The LeWitt-Flavin relationship developed at the same time that pop artists, as they would be referred to, were producing work that—in contrast with the general response to what came before it—was crowd-pleasing stuff. In a self-contradictory recollection, LeWitt said: “I always liked [Roy] Lichtenstein, and I still do. And I like [Claes] Oldenburg and [Andy] Warhol, too…. On the other hand—the theoretical sense—I didn’t care for the whole idea of what they were doing, but I could see they were very serious people who were doing something really interesting.”33
The momentum of pop art and then op art,34 a spinoff that featured optical illusions and abstractions in contrast to the former’s recognizable images, helped create the belief (at least in some circles) that the art world was on the brink of nothing less than revolution. The critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, champions of the old ways, were passé. Pop art was among the phenomena that helped build a bridge from what had come before. As the BBC art critic and author Will Gompertz wrote in What Are You Looking At? a capsulized history of modern art, “Lichtenstein’s paintings were a very long way from Abstract Expressionism. Where the art of Pollock and Rothko had been all about existential feelings, Lichtenstein and Warhol focused purely on the material subject; removing all trace of themselves in the process.”35
Still, how would these young artists—LeWitt being the oldest, and something of a father figure to the others—contribute to this new momentum, as they weren’t interested in turning Brillo boxes into subjects? And how would they do it without falling prey to what they despised, the self-congratulatory, celebrity-driven marketplace that ranked the artists’ lives as more important than their work? How would the work of the LeWitt circle become noticed? A significant part of the answer would be in the slow and steady process of relationship building.
■ There is some uncertainty about how LeWitt met Eva Hesse. In Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, Veronica Roberts credits Robert Slutsky with introducing the two to each other. Lucy Lippard writes in Eva Hesse that Harvey and Ellen Becker did the honors. But there is no doubt that from the moment LeWitt met her, Hesse affected him deeply.
In some ways their work seemed very different from each other’s. His was primarily finished when the plan was finished. Hers depended heavily on decisions made during the process of putting pieces together. But they shared common goals otherwise and were intellectually in sync.
The art historian Kirsten Swenson argues that this relationship is a microcosm of change: “Throughout the 1960s Hesse and LeWitt were engaged in an ongoing dialogue and artistic exchange, navigating the era’s social and political upheavals as well as the changing values of the New York art world.”36 She also notes that “the work of Hesse and LeWitt insisted on open-endedness and ambiguity; irrational or absurd art rejected interpretation.”37 The two sympathized with each other about the difficulties of their formative years, and Hesse’s deeply affected her mentor.
As a child, she had emigrated from Germany with her sister in the Kindertransport and was later reunited with her parents, who came to America to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. Her grandparents, however, did not survive the Holocaust. And when Eva was twelve years old, her mother committed suicide. After that Hesse’s life went in two directions, that of an art prodigy and that of a person burdened by family history and her own self-doubt.
She began to study art at the Pratt Institute when she was sixteen. She later said: “The only painting I knew, and that was very little, was abstract expressionism, and at Pratt they didn’t stress painting at all. When you started painting class, you had to do a lemon still life and you graduated to a lemon and bread still life and you graduated to a lemon, egg, bread still life and this was not my idea of painting. I was also much younger, at least emotionally, and chronologically, too, than everybody else.”38 She got the job at Seventeen when she wasn’t yet seventeen: “For some strange reason they hired me. I think it was just because of the gall of coming up there.” She later studied design at Cooper Union Art School, which she loved, and then she went to Yale University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree and became a faculty favorite. She recalled: “I loved Albers’s color course but I had had it at Cooper. I was Albers’s little color studyist—everybody always called me that—and every time he walked into the classroom he would ask, ‘What did Eva do?’ But Albers couldn’t stand my painting and, of course, I was much more serious about the painting.” At the time she met LeWitt, she was also trying to make it as a painter. And like him, she had taken jobs in Manhattan to pay the rent—in her case first at a jewelry store and then as a textile designer.
In one of his last interviews, in 2001, LeWitt described meeting Hesse: “She was really cute, very pretty, very alive, very hip at that time. She knew a lot of people because of being at Yale … even though what she was doing was kind of still-school stuff, I thought it was really pretty good.”39
From his own testimony and from that of the sculptor Tom Doyle, who later married Hesse, LeWitt fell hard for the young artist. Many men did. In 1972, the New York Post reported, “There is no one who doesn’t mention Eva Hesse’s beauty—a dark, brooding, 5-foot-3 beauty, with dangling earrings and clunky shoes and Bohemian—but always stylish—clothes.”40 LeWitt said in 1972, “Yeah, well, I was sort of wowed by her, but unfortunately she wasn’t wowed by me.”41 Doyle’s explanation of why Hesse had no romantic feelings for LeWitt was that “she said Sol reminded her too much of her father.”42 Nevertheless, LeWitt and Hesse had a deep relationship, which eventually helped both struggling artists discover new approaches to their work. Like all female artists of the time, Hesse had an extra burden as she tried to succeed in a maledominated field.
The fact that LeWitt would come to help her and then other female artists before the dawn of feminism earned him many admirers. In 1978 he wrote, “It was my friendship with Eva that made me aware of the problems that women artists face in a world dominated by the male hierarchy…. There seems to be an implicit rule (even among female critics, etc.) that a woman can never be considered the dominant practitioner of a style or idea.”43
■ LeWitt met Doyle in 1961 and immediately started talking football. Both were avid fans, and both had played the game—though LeWitt’s artistry on the gridiron was hidden in the middle of the line, and Doyle’s wasn’t. As a wide receiver (then simply called an “end”) for Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, his exploits had been clearly seen, and he retained an insider’s knowledge of the game. But he had been the only wide receiver in the Mid-American Conference to become more interested in making sculpture than in scoring touchdowns. He was also—no minor point, from LeWitt’s point of view—in love with Hesse. Lucy Lippard described Doyle’s appeal when Hesse met him at the opening of his first show, at the Allan Stone Gallery. He was “a lively and charming Pennsylvania and Ohio Irishman, several years older than [Hesse], a dedicated sculptor, good talker, Civil War buff, and Joyce addict.”44
Doyle and Hesse soon married, and worked and lived at first in a loft on Eighteenth Street near Fifth Avenue, moving to the Bowery in 1963. “The trouble was it was against the law to live in a loft,” Doyle recalled.45 Artists were supposed to limit their time in such venues to working and live elsewhere. Far from having the cachet that it now does, in those days lofts were mostly dingy firetraps in down-and-out neighborhoods. “Artists specialized in hiding things from inspectors,” Doyle said. But he was not very talented at this: “One time a fireman came to my loft and asked me, ‘You got a stove? You got hot water? What about that bed, there?’ I shrugged. He said, ‘You artists—you don’t have nothing but a good time.’” Robert Barry’s solution—when he had an apartment on the corner of Grand and the Bowery with no heat and only cold water, for $70 a month—was to take a $20 bill out of his shirt pocket and hand it to the inspector. As a result, he never had any trouble, except for the time when he was instructed to put a screen around the potbellied
