“At that time [North gave him the book] I had never heard of Muybridge,” LeWitt said in an interview in 1999, but after that he was “always trying to think of ways to incorporate [some of Muybridge’s ideas] into the making of art.”11
“I think that Muybridge was really the biggest influence on my art of any older artist,” he told Paul Cummings in 1974. “The logic of the serial image was the important thing to me. At first it was the image, but then it became the fact of seeing things from three different angles, as they emerged and changed. It had a beginning and an ending. A kind of philosophical realism…. He called his work a figure in action, in motion, or animals in motion. Of course they were still photographs…. It was right on the edge of photography and motion pictures.”12
In the early 1980s, LeWitt expanded his view of Muybridge’s influence, when he told Andrea Miller-Keller, curator of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s new Matrix Gallery, that the photographer offered a way of creating art “that did not rely on the whim of the moment but on a consistently thought-out process that gave results that were interesting and exciting…. [It was] a precise way of making art which was logical rather than rational” He said that up until then there had been two systems of making art: making decisions at every moment—“a circle here, a square there”—or spreading painting everywhere (as in the work of Jackson Pollock, for example). But “Muybridge offered a third system.”13 In short, the most important part of the artist’s anatomy is not the hand but the brain. And to the brainy LeWitt, this was a revelation that, after a period of failure that made him question his abilities, gave him a new path to pursue.
What struck him, as well as other members of the circle that developed around him, was that somehow art was at a dead end. They felt that the role of artist was to invent, not copy. But invent what? As LeWitt explained to Gary Garrels in 2000, what happened next—the development of what was called minimalism—was not some new advance on what had come before but, in a sense, a going backward, stripping art down to its bare essentials.14 In effect, it was a process of looking at art, and the idea of art, as if it had never been invented.
In the early 1960s, LeWitt experimented with the idea of applying Muybridge’s ideas to his own developing interests. It was the first time he had had a sense that, though inspired by the work of another artist, he could create something all his own.
In 1961, he made several pieces, including Muybridge 1 and Muybridge 2, using photographs. For the first one he made a box about ten feet long, one foot high, and ten inches deep. He divided this into ten compartments, and in each he inserted a photograph of a model walking toward the viewer in sequence. “It was a process of enlargement,” he explained.15 (The process and the result would become notorious three decades later in a prominent public debate.)
He started expanding his work that featured one figure in action. A running figure, for example, was repeated, and often in three-dimensional paintings that included words of explanation and symbols such as arrows. In the documentary film by Michael Blackwood, Sol LeWitt: 4 Decades, the artist describes the conception of the work. He started with the running figure by Muybridge but added elements of depth and dimensionality: “Receding color, something introduced by Joseph Albers, was important here. In this piece, color and form played with one another in terms of recession and advance, the idea of objectivity rather than subjectivity, in three-dimensional forms.”16 As a result, what the viewer saw in this piece and others that followed was not a flat canvas but one that receded or came forward toward the viewer at various points in the work. Even so, this was just a step on the way to a more inventive use of this process.
Early structures, attached to walls, were simple. LeWitt used basic forms. The idea of seriality developed as time went on and was represented in Autobiography and so much of his work later on, with “the idea that each individual part was equally important, and that all parts were equal, with nothing hierarchal. A man running in Muybridge was the inspiration for making all the transformations of a cube within a cube, a square within a square, a cube within a square, etc.”17
The cube became the primary building block of LeWitt’s structures, which in itself created something of a visual riddle. As he would write in 1966, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is it is relatively uninteresting. Compared to any other three-dimensional form it lacks any aggressive force, implies no motion, and is least emotive. Therefore it is the best form to use as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed. Because it is standard and universally recognized, no intention is required of the viewer.”18
In terms of evolving images, the process by which LeWitt turned ideas of Albers and Johns into his own involved addition and subtraction, though his explanation seems like a riddle:
The thing about Albers that I couldn’t grasp was that if he has colors that were receding they should, I thought, physically recede … rather than [serve as] an illusion. This, I think, was partially from [my] understanding of what Johns was doing…. Then I thought, well [Johns] should be applied to Albers. In the meantime I had all these Muybridge ideas in my head, so it actually came off much more simply than it seems. They had just too many things going on, too many ideas in them. Then I discarded the figure, and the word, and the symbol, and just started doing three-dimensional things…. I just had to make decisions and the main decision was that one had to simplify things rather than make things more complicated. One had to figure out what one wanted to do and then simplify it in that direction.19
Simplicity, he thought—what a remarkable concept, particularly after the anything goes, look at me and what I’m doing abstract expressionist period.
■ At the time of Sixteen Americans LeWitt was once again collecting unemployment benefits, or the Rockefeller grant, as they were sometimes referred to by the cultural crowd. The reference was to New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who by then had also earned the unofficial title of governor of the arts.
The city entered a new cultural era in terms of infrastructure and momentum. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, twenty years in the planning, finally opened on Fifth Avenue. Lincoln Center was in its nascent stage and eventually would become the home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. And the Rockefeller family collectively gave about half of the $25 million needed to expand MoMA, the cultural temple that the family had helped found and fund in 1929.
MoMA had earned a reputation of connecting modern life to art. It elevated the idea of design—industrial, graphic, and so on—allowing it to be recognized as a legitimate art form. The museum had architecture, photography, and film departments, which was unusual for the time. As Thomas B. Hess wrote in 1957 in ARTnews, “The Museum is the sum of its Christmas-cards and upholstery-fabric competitions, Mondrians, automobiles and Pollocks, Latin-American watercolors and Picassos.”20 Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s founding director, was still there, and its employment policies helped promising young artists willing to take entry-level jobs.
In that time, making a living as an artist in New York was an arduous task, even for some of those at the top. For example, though Pollock’s canvases eventually sold for millions of dollars, during his lifetime they seldom were sold for more than $1,500. For younger artists, the economic outlook was far worse.
LeWitt was first mentioned in the New York Times in an article by Nan Robertson that was published in July 1961. Robertson wrote:
The public view of painters and sculptors often focuses on two extremes, both sentimental. One is the glamorous beatnik sipping espresso into the late hours on Macdougal Street. The other is the artist struggling, starving and suffering alone in abject, but poetic, poverty.
The truth is that even the most dedicated artists in New York waiting for discovery must and do work part-time as teachers, illustrators, museum guards, house painters, carpenters, salesmen, antique restorers, truck drivers, waiters, bakers, barbers, masseurs, plumbers and fashion models.21
Robertson’s piece cited a study made by Bernard S. Myers, a professor at the City