away. This wasn’t because of the physical and historical connection between Connecticut and Northeastern Ohio. Solly wasn’t even aware at the time that that part of Ohio had once belonged to the Constitution State—it was its Western Reserve, where Cleveland sits. He told his friends simply that a person should think for himself. And when he thought for himself, he liked the Tribe, led by the farm boy wonder, Bob Feller. He never saw the Indians play in person, and this was long before televised games. So he followed them only in radio broadcasts and the box scores and brief game accounts in the New Britain Herald. This loyalty earned Solly a healthy dose of abuse, something he laughed about later—but he remained an Indians fan until his death.
Entering his teens, Solly became a member of the Boy Scouts and went several days a week to Hebrew School at Temple B’Nai Yisrael, the Conservative congregation of New Britain. The city had two synagogues at the time, the other Orthodox. And in early October 1940, Solly was called to the Torah for the first time as a bar mitzvah. Among other duties, he delivered a short speech that Saturday morning. It clearly indicates the views of a boy who understood what his mother had done for him. As his cousin Celeste LeWitt would say decades later, “Sophie’s whole life centered on her one child,” and she never walked past him without giving him a hug.27 Friedenberg recalled, “The way she looked at him and spoke to him with great affection and love … I thought of her as a very warmhearted person.”28 This was obvious in the speech, which read in part: “Spare, I pray Thee, my dear mother for many a year. Bless her for the tender attention and selfless care she has given me to this day. May it be Thy will that she live many years to witness the results of her toil so that she may see that she has not labored in vain.”29
It certainly appeared that Sophie had not labored in vain. Solly’s early report cards were promising (with As and Bs). He received As for effort, obedience, courtesy, and cleanliness. Oddly, he earned Bs in penmanship, in which he later excelled and used in dramatic fashion in much of his work. And he did well in the Boy Scouts, earning merit badges in athletics, cooking, pioneering, safety, public health, bird study, personal health, swimming, lifesaving, handicrafts, first aid, stamp collecting, rowing, reading, civics, reptile study, path finding, scholarship, and camping.
Solly’s interest in stamps and the passion he demonstrated for his collection may easily be viewed as a part of a behavioral pattern, since he would eventually collect art obsessively. His passion to own beautiful stamps is reflected in a letter he sent in 1941 to Reverend H. G. C. Hallock, a missionary in Shanghai, China, who immersed himself in Chinese culture and collected local ephemera:
Dear Sir, I received your address through D. Mayer’s friend in Lenox Hill Hospital. Although I know you are quite busy I was wondering if you could possibly send me some extra stamps you have lying around, because I am a stamp collector and have a quite large collection. My age is 13. To get back to my stamps, I have a few (14) covers from throughout the world and I thought it would be nice to have some from China. Will you please acknowledge this letter. I would appreciate it very much.
Sincerely,
Sol LeWitt
51 Cedar Str.
New Britain, Conn., USA30
In school he took art classes, and many of his drawings survive. They show a very different Sol LeWitt—one who, in art anyway, was either obliged to or decided to think conventionally. He did portraits in pencil of famous men in public life: James Madison, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Simon Bolivar.31 It is not known whether he was free to choose his subjects, but if he was the choices indicate an early interest in history and politics that stayed with him. The portraits were straight-ahead drawings whose style would surprise no one, yet one could draw an obvious conclusion: the boy had talent, something that he dismissed in adult interviews as something everyone has. But the drawings he did at the age of fifteen stand out for their originality, attitude, and invention.
The portrait of James Monroe was reflective, to be sure, of images of the sixth president at the time in terms of the facial shape, hair, and so on. But the young LeWitt’s portrait of Monroe added elements showing that at an early age the artist had begun to form ideas about the world. It shows Monroe as the mastermind of the Monroe Doctrine, standing tall on a map of America that features a sign: “Warning!! You are now entering the Western Hemisphere…. Leave Guns and Knives at Home.” In this drawing, the United States is surrounded by a fence with its posts dug into the ocean. That ocean was also a theme for him in the sense that historic boats became subjects for his work. There are pencil sketches of a Spanish warship, the Matthew of Bristol (similar to the Santa Maria), an English warship of 1560, and a Roman warship dated 60 B.C.E. All of the vessels were sailing, perhaps, from landlocked New Britain. Unlike some of the other work, these maritime images have a great amount of detail. An observer studying LeWitt’s ships and the intricate if much more abstract designs that emerged in his art decades later might conclude that the artist’s mature vision of art began to develop in childhood.
In the summer between his junior and senior years of high school, Solly worked at manual labor he despised. He spent his free time expanding his views, commenting on present-day world affairs—which were dominated, of course, by World War II.
This sixteen-year-old, who had never traveled beyond the boundaries of Connecticut, had sophisticated ideas. A cartoon he drew on August 13, 1944, shows the metaphorical ship Germania sinking, with a few people on board representing Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. Private LeWitt’s advice appeared below: “You’d better jump while you’ve got the chance.” A few days later, Solly drew Hitler with his hands to his head and the Grim Reaper about to hand him a death cocktail. The title of the drawing was The Day of Reckoning.
But subtlety and a grasp of how people acquire and retain power were also evident. In another August 1944 drawing, Solly shows two German men in suits talking about the war. The death camps had recently been discovered, and news of disappearing Jews had certainly reached 51 Cedar Street. One of the men in the drawing whispers to the other: “I never would have imagined. Goodness.” The other whispers back: “Und der Russians vant to Communize the United States und Britain—and the Jews vere the only vons to profit in the war. And that’s not all …” Below is a quote attributed to Hitler: “When you tell them a lie, tell them a big one.” Perhaps the most sophisticated drawing from that breakthrough summer shows an American businessman in a stupor, popping his vest buttons and railing, “Down with Russia, down with England, let the rest of the world go to hell.” The title was “Hitler’s Rear Guard—The Isolationist.”
Mort Jaffe, one of Solly’s high school friends, doesn’t remember these drawings. Jaffe recalls only the European piece that hung near the kitchen table at 51 Cedar Street. He didn’t know who had drawn it, but he didn’t like it. It was sketchier, not intended to be representational, in the manner of schools of art that emerged after the impressionist period: “It was an ink drawing. A lot of white. It didn’t make sense to me, as compared to Rembrandts.”32
Jaffe was at the house because Sophie LeWitt, whom he recalls as being “a very liberal parent,” was the only mother in the neighborhood who allowed the boys to play seven-card stud poker any time they wanted. They came in not through the living room door but through the back door, “in the European fashion,” Jaffe recalls. “We played there maybe twice a week. Five of us—Wilbur K. Williams, Bill Rachlin, Samuel Abrahamson, Sol, and me. Only we never in those days called him Sol. We knew him as Saul. Just Saul. Like the king. I was surprised years later when his name was spelled S-O-L, because I never knew him that way.”33
Friedenberg, who several decades later became publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer, said: “Why did I like Sol? Because he was quiet, reserved, good-natured, witty and Jewish—and I was taught at home to be friendly and nonprejudiced toward Negroes and Jews.”
