Sol Lewitt: A Retrospective

Sol LeWitt, one of the most important American artists of this century, has spent the past four decades creating artworks that explore the potential of ideas for the making of visual forms. LeWitt transforms these ideas into objects of exquisite beauty and elegance, deliberately introducing elements of chance, intuition, or irrationality into the systems that govern the creation of his works. LeWitt's delicate balancing act between thought and form, between order and disorder, between authorship and anonymity, has exerted an enormous influence on artists of subsequent generations. This book, the first retrospective of LeWitt's work in more than twenty years, fosters a deeper understanding of the artist's career and its significance to American art and thought. Including essays by Gary Garrels, Martin Friedman, Brenda Richardson, and other distinguished curators and art historians, the book charts the evolution of LeWitt's art from his groundbreaking work in Conceptualism during the early 1960s through his turn toward a more lyrical and sensual form of abstraction around 1980. With more than 350 images, the book provides a stunning visual survey of LeWitt's oeuvre from 1960 to the present, including sumptuous wall drawings, three-dimensional structures, and works on paper. This handsome book is the catalogue for an exhibition that will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 19 February through 30 May 2000, and will then travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from July to October and to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York from November to February 2001.