artists he tracked had earned more than $3,000 annually.
LeWitt was among the many artists that Robertson interviewed. The Times noted under the photo of the artist in his studio: “Sol LeWitt earned $1,000 last year, the first money he has ever taken from sales of his paintings.”22
When he applied to work at MoMA in 1960, LeWitt was thirty-one, near the end of the “young” range. He contacted his cousin, Pell LeWitt, who worked in the museum’s publicity department, and who helped arrange an interview.23 And the idea of entry-level work didn’t faze the artist. He recalled in 1993: “I asked for the job and got it. That was great. I wouldn’t have to come to work until 5:30 p.m., and I’d work until about 10 or 10:30 p.m…. This job was the best one I got because it was sitting at the desk in the office building part in the evenings and after the offices were closed. There was nothing to do but read and be there. So I saw every exhibition that they had at the time and saw a great deal of film.”24
In all, from 1960 to 1964, he served in a variety of capacities: bookseller, night receptionist and watchman, and all-around clerk. In the last year he worked at the museum, he was recruited to teach a class in drawing “to mainly suburban housewives” in a school run by Victor D’Amico, a tenant in the building: “I had all to do [my own work] and I made enough money, living very frugally, to live fairly well.”25
LeWitt recalled a time of great worry at the museum during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when it seemed as if the United States was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union. At the time, LeWitt was stationed at one of the desks. One night “they were taking paintings out, the Picassos, Matisses, Schwitters—all the great masterpieces—and substituting a sort of the second string. Alfred Barr was coming through and I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Barr, where these paintings are going, that’s where I want to go, too.’”26
The coterie of low-level MoMA employees banded together artistically. Others with entry-level positions (including serving as guards) included the young artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Gene Beery. The circle also included Lucy R. Lippard, who worked in the library and eventually became a writer and art critic who documented the minimalist and conceptual periods. Lippard wrote that MoMA became “the hub” and “the beginning of our art world lives.”27 In 1993 LeWitt said, “It was an important little cell of art at that time. The ideas that were talked about amongst ourselves turned out to be of some significance, because at that time art was changing a great deal, and some of the more important people of that generation happened to be here at that time.”28 In the same year he recalled: “The discussions at that time were involved with new ways of making art, trying to reinvent the process, to regain basics, to become as objective as possible.”29 This idea was in direct contrast to the highly subjective and self-aggrandizing abstract expressionist movement.
A different form of influence developed in this circle, which expanded beyond MoMA employees: artists wrote about each other’s work in art journals. Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, for example, wrote about LeWitt, who in turn wrote about Ruth Vollmer. Many of the artists curated shows in new downtown galleries that included the work of their colleagues.
Because these artists got to know each other and began to gather in their respective lofts, it is tempting to think of scenes from La Bohème, with young impoverished dreamers struggling for their art and love. Indeed, there was even a tragic Mimi figure, Eva Hesse. But reality offered its own drama. And the jobs the artists secured gave them living wages, even if low ones, and time during the daylight hours to tend to their own work and invite their museum colleagues into their studios.
One of LeWitt’s first close relationships from that period was with Flavin. Together they explored a simple idea: simplicity itself. This would be clearly manifested in Flavin’s work, in which he featured arrangements of fluorescent lights that baffled many viewers.
LeWitt recalled that Flavin often quoted philosophers when he wasn’t expressing his own opinions. LeWitt listened, apparently endlessly, to his new colleague: “One didn’t talk very much with Flavin; one listened.”30
LeWitt often went to Flavin’s house for dinner, as the latter’s wife at the time, Sonja Severdija, was an excellent cook. Flavin was “always interested in art and would talk about it. These weren’t always one-sided conversations, but his egotism was not fully developed at the time. He was working on it.”31
Loquaciousness aside, Flavin became a big influence on LeWitt, who in a 1993 interview said: “Flavin’s piece [Nominal Three] using a progression of one, one-two, one-two-three [fluorescent lights], was an important example for me. It was one of the first system pieces I’d seen. [Donald] Judd’s progression pieces of that time were also very important. I began to think of systems that were
