Читать книгу Sol LeWitt - Lary Bloom - Страница 13

THREE

THE BOY FROM SYRACUSE

When sixteen-year-old Solly LeWitt arrived on the campus of Syracuse University for the first time in the summer of 1945, escorted by his loving older cousins Nellie and Bella LeWitt, he became one of the youngest students in the oldest fine arts educational institution in the country.

At that point, he knew little about the university except that one of his uncles had attended it, and that it was far enough from New Britain (about 275 miles) to suit him. He also knew that the Syracuse art department was strong, with a highly regarded faculty.

His first impressions, to be sure, were positive. In later years, LeWitt said that he thought the city was handsome and the countryside of hills and lakes even more so. He made no specific references in interviews to the campus architecture, but considering his eventual interest in the subject—including his evocation of architectural elements in his cement block pieces—it seemed that Syracuse had been a good choice.

The Romanesque Hall of Languages, the school’s only building when it first opened in 1873, was large enough to accommodate classrooms for 2,000 students. Nearby Crouse Hall, where the college of Fine Arts and Architecture was housed, was built in 1889 of brownstone and had a medieval atmosphere with its dark, rounded arches; carved woodwork; and high ceilings.

Syracuse, like many other private universities, had suffered financially in previous years, because so many of the young men eligible for enrollment were fighting in World War II. As a result of returning soldiers and the promise of a GI Bill, campuses were soon overwhelmed by larger and much more diverse student bodies. At Syracuse, whose undergraduate population nearly doubled in size to about 16,000 over a period of months, a shortage of housing meant that some classes (including some in art) were held in Quonset huts.

Martin Greenberg, who also came from Connecticut, met Solly LeWitt in the summer of 1945. Greenberg recalled that the housing shortage for freshman was so acute that the two of them were assigned to rooms in Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity. “It was a house on a nice, tree-lined street of big Victorians,” Greenberg remembered.¹ It was also headquarters for what became LeWitt’s circle of friends.

If he was looking for fellow artists, he found them instantly. Leon Morgenstern, Edward Feldman, and Russell North became buddies. On the fringe of the group was a young man from Massachusetts named Hilton Kramer, who planned to become an art critic. A few students pursuing degrees in other subjects were part of the circle, too. Deborah Faerber was an English major and prospective teacher; Alan Nevas would pursue a career in the law and become a judge; and Arnold “Libby” Libner would go on to establish many businesses, including a prominent firm that manufactured bird feed. Sydney Geffen, a veteran who owned a car, provided the wheels for group outings to Warren Street (also known, Faerber remembers, as Fluid Street because of its multitude of bars).

Libner, a cousin of Greenberg, might have been the one who grew closest to the young student from New Britain. “Arnold was quite literary,” Alan Nevas recalled: “He fancied himself a writer, and he wrote in a very flowery style, lots of flourishes in his fiction and nonfiction.”² Libner also had a reputation, his cousin said, for being “biting and acerbic.”

Nevas recalled that this circle of friends often went to clubs, shepherded there by North, who yearned to introduce his pals to the pleasures and complexities of bebop. “This helped us all,” Nevas said. “None of us were big socializers. One of the reasons was that right after the war all the soldiers had come back, so the coeds our age that we would normally be dating were more interested in twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-old veterans. Guys like Sol and I were left behind socially. Besides, Sol was shy, not a pushy guy. We sort of connected on that level. So our substitute for socializing was listening to jazz.”³

LeWitt’s other passion was sports, both as a player and a fan. At Syracuse, he quickly adopted the Orangemen, as the football team was known at the time, and he went to games at the old Archbold Stadium, though in the postwar years the team was weak and rarely won.

The rub was academics. As LeWitt said in 1974, “Well, I was quite young when I went and … it just took me quite a while to get adjusted. And then I didn’t have much art training. That was very tough on me because it was a very academic school. There was a lot of cast drawing and stuff like that, painting in a very academic way. And I was never very good at that. So that all made it more than usually difficult.”⁴

Naomi Bragman Stern, who took some of the same classes at the time, recalled, “Hour after hour, we drew from the same plaster casts of Greek statues. It was all very traditional.”⁵ Cecile Gray Bazelon, who enrolled in the art school the same semester as LeWitt did, remembered that students were required to produce a work in the Renaissance style.⁶ The faculty had relied for years on conservative stalwarts and taskmasters—“hard core old boys,” as another student of that period, Morton Kaish, recalled.⁷

Unada Gliewe remembered that many of her fellow students in the pared-down freshman class in painting switched to liberal arts because of the strictures of the faculty. The schedule, she said, was rigorous: “Freshman year, we had cast drawings 9 to 12 Monday through Friday. Boy, you learned to draw. First two years were things like that, basic courses. I had illustration from 2 to 5 every afternoon. Every month you had to turn in sketchbooks. Friday they came around critiquing. Dr. [Frederick] Haucke we had for that. That man had the broadest thumb in creation. To make his point he would drag his thumb through the wet paint.”⁸ Haucke is remembered by others, such as Gray Bazelon, as an excellent teacher and one of the few in the first year or two of study who required students to use their imaginations.

Gray Bazelon and Kaish were two students who took the classic approach to art and appreciated the school’s direction. They had the ability to copy styles of the masters. Those who earned the top grades were the ones who could render representational images without great difficulty. Kaish remembers that in such circumstances LeWitt had a difficult time:

We all worked in light-filled high-ceilinged rooms dedicated to Old World discipline from a faculty largely composed of formalists. It was all about drawing from plaster casts, figure drawing. As the first such art school in America, [Syracuse] wanted to pass along the classic approach. I loved it because that’s what I was interested in and could do. Unlike Sol. The thing I remember about him is that he was an intellectual—very thoughtful, quiet, not one of the student stars. I also remember his paintings at the time. He was struggling. We still worked from the model. Sol always painted their heads very large, pretty much in a modified monochrome, earth colors, grays. It was astonishing in that he did it his own way even in the face of criticism of the faculty. What Sol wanted to do was more expressive.⁹

Indeed, LeWitt would later say in an interview that the longtime dean of the college of fine arts, Lemuel C. Dillenback—hired by Syracuse in 1934 to teach design—thought that the student from New Britain might become a great success—if only he would choose a field other than art.¹⁰ This was the view not only of the authorities but also of some of his classmates. Gray Bazelon, reflecting on LeWitt’s rise to fame, said, “What Sol LeWitt became afterward had no relationship with who he was at Syracuse. He was a nonentity for four years. We couldn’t believe it [when he became famous].”¹¹ She had not wanted to spend time with him as she had with other students, such as one who “could draw like a Renaissance master.”

It was a considerable service that the curriculum was focused on Old World art. How could a young person prepare to become an artist or art teacher without being knowledgeable about Rafael, Giotto, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and the movements that stretched from the Renaissance to the eve of Modernism? But the eve of Modernism was the limit at Syracuse. By 1945, other universities’ fine arts programs were teaching about what had happened since the Paris Salon dropped its requirement that to be exhibited, works of art had to be idealistic. In other words, the definition of art, as the years passed, changed dramatically from work that was representational to work that was affected by other elements, and ideas became as prominent as renderings.

What did it mean, Syracuse students may have wanted to know, when Paul Cezanne’s green blobs represented trees; Georges Seurat extended the gap between artist and viewer with white space between dots and trusted the viewer to make up the difference; or when Marcel Duchamp decided that a urinal could be shown in an art gallery, turning both the object and assumptions about art upside down? What about the pranksters of Dadaism and the innovators of futurism, Fauvism, surrealism and other isms that led to the revolution of the abstract and its offshoots? Weren’t they important as definitions (and collections) of art were changing dramatically?

In the years that followed, LeWitt became passionate about the foundations of expression. He wrote, as a kind of career statement, “I’d like to produce something that I would not be ashamed to show Giotto.”¹² As he learned more about the world and traveled as much as any young artist of the era did, he understood that he was part of a continuum and found breathtaking the meticulous work of the masters, particularly those of the Italian Renaissance. His career, however, did not depend on his ability to learn their techniques. He grew to admire their achievements, but appreciating them, learning from them, and being inspired by them are quite different from copying them.

At Syracuse, the work that he was required to do meant that his freshman grades were mediocre at best.¹³ He received a D in design and Cs in still life and other art courses. In his sophomore year his performance improved a bit, though he still got Cs in his portrait and watercolor classes. He got Bs in still life, illustration, and art history. And his best grade of all reflected the dean’s opinion of his capacity outside the art world: LeWitt earned an A in English literature.

In the later 1940s, something of a revolution occurred on campus that changed LeWitt’s outlook and prospects. Syracuse’s chancellor, William Pearson Tolley, decided that the art school had to adopt a more contemporary view of art.¹⁴ Kaish said, “My recollection is he put together a search committee, which came up with a recommendation that he chose not to follow.”¹⁵ Tolley brought Norman Rice to Syracuse, who in turn brought members of his Art Institute of Chicago circle, and Rice made the art program more innovative and diverse. Among the new faculty members were Merlin Pollack, Dean Butler, and George Vandersluice. Kaish recalled, “I liked the conservative guys, but suddenly they were out.”

Kaish came back to campus for his junior year and saw dumpsters out in front of the school:

At first, I was dismayed and overcome by sadness. I loved the old way, and I didn’t really know how much I loved it until it was gone. I loved that there was no freedom and experimentation in the way you looked at things, or in the material we used. After the change, we began using new ways to think about design and color as opposed to the accuracy of shape. We were no longer documenting. We were interpreting and transforming. Eventually it all became very exciting, but some people never got over the change.¹⁶

LeWitt did. Of the new faculty members, he said: “They had decided that anyone who was in school before that was totally lost. They really didn’t give a shit at all, and we didn’t get very much instruction, which was the best thing in the world for me at the time.”¹⁷

In his third year, LeWitt’s grades improved, though not dramatically. He still got Cs for anything that had to do with detailed portraiture, but in the class on form and expression he received an A. His senior year was by far his best, with all of his grades As, except for a B in esthetics. And he proved outstanding in his newest discovery, lithography. (Throughout college his grades in courses outside of art—history, English, and philosophy—were consistently high.) He didn’t think he showed nearly as much talent as many of his classmates: “Some [of the other students] were really very good, but most of them didn’t turn out to be artists after all. Some of the best ones never did. One guy became a window designer. There was one guy who did Lord & Taylor ads for a while. Then he started doing paintings, which were not so good.”¹⁸

Theodore Salz, by consensus the star of the class, never became a full-time artist, though Gray Bazelon recalled, “We stood around awestruck looking at his drawings.”¹⁹ Other star students put their talents to use in various ways. Marvin Israel became art director for Vogue, Sydney Tillim was a long-time teacher at Bennington College, and Josh Fendell taught for nearly thirty years at the Maryland Art Institute. Kaish was one of the few who had major success in the art marketplace. Gray Bazelon’s paintings became valuable commodities in New York City. And Kramer landed his dream job as art critic for the New York Times, though during his long tenure there he never let his friendship with Le-Witt soften his views on the artist’s work.

When asked why some of the best students didn’t become artists but went off into the academic world, LeWitt’s reply was one that ought to give hope to anyone who does not fit into the category of prodigy:

Well, I think the reason they were very good students was that they had a great deal of talent; they had a great deal of facility. Having a great deal of facility, there wasn’t the sense of struggle or sense of desire to improve that other people who didn’t have this facility or natural talent to do things had to struggle a lot more. And merely doing things well in school is not the program of being an artist. It’s a good program for being a student … because you do get very good grades and you do what’s expected of you. To be an artist you probably need a little more rebelliousness…. Most of the artists I know, well, some of them never went to art school at all. Most of them weren’t the best students.²⁰

The interview in which he said this, by Paul Cummings, avoided most personal subjects, like all of the interviews of LeWitt. If Cummings, going out of character for such interviews, had asked this question: “So, Sol, during your four years at Syracuse did you attract the attention of any lovely coed?” LeWitt might not have answered, or he might have responded with something less than a full accounting. Indeed, he did attract such attention. Gray Bazelon recalled—in contrast to how LeWitt would think of himself in later years—that the quiet young man had “handsome features.” She herself had no interest in him—“the ballsy guys were the ones I was attracted to.”²¹ (She later married the classical composer Irwin Bazelon.) But another pretty student from New Rochelle became a LeWitt pursuer, up to a point.

North, LeWitt’s friend and fellow art student, was the matchmaker. He talked to Naomi Bragman about a Syracuse junior art student who just might be interested in a date. When LeWitt met Bragman formally—they had previously seen each other at Crouse Hall—he told her his story in a few words. He spoke of his physician father, whom he’d never really had the chance to know. Bragman’s father had been a physician, too (a psychiatrist), and, again like Abraham LeWitt, had met with an untimely death. Naomi had been only nine years old at the time.

She told LeWitt that her family had moved from Syracuse to Binghamton, New York, when she was a young girl, and that her father became the first person to have a psychiatric practice in that city. In the evenings, she, her sister, and their dad formed a chamber group, the Ill-Harmonic Trio, with herself on clarinet, her sister on piano, and their father on violin.

She said that after his devastating death, from pneumonia, the rest of the family moved to Manhattan and, like the LeWitt family after Abraham’s death, found themselves in reduced circumstances. In Manhattan she attended ps 9, where the teacher used to let her go to the back of the room and copy pictures while everybody else was doing math.

Her interest in art continued through school, and she applied to only Brown University (which did not appeal to her) and Syracuse (her father’s alma mater and her preference), because she intended to major in art and the tuition at Syracuse at the time was reasonable.

As she explained more than sixty years later, she took an instant liking to the much more introverted LeWitt, who, as she remembered, was seldom seen in art classes by then: “He spent hours in lithography. He was often the only person there. I don’t now if he ever went to class. When I think about him at Syracuse, I think he was basically a self-taught artist. He didn’t get anything out of Syracuse except a degree.”²²

They were opposites. “I was not introverted,” Ms. Stern said:

That’s what appealed to him. We often double-dated with Russ North and his girlfriend at the time, Debbie [Faerber]. Russ had this car, which only had a front seat. So I had to sit on Sol’s lap all the time. I even wrote a poem about it. I remember the legal drinking age was nineteen. I was old enough, but the guys weren’t, so they would drink beer. I hated beer. I drank whiskey sours because you can’t taste the whiskey. We used to go out to the really cheap bars near the campus.

Sol was really poor then, but so was I. We went to a lot of free stuff—to hockey games and lacrosse games, and I never even heard of lacrosse. The rest of the time we used to sit on the back stairs of my sorority, Phi Sigma Sigma, and neck. I wasn’t really the sorority type. I joined just to see if I could get in.²³

She described LeWitt at the time as “cute but not handsome. His hair was going already. But he had a lovely smile. And he was in love with me.”

Here, however, is the information that Naomi didn’t give him at their first meeting—she already had a beau, Ted Stern, back in New York City. He had graduated from Cornell, was living at home and working, and was “waiting for me so that we could marry. I used to argue with Ted, and every time we argued I was very happy to go out with Sol. When I told Sol about Ted, though, it didn’t bother him.”²⁴ It was as if this quiet young man from Connecticut had a confidence even then that he could win her.

But it wasn’t to be. When she graduated, Naomi announced, in a tearful scene, that she did indeed intend to marry Ted: “Sol came to the sorority house later and handed me this bundle, and then left. He was on his way to Illinois, he said. He won a teaching assistant’s spot there, and would get his master’s. The bundle he left with me had a dozen lithographs and an oil painting. The painting was done with a palette knife, and it was of an old woman in a black cloak, somber, depressing. When I showed it to Ted, he hated it.”²⁵

Indeed, LeWitt’s lithography work at this time was dark. Much of it featured loosely drawn groups of people in gloomy atmospheres, such as in Street Scene (1949). Scholars who examined that work later noted the apparent influence of German expressionists such as Max Beckmann.

Despite the unpromising reaction from Bragman, LeWitt kept knocking on her door:

A month after Sol graduated, he was still thinking he could win me back. He came to New Rochelle and surprised me in the store where I was working, Sylman’s, selling cheap clothes. I thought I would fall through the floor. He’d hitchhiked from New Britain. I had to find a place for him to stay—a friend of Ted’s took him in. But I told him I wasn’t going to marry him, that I was in love with Ted. I said, “I’m not going to see you anymore.” Ted knew, of course, and had been very jealous. Ted was an engineer, who worked in a family business. He had money, and Sol was totally broke. He lost me, and he was still smarting because he was certain he was going to get the senior art prize at Syracuse. But Mort Kaish beat him out.²⁶

The 1949 Syracuse yearbook makes no mention of the senior art prize, or of LeWitt. He didn’t show up for his senior picture, making it the fourth straight year he’d shunned the camera, and the beginnings of a lifelong habit.