much can be read into Autobiography that may stray from what LeWitt had in mind, evidence shows that he thought the work explicit enough. In an interview, he said that a much better picture of him emerges from the photographs of his Hester Street life than could be gained in any other way. If that is so, then one can surmise what also might be obvious from so much of his art—that in a world of chaos, where everything cries out for attention, artists can restore order. In Autobiography, for example, Carol gets as much space as a Stanley hammer. As he wrote in “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” “To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.”4
If Autobiography II had ever been published—say, in the year of his death—LeWitt might have included photos that would only have heightened public curiosity. Perhaps there would be some of his studio in Spoleto, where he hosted many of the most creative people in the art world. There might be photos of his banned “peep show” installation at the Smithsonian or of the logos of the Philip Morris Company, 3M, Nestlé, or other conglomerates that offended him with their policies to the point where he rejected their huge checks. He might have shown the instructions for a piece of art that represented the first time that Christie’s auctioned art with no physical presence. Or there could have been a photo indicating his challenging Germany to examine, through the lens of art, its Holocaust legacy. He might have included the design that led to his being rejected by his hometown or photos of some of the young artists he employed or influenced—including one he never met, a Portuguese man who testified in an international art magazine that LeWitt had literally saved his life. There could have been photos of intimate corners of the house in the country where he and Carol lived during the last years of his life; of the studio he built there; and of his little shadow—Eva, his younger daughter. The photos could have shown his only architectural work, the synagogue that he designed and where he became, against all of his instincts, a member of the design committee. There might have been photos of the many artists, composers, and photographers whose work he championed, such as Chuck Close, Pat Steir, Mel Bochner, Robert Ryman, Lawrence Weiner, Eva Hesse, Vera Lutter, and Romare Bearden; or of the authors who affected him personally and professionally, including Michel Butor, Karen Armstrong, and Samuel Beckett. He could have shown the experimental pills or special brownies he relied on during the advanced stages of colon cancer, evidence of the enormous art collection he and Carol had built, or a dollar bill (representing the idea of making money by not caring about making money). There might have been photos of the old friends who rallied around him during his final days or evidence of how to create art after death.
TWO
SOLLY
In May 1935, a six-year-old boy in Connecticut used red and black pencils to draw a Mother’s Day card that featured a heart on the cover.1 When he finished his work, he gave the card to the woman who read Russian novels to him in the original language, cooked him borscht with potatoes and onions, and provided other homemade comforts in a period when, much too early in life, the child learned the meaning of bereavement. The Mother’s Day drawing, then, is both Sol LeWitt’s oldest surviving work and a symbol of the enduring bond between a mother and son.
That rendering of a heart, however, provides little evidence that its artist was a prodigy who one day would create a new definition of art. It is a little unusual, yes—instead of a wide and ebullient heart in the style of most childhood versions, it is narrow and deep, as if stretched from top to bottom.
On the back of the card is this handwritten message: “ROSES ARE RED/ VIOLETS ARE BLUE/ YOU ARE THE BEST MOTHER/ I EVER KNEW.”
Many decades later, after the adult LeWitt was identified as a pioneer in two of art’s many “isms,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl said: “The Minimalists scared me to death. Except for Sol LeWitt, who must have been dropped on his head as a kid. He’s the sweetest, most decent, most intelligent man in the world, and he’s a minimalist. How does that work?”2
Dropped on his head as a kid? In a way, yes.
■ Solomon LeWitt, called “Solly” by the immediate family, was the only child of two refugees who emigrated from Russia but didn’t meet until they were living in the United States. Like all new arrivals from a different culture who spoke a different language, they had much to overcome. Each, though, set examples for their child about the need for independent thinking, taking personal and professional risks, and performing tikkun olam (Hebrew for “repair of the world”).
One piece of memorabilia from those days is a formal black-and-white photograph of a man dressed in a tailored woolen suit and waistcoat. It shows that Dr. Abraham LeWitt had angular cheekbones, an imposing forehead, a well-groomed mustache, and lips that were slightly downturned but indicated a bemused countenance.
At the time the photo was taken, circa 1930, Dr. LeWitt; his wife, Sophie; and their son lived at 3333 Main Street in Hartford, the “Insurance City,” which then was one of the richest communities in the country in terms of household income.
Connecticut’s capital city had had a run of good fortune that extended back into the Gilded Age, fed not only by the insurance giants Aetna, Travelers, Hartford Fire (as it was known before it became the Hartford), and others but also by the nineteenth-century publishing empire that benefited writers who remain among the city’s most luminous figures: Mark Twain and his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe—the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even in the Great Depression Hartford remained a city of distinction. It was sometimes called “the Athens of America,” largely because of the work and vision of A. Everett “Chick” Austin, the director of the oldest public art museum in the United States, the Wadsworth Atheneum. Indeed, members of the LeWitt family were in the audience on the night in 1934 when the museum’s theater hosted the world premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, the first opera with an all-black cast.3
The home of Abraham, Sophie, and Solly was two miles north of the museum. Like many of the single-family houses in Hartford’s prosperous north end, the LeWitt home was spacious—occupying 2,818 square feet and containing four bedrooms and two baths4—reflecting Abraham’s standing as a surgeon and one of the founders of Mount Sinai Hospital, then a new institution, where he served as medical director. Even then, however, Dr. LeWitt found himself under great stress, a circumstance that he well knew could exacerbate his condition—he had been diagnosed with arteriosclerosis in addition to colorectal cancer.
How much of the details of Abraham’s life story were passed along from Sophie to her son is unknown, but it appears that some important information was omitted. In the artist’s later years, he said that he had few memories of his father, and he was uncertain about where Abraham had been born. He thought it was Turkey, as the birth certificate specified,5 yet there had never been any stories passed down in the family about that country. However, among the documents the family kept was a copy of a certificate from an official registry in Istanbul that listed Abraham’s father, Simcho, in the year 1891:
Eligibility to vote: None
Religious Affiliation: Jew
Date and Place of Birth: Ottoman Calendar 1247 (1832/33) Austria
Trade and Qualifications and Means of Livelihood: None
Age: 60
Father’s Name and place of residence: Avram
Name and Reputation: Simchi [sic] LeWitt
Type of Residence: House
Street No.: 23
Street:
