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Lot Essay
The current work, Untitled or Steel Piece, comprises three identically-sized latticed steel squares coated in baked enamel. It is one of Sol LeWitt’s Modular Structures, among the artist’s chief contributions to Minimalism.
LeWitt labeled them structures, or in the case of the present lot, pieces, in order to differentiate them from either paintings or sculptures: according to the artist, they were both. Their humanistic dimensions — taking inspiration from da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and never being so large that the viewer wouldn’t be able to look down upon or at it as a whole— recall LeWitt’s wall drawings, which he began to create the very same year the current work was completed, in 1968. His wall drawings were presented as instructions that others could follow and execute themselves. As he grew accustomed to the medium, LeWitt created wall drawings that were ever more complex and varied in size: they could be made as large or as small as the executer wished, depending on the wall space available to him or her.
Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, Sol LeWitt studied painting at Syracuse University before serving in the Korean War in 1949. Afterwards he would travel to Italy, where he became acquainted with the Old Masters, including Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci and, in the realm of architecture, Brunelleschi, whose infinite repetitions of the cube in his design of chapels, churches and hospitals bear the very same humanistic foundations as LeWitt’s modular structures of five centuries later. In 1953 he moved to New York City to attend the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now known as the School of Fine Arts), and from 1955 to 1956 he worked as a graphic designer under the architect I.M. Pei.
Ten years later, in 1965, LeWitt would have his very first solo show at the Daniels Gallery, run by the artist Dan Graham. He included several floor pieces in this show, and the next year he would participate in the Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum, an important precursor to defining the Minimalist Movement, to which he submitted an untitled, nine-unit modular cube. Three years later, the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (now known as Kunstmuseum Den Haag) would give LeWitt his very first retrospective, where his Untitled (Modular Cube) executed the same year as the current work was displayed front and center on the gallery floor, offering its viewers a 360 degree view of the structure. Untitled (Steel Piece) embodies the humanist and rationalist principles of both Minimalism and Conceptualism that have eternalised LeWitt’s oeuvre as one of the most significant aesthetic contributions of the twentieth century.
LeWitt labeled them structures, or in the case of the present lot, pieces, in order to differentiate them from either paintings or sculptures: according to the artist, they were both. Their humanistic dimensions — taking inspiration from da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and never being so large that the viewer wouldn’t be able to look down upon or at it as a whole— recall LeWitt’s wall drawings, which he began to create the very same year the current work was completed, in 1968. His wall drawings were presented as instructions that others could follow and execute themselves. As he grew accustomed to the medium, LeWitt created wall drawings that were ever more complex and varied in size: they could be made as large or as small as the executer wished, depending on the wall space available to him or her.
Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, Sol LeWitt studied painting at Syracuse University before serving in the Korean War in 1949. Afterwards he would travel to Italy, where he became acquainted with the Old Masters, including Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci and, in the realm of architecture, Brunelleschi, whose infinite repetitions of the cube in his design of chapels, churches and hospitals bear the very same humanistic foundations as LeWitt’s modular structures of five centuries later. In 1953 he moved to New York City to attend the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now known as the School of Fine Arts), and from 1955 to 1956 he worked as a graphic designer under the architect I.M. Pei.
Ten years later, in 1965, LeWitt would have his very first solo show at the Daniels Gallery, run by the artist Dan Graham. He included several floor pieces in this show, and the next year he would participate in the Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum, an important precursor to defining the Minimalist Movement, to which he submitted an untitled, nine-unit modular cube. Three years later, the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (now known as Kunstmuseum Den Haag) would give LeWitt his very first retrospective, where his Untitled (Modular Cube) executed the same year as the current work was displayed front and center on the gallery floor, offering its viewers a 360 degree view of the structure. Untitled (Steel Piece) embodies the humanist and rationalist principles of both Minimalism and Conceptualism that have eternalised LeWitt’s oeuvre as one of the most significant aesthetic contributions of the twentieth century.