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TWO

SOLLY

In May 1935, a six-year-old boy in Connecticut used red and black pencils to draw a Mother’s Day card that featured a heart on the cover.¹ When he finished his work, he gave the card to the woman who read Russian novels to him in the original language, cooked him borscht with potatoes and onions, and provided other homemade comforts in a period when, much too early in life, the child learned the meaning of bereavement. The Mother’s Day drawing, then, is both Sol LeWitt’s oldest surviving work and a symbol of the enduring bond between a mother and son.

That rendering of a heart, however, provides little evidence that its artist was a prodigy who one day would create a new definition of art. It is a little unusual, yes—instead of a wide and ebullient heart in the style of most childhood versions, it is narrow and deep, as if stretched from top to bottom.

On the back of the card is this handwritten message: “ROSES ARE RED/ VIOLETS ARE BLUE/ YOU ARE THE BEST MOTHER/ I EVER KNEW.”

Many decades later, after the adult LeWitt was identified as a pioneer in two of art’s many “isms,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl said: “The Minimalists scared me to death. Except for Sol LeWitt, who must have been dropped on his head as a kid. He’s the sweetest, most decent, most intelligent man in the world, and he’s a minimalist. How does that work?”²

Dropped on his head as a kid? In a way, yes.

■ Solomon LeWitt, called “Solly” by the immediate family, was the only child of two refugees who emigrated from Russia but didn’t meet until they were living in the United States. Like all new arrivals from a different culture who spoke a different language, they had much to overcome. Each, though, set examples for their child about the need for independent thinking, taking personal and professional risks, and performing tikkun olam (Hebrew for “repair of the world”).

One piece of memorabilia from those days is a formal black-and-white photograph of a man dressed in a tailored woolen suit and waistcoat. It shows that Dr. Abraham LeWitt had angular cheekbones, an imposing forehead, a well-groomed mustache, and lips that were slightly downturned but indicated a bemused countenance.

At the time the photo was taken, circa 1930, Dr. LeWitt; his wife, Sophie; and their son lived at 3333 Main Street in Hartford, the “Insurance City,” which then was one of the richest communities in the country in terms of household income.

Connecticut’s capital city had had a run of good fortune that extended back into the Gilded Age, fed not only by the insurance giants Aetna, Travelers, Hartford Fire (as it was known before it became the Hartford), and others but also by the nineteenth-century publishing empire that benefited writers who remain among the city’s most luminous figures: Mark Twain and his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe—the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even in the Great Depression Hartford remained a city of distinction. It was sometimes called “the Athens of America,” largely because of the work and vision of A. Everett “Chick” Austin, the director of the oldest public art museum in the United States, the Wadsworth Atheneum. Indeed, members of the LeWitt family were in the audience on the night in 1934 when the museum’s theater hosted the world premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, the first opera with an all-black cast.³

The home of Abraham, Sophie, and Solly was two miles north of the museum. Like many of the single-family houses in Hartford’s prosperous north end, the LeWitt home was spacious—occupying 2,818 square feet and containing four bedrooms and two baths⁴—reflecting Abraham’s standing as a surgeon and one of the founders of Mount Sinai Hospital, then a new institution, where he served as medical director. Even then, however, Dr. LeWitt found himself under great stress, a circumstance that he well knew could exacerbate his condition—he had been diagnosed with arteriosclerosis in addition to colorectal cancer.

How much of the details of Abraham’s life story were passed along from Sophie to her son is unknown, but it appears that some important information was omitted. In the artist’s later years, he said that he had few memories of his father, and he was uncertain about where Abraham had been born. He thought it was Turkey, as the birth certificate specified,⁵ yet there had never been any stories passed down in the family about that country. However, among the documents the family kept was a copy of a certificate from an official registry in Istanbul that listed Abraham’s father, Simcho, in the year 1891:

Eligibility to vote: None

Religious Affiliation: Jew

Date and Place of Birth: Ottoman Calendar 1247 (1832/33) Austria

Trade and Qualifications and Means of Livelihood: None

Age: 60

Father’s Name and place of residence: Avram

Name and Reputation: Simchi [sic] LeWitt

Type of Residence: House

Street No.: 23

Street: Bath House

Neighborhood: Dark Mustafa Pasha the Archer

District: 6

City: Istanbul

Permanent distinguishing mark: None

Moustache and Beard: Red Beard

Eyes: Hazel

Height: Medium.⁶

Sometime after this certificate was issued, however, the family moved from Istanbul to Palestine, taking up residence in Hebron, where Abraham was born. Thus the confusion. At the time, Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and this fact, presumably, led the artist to believe that Turkey was his father’s birthplace.

Abraham LeWitt left Palestine after becoming one of the few Jews accepted to study in Russia at the Samuel Poliakov School of Mining Engineers, in Gorlovka, from which he graduated with highest honors in 1890.⁷ Later that year, he and his mother, Hinda, sailed from Hamburg to Liverpool on the passenger ship Warrington. In Liverpool they boarded the Pennsylvania and sailed for New York City, where they lived with Abraham’s sister, Bella, in an apartment on East Thirty-Ninth Street.

Abraham worked with his brother, Michel, in the latter’s Brooklyn jewelry store, which eventually moved to New Britain. Abraham was briefly employed after that as a mining engineer near Scranton, Pennsylvania, but then, wanting to be near members of his family, took a job at Russell & Erwin Manufacturing Co. of New Britain. There, his work on cylinder locks led to patents held by the firm. But he had plans to become a physician and enrolled in the first class at the new Cornell University Medical College in Harlem. Two years later, in 1902, the State of New York issued medical license number 4230 to Dr. Abraham Le-Witt. Once again to be near relatives, he moved back to Connecticut. In a relatively brief time, he became one of Hartford’s most prominent physicians, specializing in maladies of the eyes, nose, and throat, and also practicing surgery. He invented several medical devices, including clamps used in eye surgery and a girdle harness that helped intestines heal after abdominal surgery, which led him to become one of the city’s wealthier residents. He invested in real estate, particularly apartment buildings, a financial plan that worked well for a time. He intended to stay single until his mother died.

■ Sophie (a nickname for Sofia) Appell was born in 1890 in Rostov-on-Don, in western Russia. She was one of the seven children of Solomon and Elizabeth Appell. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, for which many Russians incorrectly blamed the Jews, pogroms proliferated in cities and villages across Russia. In 1892, Solomon parted from his wife and children to see if he could find a place in the new world for them.

Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Jewish German banker, had devoted some of his enormous fortune to helping Eastern European Jews emigrate. Initially most of the Jews moved to Argentina, Canada, and Palestine, but many were also immigrating to the United States by the 1880s. Other charitable and humanitarian efforts were begun, and Jews from Russia began to settle on American farmland that was largely available because it was too difficult for others to till.

This is how Solomon Appell ended up in Colchester, Connecticut, along with many other Jewish farmers. By the end of the nineteenth century, his farm had become a working concern, and shortly thereafter he sent for the rest of his family. The timing was fortuitous. Soon afterward, nearly 150 citizens of Rostov-on-Don were slaughtered in a pogrom.

Sophie was sixteen years old when she left Russia for America in 1906, traveling from Hamburg with her brothers Sam, Moses, and Aaron aboard the Graf Waldersee (their mother would come later). In Colchester she worked on the farm, but she also studied nursing.

A little more than a decade after that she was back in Europe—France, specifically—serving as a nurse during World War I. Her three brothers, Sam, Harry, and Louis served as soldiers toward the end of the war. A story in the Hartford Daily Courant indicates that the Appells made one of the largest American family contributions to the war effort. The account details the service of the brothers—a quartermaster sergeant, a machine gunner, and an army hospital worker—and then offers the following description of their sister:

Sophie Appell has done valiant service. She was graduated from Mount Sinai Hospital at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After being called to service, she was temporarily on duty at Cape May, N.J., General Hospital #11 and was sent from there to France. Her letters tell of the wonderful morale of the American soldiers. She expressed pride in New Britain boys with whom she came in contact. A recent letter tells of having met David Rosenberg, Fred Ward, John Storey, Edward Hayes, Joseph Farr, and John Kerin, all well-known young men of the city.

That Miss Appell was popular with her associates at Camp May is evidenced by the fact that in recognition of her service overseas, they named one of their rooms in the quarters at General Hospital #11 in her honor.⁸

Later in the piece, Louis Appell is quoted on the progress of the war, and the family spirit: “Never fear. We have [them] on the run, and we will be among the first to enter Berlin. Don’t worry. An Appell can always take care of himself or herself.”

When Sophie returned she had received a Red Cross commendation: “Sophie Appell—foreign service certificate … September 1918 to August 1919. The American National Red Cross tenders this expression of sincere appreciation for the faithful and efficient services rendered by you to this organization in its work overseas connected with the great European War when you served in the Nurses’ Bureau. Certificate of identity, no. 22842, Nurse, Base unit 60 at Hoboken…. One scar over left cheek, one mole under left eye.”⁹

The unofficial record consists of postcards from the war zone. One of them indicates that in France Sophie met a suitor. But the romance wasn’t going to go anywhere as he was not Jewish but a Christian from Texas, and her family objected.¹⁰

A year after her return, when she working as a nurse in Hartford, she met the confirmed bachelor, Abraham LeWitt, who had treated Sophie’s father in his medical practice.¹¹ Nineteen years her senior, the forty-five-year-old the doctor was an adventurer who had traveled to Berlin and Vienna to investigate up-to-date surgical techniques and other new methods of treatment. He had been one of the first residents of Hartford to own a high-end automobile—a Knox,¹² made in Springfield, Massachusetts—and among the first to be a victim of auto theft (someone stole the steering mechanism) and to be thrown from a car at a railroad crossing after a collision with a freighter (he suffered only minor injuries).

After his mother died in 1920, LeWitt proposed to Sophie Appell. The two were married on January 16, 1922, at the home of Rabbi Abraham Nowack, and honeymooned in Florida.

In addition to his career as a doctor, Abraham took up writing, apparently as an avocation. In a 1933 essay he foresaw a time when the automobile and incompetent or inebriated drivers would be at the heart of a great number of deaths.¹³ What is exceptional about the essay is the amount of research he had done to bolster his argument.

He also wrote a short story telling, in a foreshadowing of his son’s eventual passion for social justice, of a doctor faced with an ethical dilemma common in that time: how to protect a deeply distressed woman about to give birth who was unmarried at the time she conceived. The story that ends with the mother being sent off to an institution, an outcome the doctor deeply regrets.

The tale may have been based on a real Hartford incident, and it might indicate that that one night, after a hard day, Abraham at last found a way to address an issue that had troubled him—and, it may reasonably be inferred, left him with a guilty conscience. In any case, there is no doubt that Abraham’s final years were stressful.

He also was unfortunate with his real estate investments—which probably led to Sol LeWitt’s later expressing a reluctance to own real estate. Abraham’s investments were largely in properties in Hartford’s north end. Though these provided the level of income that allowed him and Sophie to travel as well as enjoy other luxuries, they also appear to have contributed to his eventually fatal medical condition. He was highly stressed as a result of at least two lawsuits filed against him, as a result of his inability to collect rent from his tenants in the heart of the Great Depression. One lawsuit was filed by the Society for Savings, a Hartford institution that had loaned Abraham money. The other, more crushing, suit was filed by his brother, Michel. On August 11, 1934, Abraham LeWitt collapsed at his home and died of a heart attack.¹⁴

In the following months, Sophie tried to avoid financial ruin. The only way she could manage was to try to collect rent herself: She had to go door to door begging people to pay, and hated it.¹⁵ Eventually, she realized that she would not be able to remain in her home.

■ When young Solly made his 1935 Mother’s Day card, he and his mother were living temporarily in a small apartment owned by Sophie’s sister, Luba Appell. She had taken them in after Abraham’s death, but she did not have substantial means either. Luba, who had lived alone, owned a small grocery store on the first floor of an apartment building, but she performed acts of charity, extending credit to those who in the midst of the Great Depression couldn’t pay their bills.

The view from Aunt Luba’s kitchen table in the spring of 1935 resembled New York as portrayed by painters in the Ashcan school.¹⁶ New Britain was a city of soot, but it had jobs. During the Great Depression the number of workers fell by a third, but the city’s factories still employed 11,000 men making hand tools, ball bearings, refrigerators, pots, machine parts, razor strops, coffin trimmings, and other items that had turned the city into an international destination for blue-collar workers.¹⁷

Downtown the sidewalks were crowded with people on their way to buy pirogues, sausages, or dark European bread; to go to the clothing shops; or to visit the Polish-language movie theater on Broad Street or the jewelry and optician shop owned by the LeWitts—members of Abraham’s extended family, which owned a variety of enterprises in the city and lived in much nicer housing than Luba’s. The circumstances of Sophie and Solly improved, if only modestly, when Sophie found work as a school nurse in 1936 and they moved to a second-floor apartment of their own, at 51 Cedar Street, off of West Main. The artist would recall in 1974, “I … remember living in a part of town that really wasn’t a very good part of town. It wasn’t so bad really. But I remember that people were out of work.”¹⁸

The Cedar Street location had at least one advantage: It was within easy walking distance of the library and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Few people could afford automobiles in the 1930s. Sophie would never learn to drive, and neither would her son (though certain people in rural Italy could testify that he foolishly took the wheel of a car at least once). The art museum was a community gathering spot, as in those days admission was free—primarily as a result of the generosity of the hosiery manufacturer John Butler Talcott and the philanthropist Grace Judd Landers. And as it turned out, it wasn’t the city’s manufacturing that made it a national sensation during those years, but an art exhibit.

Many decades earlier, in 1851, the Hartford Times had described New Britain as “a moral, well-regulated community.”¹⁹ That view held for a long time. Eventually, as both a teenager and a mature adult, Sol LeWitt would offer related descriptions that put the Times’s observation into an artistic context—the city could stifle ideas, especially those of young artists.

In 1929, the city became the focus of a national art story. What was then called the New Britain Institute, founded to offer educational opportunities, developed a small art collection. Its first curator, Fanny J. Brown, organized an ambitious temporary exhibit that featured the words of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Braque, and Modigliani—a real coup for a small, working-class city. But the head of the New Britain schools’ art program, Dewey Van Cott, considered the exhibit a travesty.²⁰

Van Cott wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the New Britain Herald, arguing that works of the artists represented in the exhibit ignored “such utterly unessential things as how to handle brushes, how to draw, what the principles of good design are and what constitutes good, harmonious color.”²¹ The controversy earned the Hardware City a national reputation for provincialism. ARTNews reported that the Van Cott’s criticism “might have been quoted from the Boston papers of 1913 when the Armory show invaded the sacred city.”²²

New Britain was hardly alone in its provincialism. Just nine miles away, in the more sophisticated Hartford, Chick Austin, the Wadsworth Atheneum’s director, was testing the patience of the institution’s trustees when he paid $399.65 for a painting by Mondrian—just one example of his devotion to modern art. In fact, the trustees were no more welcoming to expensive traditional paintings. When Austin paid a whopping $17,000 for a Caravaggio, the brilliant Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, an investment that secured the museum’s place as a repository of important art, the board objected to his profligate spending.²³

In such an atmosphere, the odds seemed against any young person’s being inspired to think outside the rules of art as they were accepted at the time. Indeed, on the roster of native sons and daughters of New Britain who became nationally prominent, there is no prominent artist. To be sure, the city produced Walter Camp, often referred to as the “father of American football,” and two national political figures—Abraham Ribicoff, who was governor of Connecticut, a us senator, and secretary of health, education and welfare in the administration of President John F. Kennedy; and Paul Manafort, who served as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and in 2018 was convicted of several felonies. Even if adopted sons and daughters are added to the list, only one child of New Britain became an artist of international status. He was the child of a mother who never stopped doting on him and a father who never had the chance to do so.

■ When a boy loses a father at a tender age, there is often speculation about the effect of the loss and the legacy of the father. The earliest evidence shows that the young Solly seemed withdrawn. This is apparent in the testimony of childhood friends and school records. Anna Foberg, principal of Lincoln Elementary School, wrote:

Solomon did a very good job as a traffic officer. He was pleasant, not too bossy and kept his head at all times. He watched the children do things and talked about it in the meeting instead of picking small flaws. He needs to take his work less seriously and learn to smile. He also needs to step up and take charge of things as he finds that may be needed. He is apt to do just the ordinary job until an older person shows him where he may do things on his own. He was elected to the Safety Council by the votes of 200 children’s teachers of the upper grades. He was chosen second best in a group of four.²⁴

Miss Brown, a teacher at the school, wrote: “Solomon is a sober little fellow. He needs to smile and enjoy other boys and girls. He does very good work but acts too old for his age. Not a very tidy housekeeper. Had to be reminded to come back from traffic and clear away his work.”²⁵

As years passed, however, he occasionally showed signs of an emerging sense of humor. Walter Friedenberg, Solly’s boyhood friend and classmate at Central Junior High, remembers: “He was not loquacious, and his diction was slurring. But he was alert, companionable, and witty. He had a giggle. That little giggle.”²⁶

Friedenberg remembers the games that their group played. There was football at Walnut Creek Park and baseball wherever the kids could play it. In those games, Solly LeWitt fit in nicely.

No doubt, however, he was different from other boys. Perhaps the clearest example is his choice of which professional baseball team to follow. New Britain is halfway between New York City and Boston, and the loyalties of the Hardware City’s residents always have been split between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Solly, however, supported the Cleveland Indians, whose home games were played hundreds of miles away. This wasn’t because of the physical and historical connection between Connecticut and Northeastern Ohio. Solly wasn’t even aware at the time that that part of Ohio had once belonged to the Constitution State—it was its Western Reserve, where Cleveland sits. He told his friends simply that a person should think for himself. And when he thought for himself, he liked the Tribe, led by the farm boy wonder, Bob Feller. He never saw the Indians play in person, and this was long before televised games. So he followed them only in radio broadcasts and the box scores and brief game accounts in the New Britain Herald. This loyalty earned Solly a healthy dose of abuse, something he laughed about later—but he remained an Indians fan until his death.

Entering his teens, Solly became a member of the Boy Scouts and went several days a week to Hebrew School at Temple B’Nai Yisrael, the Conservative congregation of New Britain. The city had two synagogues at the time, the other Orthodox. And in early October 1940, Solly was called to the Torah for the first time as a bar mitzvah. Among other duties, he delivered a short speech that Saturday morning. It clearly indicates the views of a boy who understood what his mother had done for him. As his cousin Celeste LeWitt would say decades later, “Sophie’s whole life centered on her one child,” and she never walked past him without giving him a hug.²⁷ Friedenberg recalled, “The way she looked at him and spoke to him with great affection and love … I thought of her as a very warmhearted person.”²⁸ This was obvious in the speech, which read in part: “Spare, I pray Thee, my dear mother for many a year. Bless her for the tender attention and selfless care she has given me to this day. May it be Thy will that she live many years to witness the results of her toil so that she may see that she has not labored in vain.”²⁹

It certainly appeared that Sophie had not labored in vain. Solly’s early report cards were promising (with As and Bs). He received As for effort, obedience, courtesy, and cleanliness. Oddly, he earned Bs in penmanship, in which he later excelled and used in dramatic fashion in much of his work. And he did well in the Boy Scouts, earning merit badges in athletics, cooking, pioneering, safety, public health, bird study, personal health, swimming, lifesaving, handicrafts, first aid, stamp collecting, rowing, reading, civics, reptile study, path finding, scholarship, and camping.

Solly’s interest in stamps and the passion he demonstrated for his collection may easily be viewed as a part of a behavioral pattern, since he would eventually collect art obsessively. His passion to own beautiful stamps is reflected in a letter he sent in 1941 to Reverend H. G. C. Hallock, a missionary in Shanghai, China, who immersed himself in Chinese culture and collected local ephemera:

Dear Sir, I received your address through D. Mayer’s friend in Lenox Hill Hospital. Although I know you are quite busy I was wondering if you could possibly send me some extra stamps you have lying around, because I am a stamp collector and have a quite large collection. My age is 13. To get back to my stamps, I have a few (14) covers from throughout the world and I thought it would be nice to have some from China. Will you please acknowledge this letter. I would appreciate it very much.

Sincerely,

Sol LeWitt

51 Cedar Str.

New Britain, Conn., USA³⁰

In school he took art classes, and many of his drawings survive. They show a very different Sol LeWitt—one who, in art anyway, was either obliged to or decided to think conventionally. He did portraits in pencil of famous men in public life: James Madison, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Simon Bolivar.³¹ It is not known whether he was free to choose his subjects, but if he was the choices indicate an early interest in history and politics that stayed with him. The portraits were straight-ahead drawings whose style would surprise no one, yet one could draw an obvious conclusion: the boy had talent, something that he dismissed in adult interviews as something everyone has. But the drawings he did at the age of fifteen stand out for their originality, attitude, and invention.

The portrait of James Monroe was reflective, to be sure, of images of the sixth president at the time in terms of the facial shape, hair, and so on. But the young LeWitt’s portrait of Monroe added elements showing that at an early age the artist had begun to form ideas about the world. It shows Monroe as the mastermind of the Monroe Doctrine, standing tall on a map of America that features a sign: “Warning!! You are now entering the Western Hemisphere…. Leave Guns and Knives at Home.” In this drawing, the United States is surrounded by a fence with its posts dug into the ocean. That ocean was also a theme for him in the sense that historic boats became subjects for his work. There are pencil sketches of a Spanish warship, the Matthew of Bristol (similar to the Santa Maria), an English warship of 1560, and a Roman warship dated 60 B.C.E. All of the vessels were sailing, perhaps, from landlocked New Britain. Unlike some of the other work, these maritime images have a great amount of detail. An observer studying LeWitt’s ships and the intricate if much more abstract designs that emerged in his art decades later might conclude that the artist’s mature vision of art began to develop in childhood.

In the summer between his junior and senior years of high school, Solly worked at manual labor he despised. He spent his free time expanding his views, commenting on present-day world affairs—which were dominated, of course, by World War II.

This sixteen-year-old, who had never traveled beyond the boundaries of Connecticut, had sophisticated ideas. A cartoon he drew on August 13, 1944, shows the metaphorical ship Germania sinking, with a few people on board representing Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. Private LeWitt’s advice appeared below: “You’d better jump while you’ve got the chance.” A few days later, Solly drew Hitler with his hands to his head and the Grim Reaper about to hand him a death cocktail. The title of the drawing was The Day of Reckoning.

But subtlety and a grasp of how people acquire and retain power were also evident. In another August 1944 drawing, Solly shows two German men in suits talking about the war. The death camps had recently been discovered, and news of disappearing Jews had certainly reached 51 Cedar Street. One of the men in the drawing whispers to the other: “I never would have imagined. Goodness.” The other whispers back: “Und der Russians vant to Communize the United States und Britain—and the Jews vere the only vons to profit in the war. And that’s not all …” Below is a quote attributed to Hitler: “When you tell them a lie, tell them a big one.” Perhaps the most sophisticated drawing from that breakthrough summer shows an American businessman in a stupor, popping his vest buttons and railing, “Down with Russia, down with England, let the rest of the world go to hell.” The title was “Hitler’s Rear Guard—The Isolationist.”

Mort Jaffe, one of Solly’s high school friends, doesn’t remember these drawings. Jaffe recalls only the European piece that hung near the kitchen table at 51 Cedar Street. He didn’t know who had drawn it, but he didn’t like it. It was sketchier, not intended to be representational, in the manner of schools of art that emerged after the impressionist period: “It was an ink drawing. A lot of white. It didn’t make sense to me, as compared to Rembrandts.”³²

Jaffe was at the house because Sophie LeWitt, whom he recalls as being “a very liberal parent,” was the only mother in the neighborhood who allowed the boys to play seven-card stud poker any time they wanted. They came in not through the living room door but through the back door, “in the European fashion,” Jaffe recalls. “We played there maybe twice a week. Five of us—Wilbur K. Williams, Bill Rachlin, Samuel Abrahamson, Sol, and me. Only we never in those days called him Sol. We knew him as Saul. Just Saul. Like the king. I was surprised years later when his name was spelled S-O-L, because I never knew him that way.”³³

Friedenberg, who several decades later became publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer, said: “Why did I like Sol? Because he was quiet, reserved, good-natured, witty and Jewish—and I was taught at home to be friendly and nonprejudiced toward Negroes and Jews.” He offered the following reminiscence:

It was an early fall day, probably a Saturday, as I recall, when we were in 9th or 10th grade. Ten or a dozen schoolmates—boys only of course—would gather in Walnut Hill Park for a game of touch football….

One day, for the first time, Sol showed up to play. I was surprised because he was conspicuously non-athletic, but I was glad to see him, as were the others. He was on the opposing team from mine and like me was a lineman, blocking and tagging the runner when we could. He seemed to be not quite in a flow of play, doubtless because he was the only one of us wearing eyeglasses, and they were of a definitely unfashionable rimless kind.

It started to rain lightly, but of course we kept playing, like real football teams do. Our hair, our clothing, our shoes, the grass, the ball all got wet, but we played on. Then on the next play, Sol and I were on the scrimmage line facing each other, and I noticed that the rain had coated his glasses with water, and I thought, “Heck, how can he SEE?” Yet he was still in there, playing with all his heart. My esteem for Sol went up.

Then, after the game was over, Sol invited me to his home, and I was pleased and accepted. It was an unpretentious apartment in a small building on a side street near the park. We were greeted by his mother, a kindly woman who continually gave me a blissful, serene smile and served me and Sol a cup of hot chocolate and a pastry with nuts and apples. She didn’t say much but seemed very pleased that Sol had invited me to their home. I didn’t say long because I had to get home.

It was only when we were in the army and became solid friends, Sol told me his mother was a nurse and that his father, a doctor, had died when was just starting school. I thought then that maybe [the reason] Mrs. LeWitt smiled so much was that she was pleased that Sol had a friend.³⁴

However, Solly’s schoolwork during this time was certainly not up to Sophie’s expectations, as she held onto her hopes that he would eventually decide to go to medical school. His final grades for his junior year, 1943–44, were:

English: B

Physics: C

French 1: C

Chemistry: B

American history: A

His grades improved somewhat in his senior year, when he had the chance to take electives—including, for the first time, the field in which he would excel:

English (college prep): B

Physical education: A

Physics: C

Art: A

Latin American history: A³⁵

The report cards reveal his two lasting passions: art and history. What they don’t necessarily show was his emerging interest in international affairs. At some point in high school, he entered an essay contest. How he fared isn’t clear, but essay is still in existence. In it is a deep sense of humility and questioning that would become one of LeWitt’s trademarks:

Not the kind that preaches that everyone should love me, but that which teaches each to love all…. A tolerant person sees at once all sides of a question and at the same time sees the right one. That which benefits the greatest number of people. A tolerant person does not consider himself any better than his associates and his race and nation no better than his neighbors. Freedom and peace follow naturally from tolerance. It sounds simple but it is the most difficult of things to do. Men’s minds are hard to change, especially when they live in the past.³⁶

The essay is astonishing for its maturity and the glimpse it provides into the artist’s career and personal values. In arguing for the spirit of tolerance, he refers to what would become a lifelong quest. In addition, a reader of the entire essay would see a fierce originality in it—unlike the bar mitzvah speech a few years earlier, which seemed more scripted. Solly understood complexity but at the same time argued that complexity should be no impediment to righteous action. This is early evidence of his independent thought and an indication, in his assertion that he doesn’t need to be loved by everyone, that he understands going along with the crowd can take an unthinking person in the wrong direction.

When Solly entered the essay contest, friends assumed that if he won he wouldn’t want to read his work aloud at an assembly. But he proved to be no recluse.

Like most of the Jewish male students at New Britain Senior High, Solly joined a Jewish club. His had about forty members. Jaffe, one of the members, recalled:

Every Monday we had a meeting in the Main Street office of the B’nai B’rith which sponsored us. You could play pool, cards. We had a Ping-Pong table, and it was a place where we could meet and talk … not much else to do in the middle of the war. Nobody had [a] car, gasoline was rationed, so very little dating was done. Even if you had a car, the kids didn’t have driver’s license[s]. The ration was something like three gallons per week. We had parties—very few. Later on we had basketball uniforms and played other sports. Sol played in some of it. In baseball and football, he was a not a star.³⁷

And, Jaffe says, Sol never wanted to play quarterback or be the leader. That was the quality that led to a deep misunderstanding between the two that threatened their friendship. The annual election for officers of the club was coming up. To the surprise of everyone, particularly Jaffe, Sol decided to run for president against his cousin, David Sokol, and asked for Mort’s vote. As Jaffe recalled: “I told him I couldn’t do it. He asked me why not. I told him, ‘I never thought you would run. And I already promised your cousin my support.’ Well, Sol lost by two votes. If I had voted for him, it would have been a tie. After the election he came over to me and was very angry. He said, ‘Well, you’ll never be president.’ Then a week later, I came to a poker game. He gave me a dirty look as if he was going to kick me out, but he didn’t.”³⁸

Jaffe would go on to become a professor of marketing at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. He kept in touch with his old friend through the years and sometimes expressed surprise that LeWitt would want to be so famous. That had not necessarily been his goal when he applied for college at sixteen (the age at which he graduated from New Britain Senior High). His mother; his much older cousins, Bella and Nellie; and other relatives urged him to follow his late father’s path and go to medical school, but he had no interest in it and instead wanted to pursue art. He once told an interviewer, “I couldn’t think of anything else.”³⁹ But that response downplayed or ignored the passion and cleverness he had shown in art classes. A family compromise was finally reached: LeWitt would apply to Syracuse University, where he would get a solid education, but where there was a respected school of art.

On May 29, 1945, the New Britain seniors graduated. A special edition of the Red and Gold Review, the school newspaper, featured details about the commencement, photographs of and pieces by seniors, and local advertisements. On page 3 were twenty photos of seniors who received scholarships and awards. LeWitt’s photo is in the third row, second from the left, and the paper reported that he had received the Parker Reading Prize, “given through a competitive examination under the supervision of the head of the English department.”⁴⁰

There is also a quote from LeWitt: “Let us search continually for Beauty. For it is only in Beauty that we shall find full happiness. If we are unable to find Beauty in the Arts, we should keep searching and perhaps it will appear in the commonplace. Let us always try to enrich our thoughts through new experiences: for thought is really Life’s only reality.”⁴¹

Here, then, is direct evidence of his ultimate pursuit—art as thought rather than as object. It may be reasonably presumed, of course, that this was only a notion at the time. But here an entry in a school newspaper is a serious statement from a young man who will make ideas his life’s work.

His mother, however, still hoped that her only child would follow her late husband’s path. As LeWitt put it in a 1974 oral history interview at the Smithsonian:

In a way I was rebellious, because my family was middle-class, and my mother really wanted me to become a doctor, and one thing I didn’t want to do was to chop open people and look inside of them…. I didn’t think that that was any good. I didn’t want to be in business; it was a boring kind of a life, it seemed. [Being an artist] was a way of asserting my independence…. It was something I could do. I wasn’t precocious at all.⁴²

There was nothing for him in New Britain except his mother’s love, which he treasured, and the affection of a handful of relatives. The city itself held no opportunity in his view, because of its archconservative tastes in art and the laborious summer jobs he needed to take that had him sweeping streets and clearing manhole covers. Jaffe thought that there was some kind of family conspiracy: although the LeWitts and even the Appells had a variety of enterprises, Sol was never invited to work at any of them.

Aunt Luba might have been able to use him in the grocery store, but she continued to struggle, particularly after becoming the defendant in a lawsuit. A customer complained that she had bitten into a piece of bread made by the Schneider and Pomerantz Baking Company and was injured by a tack. She won her lawsuit against Luba, who was not able to recover the money from the supplier until much later.⁴³

Aunt Luba adored Solly, as did Bella and Nellie, who helped fill in what was missing in his family. Even so, the teenager never warmed to New Britain, though he was respectful in his public comments, and apparently resentment to the city mounted.

In the first major interview that the adult LeWitt granted (in 1974 to Paul Cummings for the Smithsonian Institution), he specified his frustrations:

I reached the point in high school where I had to go away to school, and by that time I had gotten to the point where it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be an artist, it was just that I couldn’t stand the life of the town, of this society. I just couldn’t. It was more of an act of rebellion I think than a positive act of wanting to be an artist…. If I were living in these days, I would go into some sort of political activity, or say, in the ’60s, I certainly would be in some political activity. Although I was interested in politics or political activity, there just wasn’t any real road that I could see. Being an artist is something that was in a way rebellious, in a way individualistic, and, in a way, it was an act of rebellion against … the bourgeois kind of society I was brought up in.⁴⁴

Thirty-three years earlier, he had expressed this view in a very different way. Before he left for Syracuse, he wrote a poem, called “Ode to My Home Town,” on the same typewriter that his father had used for his short stories:

New Britain, oh New Britain,

You moth-eaten town,

Your dirty old buildings,

Should all be torn down.

Your winters are cold

Your summers are hot,

The air is so foul

With mildew and rot.

The land of bad colds

Of sore throats and the flu,

Of sick aching headaches

And pneumonia, too.

You’re a blot on the landscape

The nation’s eyesore,

Your people dull-witted

And God what a bore!

The home of dumb cops

And bumpy thoroughfares,

With your stinky old busses

And ten cent fares.

You live among filth

And you don’t mind the smoke

You thrive on the filth

And to you it’s a joke.

Your beautiful starlings

Fly through the trees,

And the smell from the shops

Is what you call breeze.

You make us pay double

For all you can sell,

But after the war

You can all go to hell!

And when you reach Hades

And Satan greets you,

You’ll feel right at home—

He’s from here too.

The worst of it all,

You think you are swell,

You think you are perfect

And that gripes like hell.

You’re dead and you’re rotten;

You think you’re alive.

You think you’re a place.

Instead, you’re a dive.

You’re not worth this paper,

You’re not worth this ink,

You can take it from me,

NEW BRITAIN YOU STINK!⁴⁵

Whether LeWitt ever showed this “ode” to his adopted town to anyone is not known. And although it certainly reflects his attitude at the time, it wouldn’t be his last word on the place—far from it. He would one day be ranked among the Hardware City’s greatest benefactors.