Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom

began to study art at the Pratt Institute when she was sixteen. She later said: “The only painting I knew, and that was very little, was abstract expressionism, and at Pratt they didn’t stress painting at all. When you started painting class, you had to do a lemon still life and you graduated to a lemon and bread still life and you graduated to a lemon, egg, bread still life and this was not my idea of painting. I was also much younger, at least emotionally, and chronologically, too, than everybody else.”³⁸ She got the job at Seventeen when she wasn’t yet seventeen: “For some strange reason they hired me. I think it was just because of the gall of coming up there.” She later studied design at Cooper Union Art School, which she loved, and then she went to Yale University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree and became a faculty favorite. She recalled: “I loved Albers’s color course but I had had it at Cooper. I was Albers’s little color studyist—everybody always called me that—and every time he walked into the classroom he would ask, ‘What did Eva do?’ But Albers couldn’t stand my painting and, of course, I was much more serious about the painting.” At the time she met LeWitt, she was also trying to make it as a painter. And like him, she had taken jobs in Manhattan to pay the rent—in her case first at a jewelry store and then as a textile designer.

      In one of his last interviews, in 2001, LeWitt described meeting Hesse: “She was really cute, very pretty, very alive, very hip at that time. She knew a lot of people because of being at Yale … even though what she was doing was kind of still-school stuff, I thought it was really pretty good.”³⁹

      From his own testimony and from that of the sculptor Tom Doyle, who later married Hesse, LeWitt fell hard for the young artist. Many men did. In 1972, the New York Post reported, “There is no one who doesn’t mention Eva Hesse’s beauty—a dark, brooding, 5-foot-3 beauty, with dangling earrings and clunky shoes and Bohemian—but always stylish—clothes.”⁴⁰ LeWitt said in 1972, “Yeah, well, I was sort of wowed by her, but unfortunately she wasn’t wowed by me.”⁴¹ Doyle’s explanation of why Hesse had no romantic feelings for LeWitt was that “she said Sol reminded her too much of her father.”⁴² Nevertheless, LeWitt and Hesse had a deep relationship, which eventually helped both struggling artists discover new approaches to their work. Like all female artists of the time, Hesse had an extra burden as she tried to succeed in a maledominated field.

      The fact that LeWitt would come to help her and then other female artists before the dawn of feminism earned him many admirers. In 1978 he wrote, “It was my friendship with Eva that made me aware of the problems that women artists face in a world dominated by the male hierarchy…. There seems to be an implicit rule (even among female critics, etc.) that a woman can never be considered the dominant practitioner of a style or idea.”⁴³

      ■ LeWitt met Doyle in 1961 and immediately started talking football. Both were avid fans, and both had played the game—though LeWitt’s artistry on the gridiron was hidden in the middle of the line, and Doyle’s wasn’t. As a wide receiver (then simply called an “end”) for Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, his exploits had been clearly seen, and he retained an insider’s knowledge of the game. But he had been the only wide receiver in the Mid-American Conference to become more interested in making sculpture than in scoring touchdowns. He was also—no minor point, from LeWitt’s point of view—in love with Hesse. Lucy Lippard described Doyle’s appeal when Hesse met him at the opening of his first show, at the Allan Stone Gallery. He was “a lively and charming Pennsylvania and Ohio Irishman, several years older than [Hesse], a dedicated sculptor, good talker, Civil War buff, and Joyce addict.”⁴⁴

      Doyle and Hesse soon married, and worked and lived at first in a loft on Eighteenth Street near Fifth Avenue, moving to the Bowery in 1963. “The trouble was it was against the law to live in a loft,” Doyle recalled.⁴⁵ Artists were supposed to limit their time in such venues to working and live elsewhere. Far from having the cachet that it now does, in those days lofts were mostly dingy firetraps in down-and-out neighborhoods. “Artists specialized in hiding things from inspectors,” Doyle said. But he was not very talented at this: “One time a fireman came to my loft and asked me, ‘You got a stove? You got hot water? What about that bed, there?’ I shrugged. He said, ‘You artists—you don’t have nothing but a good time.’” Robert Barry’s solution—when he had an apartment on the corner of Grand and the Bowery with no heat and only cold water, for $70 a month—was to take a $20 bill out of his shirt pocket and hand it to the inspector. As a result, he never had any trouble, except for the time when he was instructed to put a screen around the potbellied stove.⁴⁶

      LeWitt had faced similar problems, but he used his wits instead of his bank account to solve them. Once when an inspector came to his own dilapidated studio and living quarters, he had to figure out how to avoid a summons to court and, at the same time, not present false testimony as he had in the I. M. Pei case. According to Doyle, when the inspector asked, “Do you live here, too?” LeWitt replied, “Would you live in such a place?”⁴⁷ This answer, apparently, solved the issue.

      In those days, as no artist in the circle could afford extravagance, they helped each other as best they could. For example, LeWitt became part of the construction crew when Doyle and Hesse moved from Eighteenth Street to the Bowery, an area where the rents were cheap, the working spaces were ample (their place, though ramshackle, had wide floorboards and two fireplaces), and the conveniences of life scarce. So was privacy and a sense of safety, though Doyle said, “the bums were so drunk they wouldn’t bother you.”⁴⁸

      Doyle had just finished building a studio for the jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and he needed immediate help to make a studio space for himself and Hesse. LeWitt arrived at the right time. He helped install plumbing in the bathroom, repair the plaster walls, and put in a toilet and bathtub. Doyle very much appreciated the help, though he noted that “Sol wasn’t a great mechanic.”⁴⁹

      When everything was done, Doyle and Hesse set up shop, with space enough to invite others in who had worked alongside of them before the move. So Grace Bakst Wapner and Ethelyn Honig also did their artwork in the Bowery district.

      Still in her mid-twenties, Wapner became part of the LeWitt-Doyle-Hesse-MoMA circle in 1960 without any real intention of doing so. Though she had graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from Bennington College a few years earlier and had taken courses in sculpture and ceramics, she had followed a conventional path for young women at the time—marrying young, having children, and thinking of art as something of a hobby. She was convinced that her own talent, whatever it was, should be confined to producing things that would never be seen in public. Her attitude, in short, was a common one among female artists in a male-dominated profession.

      Even so, on weekdays she took the kids to school and then rode buses from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side to work on her art and pursue her blossoming friendship with Doyle, LeWitt, and Hesse.

      LeWitt was known throughout this period and later for providing encouragement to artists without regard to gender, a rare gift in those days. Both Hesse and Wapner were recipients of his guidance. Wapner recalled:

      I was a totally immature artist then, just beginning to find my way. I didn’t know Warhol, Lichtenstein, or [James] Rosenquist. Sol deliberately took me around to meet various artists: Judd, Flavin, [Carl] Andre. I remember that we had lunch with Carl, and he doodled on a napkin, and then Sol picked it up and put it in his pocket.

      Sol helped me a great deal. There was something about his mind and the way it worked. We spent a lot of time together, he often came with me to pick up the kids from school, and we talked about everything.⁵⁰

      LeWitt gave Wapner other rare gifts. On Mozart’s birthday, he brought her keys from an old piano. And he gave her lists of books to read by Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, and Gustave Flaubert, as well as Jane Austin’s Emma. He was a Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, but much kinder than Higgins. He was also something of a Harry Houdini, or perhaps merely an ordinary thief.

      One day Wapner discovered that “I was missing a piece from my [sculpture] work. There were a lot of scraps I had been putting together. I was sure I had this piece there somewhere, but couldn’t