the mystery is solved. Sol LeWitt is the author. However, a second enigma soon becomes apparent. What is the significance of the 1,125 black-and-white photographs that follow? None of them bears a caption. Most are of ordinary items that would be found in a house or artist’s studio. Each photo is the same size, three inches by three inches. There are nine on each page, in a grid formation that mirrors the artist’s reliance throughout his career on the cube—a form that he admitted was uninteresting in itself, which he decided made it ideal as a building block for art.
Autobiography is the life story in pictures of the artist Sol LeWitt (what he referred to as his only self-portrait) until the age of fifty-two. In this effort, he was influenced by a relatively new literary movement beginning in the 1950s, the Nouveau Roman, which abandoned all of the accepted tenets of storytelling.2 His contribution to the effort was to tell a story wordlessly.
This is a record of much of LeWitt’s personal inventory at the time—his way of telling his own story without the intrusion of the English language or sitting for interviews that never turned out to be accurate, in his view. In these photographs, he lets the reader make sense of where he came from and where he was going. He does this without the usual documentation and mention of his milestones to that time.
For example, there is no mention of his being born in Hartford in 1928 to immigrants prominent for their achievements—his mother having been a nurse in World War I, and his father becoming one of the most respected physicians in Connecticut. To be sure, there are visual elements that refer to Abraham and Sophie LeWitt. But there is no accounting of what befell his father when his only child was just five years old, or the greatly reduced circumstances that followed in an industrial city far from Hartford not in distance but in culture. A “reader” of Autobiography won’t come across anecdotes about Sol LeWitt’s childhood in New Britain, the industrial town that spurned modern art; his years at Syracuse University, starting in 1945, when he tried to learn what he didn’t want to learn; or his first trip to Europe in 1950, when his eyes were opened to the Renaissance masters Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and he saw in each ideas for the future. LeWitt surely had good stories to tell about being shipped off to the Korean War and, along the way, finding inspiration in Japan; and his first years in New York City, when he felt, as usual, an outcast yet met and dated a string of beautiful and accomplished women. At the same time, he joined the staff of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), helped develop a circle of young and visionary artists, and wrote his iconic “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” and then obliterated his first wall drawing—to the horror of the gallery owner. In Autobiography there is no mention of the harsh criticism of his bold idea that ideas are what matters in art, not the finished piece itself. He does not document how his work caught the eyes of international dealers or when he fell in love with Italy—and then, at the age of fifty, as if right on time, was given a MoMA retrospective that had visitors raving about what they saw. And he surely does not provide details about why, in frustration, he was about to leave the city.
The book instead provides visual memories and practical details about his studio on Hester Street, in New York’s desolate Lower East Side—where, illegally, he also slept. The timing of the publication was no accident. The book appeared just as LeWitt and his future wife, Carol Androccio, were planning to take up residence in Spoleto, Italy, where the artist already owned a house, and where their two daughters would be born. His life in New York City had become increasingly complex and nearly intolerable because of many professional demands. As Carol LeWitt recalled, “Sol was driven out of New York by graduate students who told him, ‘I’m writing my thesis on you.’ By then, he was hellbent on Italy.”3 The artist was a little more expansive, but he focused more on what he saw as New York’s professional limitations. But one thing he could manage at the time was to portray a sense of order. Autobiography, then, provides clues about the details of the first half of his long career and of his way of living up to that point.
A man whose private life had always stayed private displayed much of it on these pages in black and white, even though not a single easily recognizable image of the author is present. Readers, then, are free to draw conclusions about the life that these pictures represent. Here are nine such conclusions:
LeWitt didn’t lack for organization. There are pictures of neat shelving; cans of goods placed on top of each other; and, it might seem, enough tools to stock a small store. There is a portrait of a Stanley box cutter made in “The Hardware City,” where LeWitt grew up. Pencils sit inside a Three Fruits Marmalade jar. Art pens fill a Japanese tin—a relic, perhaps, of LeWitt’s first trip in 1951 to a land that inspired him. The compass surely came in handy in LeWitt’s mathematical schemes for wall drawings, and the gesso may have been left over from his attempts, with hideous results (by his own accounting), at abstract expressionism.
He wasn’t exactly a starving artist. His kitchen yields but a hint of his developing taste for haute cuisine. Here are Japanese tea, brewer’s yeast, and Olio Castelvetrano. There are mugs on hooks, sponges in buckets, an Italian coffeemaker, a colander, an array of pots, and a nutritional chart showing “Correct Food Combining.” Also, a hint—a bottle of Brunello—of his interest in Italian red wine.
He had a well-worn wardrobe. There are a slicker, a rain hat, two pairs of ice skates used in Central Park, moccasins, sneakers; slippers, boots, woolen socks neatly rolled, a backpack, and the sport coat that his cousin bought him so the artist could have something appropriate to wear to his own 1978 MoMA retrospective.
He owned no early American furniture. But he had a simple wooden chair with paint drippings all over it, an original LeWitt, an original Mies van der Rohe, and an old armchair—the kind that his physician father sat in while fretting over bills related to his real estate holdings or dreaming up another tool for surgery.
Looking at the overstuffed bookshelves, one can understand why LeWitt spent every afternoon reading. He admired the dialogue of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and the sturdy histories of Barbara Tuchman and William Manchester. He was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s imagination in Alice in Wonderland. And he had two helpful tomes, The New York Times Complete Guide to Home Repair and one that indicated his handicap in the anticipated move to Spoleto, Parla Italiano.
Ephemera endured. These included postage stamps (another boyhood passion); the Manhattan telephone number of Mimi Wheeler, a flame of his in the late 1960s and early 1970s; a chart of typefaces in alphabetical order; invitations to his exhibit openings; a front page of the New York Daily News featuring the tragedy at Chappaquiddick of Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne; a list of books from the nonprofit company he had founded that promotes the works of artists; and an old copy of the leftist French publication La Liberation, edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, for which LeWitt raised money.
For a man who was hard of hearing, he heard music. The composers included Bach, whose work occupied much space, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, and other famous ones, but also those less often collected: Smetana; Bloch; Villa-Lobos; Boccherini; Gluck; Britten; and the edgy ones such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who benefited from LeWitt’s largesse.
Inspiration was all around him, including the work of Eadweard Muybridge, whose serial photography influenced LeWitt’s thinking; a clipping about Robert Rauschenberg’s being given an award; a poster with the wording “If you cut your foot a dead cockroach will draw out the infection”; Italian calendars; a text painting by his friend Gene Beery (“Watch this canvas. Appearing SOON an amazing painting to revolutionize visual experience, start preparing yourself to dig NOW!”); and a mezuzah on the doorpost. There are no photos of automobiles, as he never bought one for himself.
He left very personal things that could intrigue a future biographer, such as the office sign from his father’s practice, saying “Doctor A. LeWitt. Walk In.,” and a photo of Carol LeWitt. By 1980, the artist had been with Carol for nearly two years. Not long afterward they would have two daughters: Sophia and Eva. There is no photograph indicating LeWitt’s earlier (brief and
