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‘You Have at Your Power the Ability to Do Anything’

Deb Paulson was working as a massage therapist when she took Sol LeWitt on as a client sometime after he moved to Chester in 1984.

They had something in common: Both were artists. Paulson did watercolors and some work in India ink. LeWitt was an internationally renowned minimalist and conceptual artist who had major retrospectives of his work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

Paulson found LeWitt’s reputation a bit intimidating, but one day she got up the courage to ask him some questions about her watercolors.

“He’s looking at it carefully and said, ‘I like it...what are going to do with the background?’ I said, ‘I already did it.’ He said, ‘You have to think about the background’—but he said it like he was taking me really seriously. It wasn’t patronizing—very succinct.” He then went on to praise another of her works, one done in India ink.

He later gave her a gift of one of his artworks. That gift, explains his biographer Lary Bloom, was “a sign, to his massage therapist, of acknowledgment and acceptance.”

Bloom’s new biography, Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas, published this month by Wesleyan University Press, highlights LeWitt’s professional struggles and successes and, for the first time, provides a personal and detailed look at the man behind the work. The biography will be the subject of a talk by Bloom at R.J. Julia Booksellers, 68 Boston Post Road, Madison on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 p.m.

In Bloom’s biography, LeWitt is revealed as someone who was as interested in challenging preconceived notions, and in demystifying art, as he was in creating art. Bloom shows LeWitt creating the groundbreaking work that drew a wide variety of responses—enthusiastic praise, harsh condemnation, utter confusion—and, as he spent his time in Chester raising his children with his wife, walking his dog, and going out to dinner, cementing a reputation among the friends he made there as someone kind and generous.

‘A Call to Think Freely and Honestly’

LeWitt’s life story, Bloom tell us, is one that anyone can learn from, not only creative types working full time on their art, but also the rest of us trying to make a mark in our day jobs. Bloom tells us “he serves as an example for anyone who wants to create.” LeWitt’s life story is “a call to think freely and honestly every day.” And that “it should interest anyone who wants to succeed but is afraid of breaking the rules.” It is, Bloom tells us, a story of “obstacle and triumph” about an artist who “led a purposeful and generous life.”

Bloom said in an interview that LeWitt’s story transcends the boundaries of art, in the same way that LeWitt himself transcended art boundaries by changing the way art is made and marketed.

“Understanding his life story doesn’t require a fine arts degree, or knowledge of conceptualism, or minimalism, or any of that,” Bloom says.

Bloom, a writer who has published 10 books and who worked on the LeWitt biography for about 11 years, shows us in the next 350-plus pages that life story, while also teaching the reader quite a bit about art as well. Bloom says his hope is that readers of LeWitt’s biography will not only learn something about art, but also something about the way they approach their own work and their own lives.

Part of the lesson of LeWitt’s life and work, one he tried to reinforce in conversations and letters to his colleagues, is that to do groundbreaking work first you sometimes have to do the worst you can do.

“Don’t just sit there and be intimidated,” Bloom explains. “Do the worst work you can do. I teach writing at Yale over the summer and one of the exercises is to write the worst possible opening to the essay. And they have such fun with that. It’s full of adverbs and goes nowhere and promises nothing and there’s a lot of navel gazing and we have a lot of laughs.”

Another lesson to be learned from LeWitt’s life is that “the ultimate judge is the person who does the work, not the critics. And that’s a tricky business,” Bloom admits. “You can be talked out of stuff.”

How Does an Artist Sell an Idea?

Bloom, who used to live in Chester and counted himself among LeWitt’s circle of friends and acquaintances, first encountered LeWitt when Bloom was the editor of Northeast, the Sunday magazine of The Hartford Courant. One of the first cover stories Bloom assigned involved a controversy in Hartford about LeWitt and one of his large wall drawings. Bloom was particularly drawn to this story. He knew controversial artists were most often the ones doing cutting-edge work.

Bloom writes in his biography about work LeWitt did for the Cooper Gallery in New York around 1968. It consisted of lines drawn with colored pencils, “soft, hardly visible from several yards away.” Only up close could the viewer see “its intricacies and complexities.” And it was drawn on the wall. What if someone wanted to buy it? Or, as Bloom writes, “How does an artist, then, sell an idea?”

On the price list next to LeWitt’s name was “per hour,” Bloom writes, “as if he had been a house painter or a therapist. In short, the drawing wasn’t an object but an image that could be transported anywhere.” When the show was over, LeWitt told the gallery owner to paint over his work on the wall. This would be the first of almost 1,300 wall drawings he would create, many of them working with a team of artists, over the course of his career.

LeWitt’s work was controversial in part because of his assertion that “in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work,” as he wrote in an essay that was published in Art Forum in 1967 titled “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.”

“The idea becomes the machine that makes the art,” LeWitt wrote. He also wrote, “It doesn’t really matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by seeing the work. Different people will understand the same thing in different ways.”

While “Paragraphs” is an oft-cited explanation when it comes to LeWitt’s work, he later admitted, “I wish I had never written that.” He also later grew weary of the term “conceptual art.” He and some of his fellow artists were concerned about being labeled, and at having their ideas misconstrued.

Bloom explains “he was clearly urging people to steer way from what is known and what is safe (and what is commercial).”

Martin Friedman, from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is cited in the biography as explaining it this way, “...he moved from style to style with a kind of inquisitiveness. So he never became a prisoner of style. He mastered it and then went on to the next thing.”

Controversy, Acclaim, a Cozy Hometown

LeWitt’s work continued to draw both controversy and acclaim throughout his life, and on his personal and artistic journey from his hometown of Hartford, where he was born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents from Russia, to Syracuse, to New York City, and then to Spoleto, Italy. But when he and his wife Carol and their two children decided to settle down, they picked Connecticut and then Chester, which had recently been voted Connecticut Town of the Year. Bloom describes the town’s charms in the biography.

“Its downtown, a modest but cozy array of storefronts with apartments over them, is unusual in that it is not situated on a state highway but nested between two of them, so it many ways it looked like it had decades earlier,” he writes.

He notes that because of its cozy character and its renowned French restaurant, Restaurant du Village (since closed), it was considered by some to be a hot location at the time when the LeWitts were looking for a new home.

Locals included those with deep roots in the community, with some families who had ancestors who came to Chester in the 1600s. There were equally vibrant newcomers as well, including Charles van Over and Priscilla Martel, the proprietors of Restaurant du Village; Barbara Delaney, former managing editor of Antiques, and her husband, who together started the local historical society; Peter Good and his wife Janet Cummings Good, who started a renowned graphic design business there; the artist Richard Ziemann, who had taught at Yale; Jack and Sosse Baker, who opened the Chester Gallery; and William L. Schaeffer, who opened a company specializing in vintage photographs, including the work of Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and others.

The LeWitts found “the intimate village atmosphere” perfect, and purchased a large colonial on Pratt Street. Carol LeWitt opened a local outlet for her business of ceramic imports from Italy and Sol LeWitt established his daily routine: He was usually up by 4 a.m., and read until he could walk downtown to get his copy of The New York Times, which he read by 7 a.m., and then he would work from about 8:30 to noon in his studio, and then, after lunch, a driver (he didn’t drive) would take him to the YMCA in Middletown for an hour of swimming. Then, upon his return home, he might read or listen to music or watch opera videos. After dinner, he continued his reading.

He spent time with his children, Sofia and Eva, who were enrolled in local schools. His daughter Eva, described him like this in a nursery school exercise: “A description of my Dad: He always wears glasses. He doesn’t have bangs or hair on top. He wears pants. He only gets dressed up to go to meetings.”

Throughout his career, LeWitt was generous with support and advice not only with his friends in Chester, but also with his friends in the art community.

One such example, oft cited, of that is the letter he wrote to his friend Eva Hesse.

Hesse made a name for herself during the post-minimalist art movement in the 1960s for her pioneering techniques that transformed unconventional materials into artwork that often managed to be both simple and complex at the same time. But, before she truly hit her stride as an artist, there was a period when she was beset by despair and self-doubt due in part to searing personal and professional setbacks.

In a letter to LeWitt, dated the day after April Fool’s Day in 1965, she says, “I trust myself not enough to come through with any one idea...At this time I can no longer see what I have done nor distill the meaning. I want too much and try to much—the joke is on me, constant frustration and failure.”

Bloom writes that when LeWitt received the letter, he realized her fears prevented her from seeing how extraordinary her work really was. He worried she was “frittering it away with self-doubts, which were a big thing in her life.” He also realized part of the problem was the male-dominated art scene that “would not allow a woman to be a great, important artist.”

‘Don’t Worry About Cool, Make Your Own Uncool’

So LeWitt wrote back. It’s a letter that Bloom correctly observes “also is an inspiration for people today...who are in any field in which subjectivity rules and where self-confidence is a fragile commodity.” To read the letter in its entirety, buy the book. There are parts that we can’t include here, this being a family newspaper and all. Here are some of the highlights.

Instead of pulling back from her most creative impulses, some of which Hesse characterized as “crazy like,” LeWitt told her to “Stop it and just DO!” and then to “do more.”

“...make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own world. If you fear, make it work for you—draw and paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as ‘to decide on a purpose and a way of life, a consistent approach...You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO! ...But when you work or before you work you have to empty your mind and concentrate on what you are doing...So try the most outrageous things you can—shock yourself. You have at your power the ability to do anything.”