to Sol LeWitt’s later expressing a reluctance to own real estate. Abraham’s investments were largely in properties in Hartford’s north end. Though these provided the level of income that allowed him and Sophie to travel as well as enjoy other luxuries, they also appear to have contributed to his eventually fatal medical condition. He was highly stressed as a result of at least two lawsuits filed against him, as a result of his inability to collect rent from his tenants in the heart of the Great Depression. One lawsuit was filed by the Society for Savings, a Hartford institution that had loaned Abraham money. The other, more crushing, suit was filed by his brother, Michel. On August 11, 1934, Abraham LeWitt collapsed at his home and died of a heart attack.14
In the following months, Sophie tried to avoid financial ruin. The only way she could manage was to try to collect rent herself: She had to go door to door begging people to pay, and hated it.15 Eventually, she realized that she would not be able to remain in her home.
■ When young Solly made his 1935 Mother’s Day card, he and his mother were living temporarily in a small apartment owned by Sophie’s sister, Luba Appell. She had taken them in after Abraham’s death, but she did not have substantial means either. Luba, who had lived alone, owned a small grocery store on the first floor of an apartment building, but she performed acts of charity, extending credit to those who in the midst of the Great Depression couldn’t pay their bills.
The view from Aunt Luba’s kitchen table in the spring of 1935 resembled New York as portrayed by painters in the Ashcan school.16 New Britain was a city of soot, but it had jobs. During the Great Depression the number of workers fell by a third, but the city’s factories still employed 11,000 men making hand tools, ball bearings, refrigerators, pots, machine parts, razor strops, coffin trimmings, and other items that had turned the city into an international destination for blue-collar workers.17
Downtown the sidewalks were crowded with people on their way to buy pirogues, sausages, or dark European bread; to go to the clothing shops; or to visit the Polish-language movie theater on Broad Street or the jewelry and optician shop owned by the LeWitts—members of Abraham’s extended family, which owned a variety of enterprises in the city and lived in much nicer housing than Luba’s. The circumstances of Sophie and Solly improved, if only modestly, when Sophie found work as a school nurse in 1936 and they moved to a second-floor apartment of their own, at 51 Cedar Street, off of West Main. The artist would recall in 1974, “I … remember living in a part of town that really wasn’t a very good part of town. It wasn’t so bad really. But I remember that people were out of work.”18
The Cedar Street location had at least one advantage: It was within easy walking distance of the library and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Few people could afford automobiles in the 1930s. Sophie would never learn to drive, and neither would her son (though certain people in rural Italy could testify that he foolishly took the wheel of a car at least once). The art museum was a community gathering spot, as in those days admission was free—primarily as a result of the generosity of the hosiery manufacturer John Butler Talcott and the philanthropist Grace Judd Landers. And as it turned out, it wasn’t the city’s manufacturing that made it a national sensation during those years, but an art exhibit.
Many decades earlier, in 1851, the Hartford Times had described New Britain as “a moral, well-regulated community.”19 That view held for a long time. Eventually, as both a teenager and a mature adult, Sol LeWitt would offer related descriptions that put the Times’s observation into an artistic context—the city could stifle ideas, especially those of young artists.
In 1929, the city became the focus of a national art story. What was then called the New Britain Institute, founded to offer educational opportunities, developed a small art collection. Its first curator, Fanny J. Brown, organized an ambitious temporary exhibit that featured the words of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Braque, and Modigliani—a real coup for a small, working-class city. But the head of the New Britain schools’ art program, Dewey Van Cott, considered the exhibit a travesty.20
Van Cott wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the New Britain Herald, arguing that works of the artists represented in the exhibit ignored “such utterly unessential things as how to handle brushes, how to draw, what the principles of good design are and what constitutes good, harmonious color.”21 The controversy earned the Hardware City a national reputation for provincialism. ARTNews reported that the Van Cott’s criticism “might have been quoted from the Boston papers of 1913 when the Armory show invaded the sacred city.”22
New Britain was hardly alone in its provincialism. Just nine miles away, in the more sophisticated Hartford, Chick Austin, the Wadsworth Atheneum’s director, was testing the patience of the institution’s trustees when he paid $399.65 for a painting by Mondrian—just one example of his devotion to modern art. In fact, the trustees were no more welcoming to expensive traditional paintings. When Austin paid a whopping $17,000 for a Caravaggio, the brilliant Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, an investment that secured the museum’s place as a repository of important art, the board objected to his profligate spending.23
In such an atmosphere, the odds seemed against any young person’s being inspired to think outside the rules of art as they were accepted at the time. Indeed, on the roster of native sons and daughters of New Britain who became nationally prominent, there is no prominent artist. To be sure, the city produced Walter Camp, often referred to as the “father of American football,” and two national political figures—Abraham Ribicoff, who was governor of Connecticut, a us senator, and secretary of health, education and welfare in the administration of President John F. Kennedy; and Paul Manafort, who served as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and in 2018 was convicted of several felonies. Even if adopted sons and daughters are added to the list, only one child of New Britain became an artist of international status. He was the child of a mother who never stopped doting on him and a father who never had the chance to do so.
■ When a boy loses a father at a tender age, there is often speculation about the effect of the loss and the legacy of the father. The earliest evidence shows that the young Solly seemed withdrawn. This is apparent in the testimony of childhood friends and school records. Anna Foberg, principal of Lincoln Elementary School, wrote:
Solomon did a very good job as a traffic officer. He was pleasant, not too bossy and kept his head at all times. He watched the children do things and talked about it in the meeting instead of picking small flaws. He needs to take his work less seriously and learn to smile. He also needs to step up and take charge of things as he finds that may be needed. He is apt to do just the ordinary job until an older person shows him where he may do things on his own. He was elected to the Safety Council by the votes of 200 children’s teachers of the upper grades. He was chosen second best in a group of four.24
Miss Brown, a teacher at the school, wrote: “Solomon is a sober little fellow. He needs to smile and enjoy other boys and girls. He does very good work but acts too old for his age. Not a very tidy housekeeper. Had to be reminded to come back from traffic and clear away his work.”25
As years passed, however, he occasionally showed signs of an emerging sense of humor. Walter Friedenberg, Solly’s boyhood friend and classmate at Central Junior High, remembers: “He was not loquacious, and his diction was slurring. But he was alert, companionable, and witty. He had a giggle. That little giggle.”26
Friedenberg remembers the games that their group played. There was football at Walnut Creek Park and baseball wherever the kids could play it. In those games, Solly LeWitt fit in nicely.
No doubt, however, he was different from other boys. Perhaps the clearest example is his choice of which professional baseball team to follow. New Britain is halfway between New York City and Boston, and the loyalties of the Hardware City’s residents always have been split between
