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FIVE

LOST IN THE CITY

LeWitt didn’t often speak of his early years in New York City. But the impression he left with friends and in interviews is that it was a deeply frustrating period artistically and, from a personal point of view, a lonely one. Not that he was isolated. He developed friendships, pursued romances, and even succumbed—if briefly and exasperatingly—to the institution of marriage. But in recalling those days in conversation, Le-Witt was uncharacteristically downbeat.

In 1953, he rented his first apartment—at 115 East Thirty-Fourth Street, near Lexington Avenue, in an affordable building. There was enough space to work, though at first he had no idea what work he would do. By then, abstract expressionism had been the primary movement in modern art for nearly a decade, but he soon discovered that he had no interest or skill in producing works in that style.¹ Indeed, many other young artists descending on New York at the time felt the same way. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, then in their late twenties, found it very difficult to sell their work and had to make livings designing store window displays, among other tasks. The work they were developing—Johns featuring common symbols such as the American flag and bull’s-eyes, and Rauschenberg focusing on “combines,” for which he used materials and images not usually associated with art—were sometimes referred to as “anti-art” by critics. More charitable observers called their output Neo-Dadaist,² considering it to reflect elements of the prominent international avant-garde period early in the twentieth century that was known for its irrationality, humor, and elements of protest.

LeWitt, who had not yet found any ism that he could embrace, recalled later: “I spent all the money I saved and went through unemployment…. I also went to a school, and that was kind of a fiasco.”³ The school was what was then called the Cartoonist and Illustrators School.⁴ Though eventually LeWitt would later teach there, as would others of his circle, his experience as a student on the East Twenty-Third Street campus proved unsatisfactory: “I really wasn’t interested in being an illustrator, but it was the closest school to where I was living, and I just wanted to survive, I guess. I wanted to get the GI Bill money, which wasn’t very much, but at least I could live on it. It was the same sort of academic bullshit I had [at Syracuse and Illinois], so I got tired of that very quickly.”⁵ In a 1977 interview, he summed up his art training, saying that he “probably would have been better off studying something else.”⁶

However, one advantage of the route he took was that he could make enduring friendships. He kept in touch with old friends from Syracuse, for example. Martin Greenberg, Russell North, Alan Nevas, and Deborah Faerber often got together in the city to see movies or go to a bar, to enjoy Greenberg’s cooking, or indulge in whatever cheap entertainment was available. At the time Greenberg and Faerber were dating. As Greenberg recalled, “Everyone fell in love with Debbie. She was darling—short, cute as the dickens, an All-American girl, smart, funny, easy going.”⁷ And she was soon intimate with LeWitt, making Greenberg jealous—though he said, many decades later, “It didn’t come between me and Sol.”

In the spring of 2007, Deborah Faerber Evans read an obituary of Sol LeWitt in the Miami Herald. She hadn’t known that he had been ill, so the news of his death came as a shock. A few minutes later, she went through her LeWitt inventory, rediscovering memories. She kept letters from LeWitt on the top shelf of a closet with a piece of art, albeit informal, that had never been shown in a gallery.⁸

Evans thought back to “the coterie of Syracuse pals” who had stayed close in the years after graduation, and to her own days in New York before moving to southern Florida. She thought, “How young I was. How immature.”⁹ And she thought, too, about the choices she had made.

She and LeWitt had gone to plays, museums, and bars together. One memory in particular had stuck with her. One night they were having drinks in Greenwich Village,

when some guy tried to hit on me. Sol objected, and the guy left. I said, “I wonder what that guy does for a living.” Sol said, “He’s a horse’s ass. That’s what he does for a living.”

I knew that Sol was creative, and that he thought in ways that other people didn’t. I was drawn to him, but I was too much of an idiot to recognize that. We were talking marriage but I was not mature enough to even say I wasn’t interested in marriage.¹⁰

Instead, she decided to let her travel itinerary send a clear message. She bought a ticket on an ocean liner bound for Europe, where she planned to spend four months. LeWitt gave the impression that he supported the journey and, using his 1950 experience as inspiration, gave her a creative going-away gift.

It was an eight-page letter with drawings and commentary in the vein of some of the work he had done aboard the Breckenridge a few years earlier, but more pointed and clearly showing affection for the recipient.

The first page shows an ocean liner with an American flag and the words: “So … now you too are going to Europe. Well … Here are some helpful hints to make your visit happy.” The inside features a line drawing of Europe, intentionally out of scale. Accompanying his detailed sketches of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, LeWitt wrote: “There are many strange and wonderful things to see but you will become sick to death of them.” He shows a variety of different foods of the continent (fish, bacon, croissants, and so on) and says, “The food and wine is [sic] famous throughout the world, and will make you very ill.” One page shows a man playing an accordion and another man dancing. The text said, “See the real people in their native costumes—they will like you because you have American money.” Another page features a rendering of a passenger train on an overpass. LeWitt’s comment was, “Trains are lots of fun but you won’t mind if they are just a little slow and sooty … the wooden seats are nice to sit on.” The final page shows a woman climbing up one big Alp. LeWitt concluded: “Above all, have fun.”¹¹

From Evans’s account of the journey, it was clear that she did have fun. When the ship returned on December 8, 1954, she was jostled during the disembarking process and was the last person to leave the deck. When she walked down the ramp, LeWitt was waiting for her. “Anybody else would have left by then,” she said.¹²

However, LeWitt’s attempts to woo her failed. And not long afterward, Evans, who went to work in a newspaper office in New York, met a “tall, dark, handsome and stupid reporter” whom she married, a union that lasted only two years.¹³

There may have been more depth to her relationship with LeWitt than she acknowledged at the time. But that depth certainly comes across in a 1954 letter she wrote to LeWitt on Miami Herald stationery, while she was waiting for her divorce to become final. The letter also suggests, in a wry tone, an idea for art, absurd as it is:

It is with some reluctance that I take pen in hand, for thus occupied I cannot tear great shreds of skin off my back, my pastime of these last few nights. Fascinating, destroying myself on even a small scale…. I feel hurt, my sense of purpose lags and a grim anger for the elements…. Two girls, lately of the Herald, just stopped in and drank the rest of my beer. I forget what we talked about. Nothing is new with my divorce. I just sit it out for 80 days. The lawyer called me a few days ago to say my ex-boss had called him to ask how I was and how in Hell did I get a job on the Herald. Everybody is so nice. The lawyer said he’d buy me a drink later in the week and then didn’t call. If he weren’t charging me nothing, I’d take my business elsewhere…. Thank you for the temperance lecture. My god, I wish I had a bottle. When the hurricane comes, you shut all windows except one in the bathroom, fill the tub and sink with water or whatever you prefer, and sit and wait in darkness. I may just do that tonight. Who could have thought that a mind, blank non-directional me, was an eight ball? …

Why don’t you put the end tables in the middle of your living room, place a bottle of gin on one, Vermouth on the other, and tiptoe out of the room for seven or eight minutes. If, when you creep back in, and the room is empty and the skylight is broken, go up on the roof with a water pistol and squirt the hell out of any pigeon that can’t fly a straight course. Then make some more end tables and repeat the experiment but sell tickets.

It is hot and I am running out of cigarettes…. I have a date with a fellow sot tomorrow and Tuesday…. Three weeks in this town and I haven’t located a subway entrance yet. Entirely too above-board. Something fishy. Good night.¹⁴

How LeWitt could support a wife or a family had yet to be determined. He had come to New York because of its vitality, and specifically because it had become the new center of the art world, but unknown artists were at the bottom of a fixed hierarchy.

The movement toward New York began before World War II, when many prominent European artists and teachers emigrated to escape fascism. Among the most influential were Josef Albers, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, and Salvador Dali. This was followed by the emergence in the city of artists such as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock—all of them championed by the critic Clement Greenberg, whose influence was as outsized as his personality, and who argued that the art world was now in the hands and imaginations of about fifty abstract expressionists in studios south of Thirty-Fourth Street.

Some of the personality of the city that emerged during the period was captured by writers such as Mary McCarthy, who in a 1947 Partisan Review piece, suggested how she could explain the character and vitality of New York—particularly its cosmopolitan nature—to a French intellectual: “Sukiyaki joints, chop suey joints, Italian table d’hotel places, French provincial restaurants with the menu written on a slate, Irish chophouses, and Jewish delicatessens.”¹⁵

In addressing the flurry of creativity in New York, the poet John Ashbery wrote in an essay:

My arrival in New York coincided with the cresting of the “heroic” period of Abstract Expressionism as it was later to be known, and somehow we all seemed to benefit from this strong moment even if we paid little attention to it and seemed to be going our separate ways. We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing. But there were other things to attend to: concerts of John Cage’s music, Merce Cunningham’s dances, the Living Theatre, but also talking and going to movies and getting ripped and hanging, and then discussing it all over the phone.¹⁶

LeWitt was drawn in particular to the work of Kline and Willem de Kooning and the earlier work of Pollock. “But,” he said, “there weren’t too many second generation Abstract Expressionists who I thought were very good.”¹⁷ He never felt that he was equipped to be part of the movement—he described his attempts as complete failures. In addition, he professed disdain for many of its painters: “Most of them were so arrogant and loud. Because the Abstract Expressionist has a way of living and a way of talking and a way of arguing and a way of doing everything that was just so completely different from me that I just never could get with it.”

To make his rent payments, he had to find steady work. In 1954 he found a job at Seventeen, the first magazine founded specifically for a teenage audience. LeWitt’s primary task was to run the photostat machine. Rather than finding this work tedious, he discovered a way to occupy himself and to experiment with technology: “I used to do super imposing of photographs. They ended up looking like Rauschenberg’s. The kind of stuff he was doing later on. I would take whatever photographs were around and superimpose them on one another…. Then I would sometimes draw on it while it was still in the liquid. So that was the only kind of art I was really doing because I really wasn’t too interested in painting. I felt that I should or else there wouldn’t be any reason for my existence.”¹⁸

Eventually, other members of the magazine’s staff recognized that their photostat man had more to offer than making copies, and he was promoted to the art department. There he helped with production and was asked on occasion to draw small illustrations for feature articles.

In an interview he gave to the curator Gary Garrels in 2000, LeWitt revealed that some of the things he learned at Seventeen influenced his later work.

GARY GARRELS: Photography is something that you have come back to from time to time in your work….

SOL LEWITT: I learned something when I worked at Seventeen magazine. They had a man who would take pictures of objects and they used these as a kind of editorial idea of objects that were available to buy. The idea of photograph as a recorder of objects was something I thought was a basic premise of the medium, and I wanted to try to use it in different ways. Later I started to incorporate it into books because I started to be involved with the seriality…. I still make photo pieces, though I don’t think of myself as a photographer. In fact, I don’t think of myself as a painter or a sculptor. I think of myself as an artist who can use any of these media, materials and techniques as I wish, without pinning myself down to the name.¹⁹

A year before LeWitt came to Seventeen, the artist Eva Hesse (then seventeen) served as an intern there. Hesse and LeWitt, who would become the closest of friends, never met at Seventeen in person, though as the curator and author Veronica Roberts pointed out in 2014, they met “on the page.”²⁰ After Hesse left the magazine, it did a feature article on her, calling her a young artist to watch. As a filler on the last page, LeWitt drew an elaborate birthday cake in pen and ink. It was his first signed professional piece. A few months later, he drew a writing desk using the same sort of elaborate design, making full use of classical patterns and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of ideas he would expanded upon one day.

In 1955, LeWitt was offered the position of art director of Fashion and Travel magazine—but for only one issue, as at the time the magazine rotated talent. He recalled: “They had very good people, like [Richard] Avedon, people like that doing photographs. Perfectly respectable, except the hiring and firing policy. But it was a good experience.”²¹

Afterward, he collected unemployment insurance until “I met someone who said the architectural firm of I. M. Pei was expanding its graphic design department, and ‘Why don’t you go?’”²² By then, LeWitt had developed a keen interest in layout and typefaces, so it seemed like a sensible idea. He secured a position in the firm in 1955, where he was one of five artists in the department, but he found it tedious and frustrating:

The first job that they asked me to do was to design a letterhead. So I just designed a very simple letterhead right across the page in small type, and the guy who was the head of the graphics department [Don Page²³] told me I had to do something else. There were three or four people working on this, some of the most God-awful things, embossing and, you know, logotype things. After six months they went back to the very first design. That was the one that was accepted. I was so pissed off at that, and it was such a waste of time. The whole thing was like that. Everything was just done, and redone, and overdone. Usually the first solution was best.²⁴

In general, the working atmosphere was tense. LeWitt recalled, “Architects and artists are mortal enemies (at least many architects think so).”²⁵

LeWitt also produced brochures and did specialty work on projects such as the Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall, in East Garden City, Long Island:²⁶ “The only thing that I did was to make a directory to be placed throughout the shopping center. You would push a button and the store … would light like a big pinball machine.”²⁷ He also worked on symbols to be put in storefronts, illustrating what that store sold (a shoe, for example), but they were never installed: “The head of the department had this kind of idea, and then he just sent everybody to work on it. That kind of treadmill just turned me off: doing stupid things endlessly.” There were other stupid things, however, aside from the work, one of which involved an impersonation.

Martin Greenberg recalled that during their conversations on East Thirty-Fourth Street, LeWitt revealed that Pei, who became one of the world’s most acclaimed architects, was also “a notorious scofflaw”—in that he accumulated dozens of parking tickets, and never paid the fines. “The police were after him and he had to go to court.” LeWitt often told the story to friends, and always had a laugh over it. He said Pei refused to go and sent instead an intern of Italian descent to pay the fines, instructing him, “When they call my name tell them, you’re me.” When he got in front of the judge the intern was very nervous. The judge asked, “Is your name I. M. Pei?” The intern said he was. The judge said, “Are you Italian?” The intern said, “No, I’m Chinese.”²⁸

Over the years, interviewers asked LeWitt whether his I. M. Pei experience (it lasted just one year) had a strong impression on the work he would eventually do. The question seems pertinent enough. LeWitt has often been compared to an architect in that, in particular for his wall drawings, he conceived the plan, did the preliminary sketching and wrote the instructions, and then let other people carry out the work. But LeWitt played down this notion. However, many decades later, while reflecting on that time in an interview for his 2000 retrospective, he surmised that the Pei experience must have affected his thinking.

During his time there, LeWitt became close friends with Tony Candido, a staff architect who was also a painter in his spare time. Candido had studied architecture under Mies van der Rohe, but he wanted to get back to his first love, seeing what he could create at an easel. The two became what Candido described as “painting buddies—there was a time we saw each other every night.”²⁹

As LeWitt later described it, Candido provided the impetus for his own ultimately unfulfilling return to painting: “So I got really turned on to doing art again. I started painting. And I got really interested in Abstract Expressionism. I did it long enough to discover I couldn’t do it. But at least it got me going.”³⁰

LeWitt persuaded his old college acquaintance, Hilton Kramer, now a critic for the New York Times, to come to Candido’s studio to see his work—the sort of generous gesture he would later become famous for among artists. LeWitt and Candido went to exhibits on Fifty-Seventh Street, and down to the Cedar Tavern on University Place, a hangout for the likes of Kline, Rothko, Pollock, and other art luminaries. LeWitt talked to none of these artists at the time, but the bar was nevertheless a source of inspiration. As the sculptor Tom Doyle recalled, “This was the artist’s living room.”³¹ The artist Mercedes Matter later called it “the cathedral of American culture of the ’50s.”³² It didn’t look much like a cathedral. Nor did it have the amenities of most bars—there wasn’t even a jukebox. It did have a clock on the wall that sometimes ran backward. In his description of the place (always referred to by patrons as the Cedar Bar, rather than Tavern), the art historian Jed Perl listed it among the hangouts that “offered opportunities for friendships and love affairs to begin or flourish or end, for careers to get going or jump forward or derail.”³³ The writer Robert Katz described it, in part, by saying that artists could “breathe the same boozy oxygen once breathed by Pollock and still breathed by Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline, where in art salons Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg handed down the immutable laws of flatness, inscribing in extravagant prose meant to be eternal how utterly marvelous it was.”³⁴

It was at the Cedar Bar, that LeWitt met his mentor, Earl Kerkam. Candido remembered Kerkam as “an original Damon Runyon character with a slouched hat, swaggering torque, a New Yorker through and through, unpretentious. Earl knew his stuff. He had a bad arm but he drew like an angel. He was a strange guy. I got the impression he was lonely.”³⁵ By then, Kerkam had shown his work at important galleries (including the galleries of Betty Parsons and Charles Egan, and the Poindexter on East Fifty-Seventh Street), but he was known to other artists primarily as a fixture on a bar stool and a man of wisdom and good counsel.

Thomas B. Hess, the editor of ARTnews, wrote as a tribute to Kerkam that he was “an old man who can nurse a beer for hours at the Cedar Bar, listening to the conversation of his newly famous artist friends.”³⁶

Even well-established artists turned to him for approval. Pollock had already become a New York icon when he received a postcard from Paris written by Kerkam that praised the younger artist for his canvases displayed in the City of Light. The painter Louis Finkelstein, writing about Pollock in ARTnews, quoted his reaction: “Overjoyed, he waved it under the noses of the boys at the Cedar Bar, shouting, ‘Earl says it’s not bad.’”³⁷

LeWitt described Kerkam as “an old man. He was really very independent. He hated the Abstract Expressionists for one thing. He would paint—he had a flower in a Coke bottle, and he would be painting that all the time. Very funny. He wasn’t much of an artist, but he certainly was a personality. He really helped me a great deal, not in any specific way, but he was very encouraging. He said he liked what I was doing.”³⁸

This was so, even though the work that LeWitt was doing at that point was derivative and unsatisfying to its creator. For a time, inspired by Giacometti and others, he experimented with still life, but with an abstract bent. In a way, Kerkam was an ideal mentor, in that his own work seemed to reject the standards of the times. In painting nudes and wildlife he rejected the idea of nostalgia and any sense of the common consensus about what makes something beautiful. Although LeWitt never remarked on this, other than to say that he didn’t much care for the work, it’s not a leap to suggest that Kerkam’s willingness to cast aside conventional thinking influenced the younger artist. One can imagine Kerkam waving a glass in the air and saying, “Screw them all. Do what moves you.” Even so, that work went nowhere either, and none of it remains. Still, LeWitt felt supported by fellow artists.

During his stay at I. M. Pei, LeWitt was encouraged by Robert Slutsky. The latter had studied at Yale University under the German-born artist and teacher Josef Albers, one of the many talented immigrants from Europe, and in time gained wide recognition for his innovations with color and shape. A few years later, Slutsky would help put LeWitt and Candido on the exhibition map.

LeWitt’s tenure at I. M. Pei also made it possible for him to discuss great books with avid readers. At the time, LeWitt read Albert Camus and all the works of Samuel Beckett. With Candido and another avid reader and artist, Dan Graham, LeWitt also became fascinated by the work of Michel Butor, a French novelist whose writing had just been translated into English. One book in particular spoke to him. He passed it along to LeWitt.

The book in question—Butor’s Passing Time, published in English in 1961, is the story of Jacques Revel, a Frenchman who takes a low-level position in a fictitious English city. Revel is not confident about his ability to speak the new language, and he also feels overwhelmed by his circumstances. The novel challenges the reader to solve a puzzle—that is, it makes the reader something of a partner in the storytelling. It’s not hard to imagine why LeWitt, who considered himself an outsider in New Britain, at Syracuse, in the army, and during his early years in New York, might see a little of himself in Revel and admire the precision and depth of Revel’s creator. As Graham pointed out, the protagonist in the novel “got lost in the city. It was like a labyrinth.”³⁹

Moreover, Butor was an experimentalist who believed that novels could be collaborations—as LeWitt would later believe about art. Butor worked with painters, musicians, and photographers on projects that defied boundaries and categories. This kind of thinking and breaking the mold intrigued LeWitt. (Many years later, he may have been thinking of Butor’s work when, for example, he collaborated with the choreographer Lucinda Childs and the composer Philip Glass.) Influences such as Butor, Beckett, and others inspired LeWitt.

He made a decision that is necessary for almost anyone who would create art. Yes, Wallace Stevens could be a bond surety executive for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in the daytime and create poetry on his way to and from work, and Charles Ives could hold an unrelated full-time job and write music at the same time. But for ordinary mortals, working and succeeding in any art field requires immersion during the most creative hours of the day. LeWitt understood this and came to the realization that working in graphic design offered him a highway to nowhere. He thought: “I don’t really want to do this. I don’t like it. So I just quit, and went back on unemployment and started painting.”⁴⁰

Even so, he struggled—or, as he put it, “I was floundering.”⁴¹ Abstract expression still held no interest for him and did not suit his talents. As he later said, after achieving some measure of success, “Abstract Expressionism was the most simpleminded kind of art imaginable.”⁴² Besides, the movement had had its day, and that day was ending. Recalling his fascination with the Italian masters, LeWitt decided to create work based on some of their canvases but with his own distinctive touches. Indeed, a drawing after Piero della Francesca that he finished in 1958 attracted a good deal of attention and comment more than four decades, later when LeWitt’s work was celebrated in his San Francisco, Chicago, and New York retrospective.

The reason the drawing was included was that the work of Piero turned out to be a crucial influence on LeWitt’s development as an artist who could discern a disciplined sense of order in narrative scenes. For example, when LeWitt worked on his own version of Story of the True Cross, one of Piero’s frescoes in Arezzo, Italy, he saw the creator of the original as partly a mathematician devoted to geometric laws. The art historian Horst Janson put it this way: “This mathematical outlook—we read of Piero—permeates all his work. When he drew a head, an arm, or a piece of drapery, he saw them as variations or compounds of spheres, cylinders, cones, cubes and pyramids, endowing the visible work with some of the impersonal clarity and permanence of stereo metric bodies. We may call him the earliest ancestor of the abstract artists of our own time.”⁴³

■ LeWitt’s downbeat recollections of his time at I. M. Pei may have been partially the result of the domestic crisis he faced at the time.

In the summer of 1955, he had gone with other artists to Fire Island, off the southern shore of Long Island—which had become a destination not only for gay city residents escaping the heat of the summer but also for many artists.

It was during that summer that LeWitt met Alma Reilly, who what was what they called in those days a “looker.” Candido referred to her as “an Ava Gardner type.”⁴⁴ A native of New Rochelle, New York, she was then twenty-seven, the same age as LeWitt. However, she had been married before for a short time and had gotten a divorce on the ground of mental anguish (unlike incompatibility, an accepted reason for divorce at the time).

Then as in his later years, LeWitt did not speak about the details of this part of his life, except to refer to a brief marriage (he never mentioned the name of his first wife in interviews), and his friends could only speculate about how and why the union occurred. The best witness might have been LeWitt’s old friend Russell North, who served as an official witness at the marriage ceremony at New York’s City Hall on August 22, 1956, but who died many years before LeWitt.

On one of the very few comments LeWitt ever made about his first marriage was to the photographer Vera Lutter many decades later. She recalled: “I asked him if he had ever been married. He said, ‘It was summer, and we shared a house, and then we were doing our thing, and we thought ok, now you’ve got to get married.’”⁴⁵ Others remember him saying something like, “I didn’t know what else to do at the time.”⁴⁶ That is, he saw no alternative to succumbing to the convention of marriage. A biographer playing psychologist might suggest that LeWitt was rebounding from the end of his relationship with Evans and wanted to be sure his solitary days were over—or that, as certainly was the case later in his life, he found some deep sense of purpose in the rescue of a needy lover. What is known for certain about the first marriage, which lasted officially for two years but in effect was over after a few months, was that the couple lived on Avenue C, in the Manhattan neighborhood of Alphabet City, during this time; that the husband and wife were ill-suited for each other; that LeWitt’s friends were surprised that he had taken this step; and that his mother, who seldom disapproved of his actions, did so in this case. Sophie LeWitt expected the best for her son, and in her view the best bride—a Jewish woman—was still out there somewhere. LeWitt later lamented that he had found himself lonelier as a husband than he had been as a single man.

After his stint at I. M. Pei’s office, LeWitt worked briefly as promotion art director at Barker Levin and Company, a marketer of Lassie coats for women, but he later offered no recollections of this time. During these months, he tried to get professional representation for the work he was doing, and he eventually found Charles W. North Studios, a producer of promotional materials for businesses. His arrival as a client was announced in hyperbolic fashion, in an advertisement that listed new artists and applied lavish adjectives to each. Robert J. Berenson was a “photographer of unusual talent.” Haskell Goldberg was a “distinctive illustrator.” Sol LeWitt was “a prize-winning painter and graphic designer.”⁴⁷ This connection lasted only a few months.

LeWitt’s personal living circumstance improved if only in that he was able to find a place that suited only him. After the failure of his marriage, he moved to a loft on West Broadway in the neighborhood that would later become famous as SoHo.⁴⁸ At the time it was a rundown section that had none of the busy character of uptown. Many buildings were shuttered, and particularly at night, there were few pedestrians on the sidewalks, except for the members of the growing community of artists.

It was during a walk to the hardware store that LeWitt met the artist Marjorie Strider. After a brief conversation about tools, he got right to the point: “Would you go out with me?” However, she was engaged to the artist Michael Kirby, who, like Strider, would become an important cultural figure in Manhattan. (In later years Strider’s work was often exhibited with that of pop artists Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein.) She told LeWitt, “You might consider my sister, Nancy.” Like her sister, Nancy Strider had come to Manhattan from Oklahoma. She had worked first for American Airlines as a stewardess (as the job was called then). “She was quite attractive,” Marjorie said of her sister, and added, “Not that I wasn’t.”⁴⁹

As LeWitt learned, Nancy had gone through a difficult time emotionally. She had been engaged to be married and the reception had been planned. Then she discovered that her husband-to-be had been married before and had four children.

Nancy Strider recalled that in any case she wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to spend the rest of her life in Guthrie, Oklahoma: “So I followed my sister to New York. I came only because she was here, and [I] stopped working for the airlines.”⁵⁰ She did this though her job had opened up, if not the world, a considerable part of the United States to her, a “girl who’d never been out of Oklahoma, except to visit my sister in Kansas City,” and she had found herself partying regularly in Santa Monica. You could get a job, she recalled, “if you were good looking. But there were restrictions. You weren’t allowed to gain weight and you had to wear a girdle, which I didn’t do.” When she’d had enough, Manhattan looked like a good alternative: “When you grow up in Oklahoma, New York is a very glamorous place.” She moved in with her sister on Green Street and got a job right away as a secretary at a construction company.

Living with her sister made Nancy almost a character out of a Broadway play. She was My Sister Eileen, transported from the backwater, seeing the city as a naïf, and trying to make it. She recalled:

All of my sister’s friends were artists. They had a much different lifestyle than I did. I always had a self-esteem issue. I had been brought up, in the fashion of those days, to be seen and not heard, to not have opinions.

To me these artists were intellectuals. That’s not quite totally true, but they had different interests than I did.

When she met LeWitt, he put her at ease:

He made fun of snobbery. He was so unassuming. Almost anti-intellectual, but he read widely, and was knowledgeable about many things. And he made me feel wonderful. He was dismissive of me feeling as if I was an inferior intellect. He introduced me to his friends, and to the films of [Ingmar] Bergman—I hated The Virgin Spring and I’ll never forget it. There was also Bob and Ray on the radio—I thought they were hilarious. And there were the records of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf—I had already become a fan of the opera.

Strider never met Sophie LeWitt, but she remembers that Sophie often sent her son homemade baked goods and other treats from New Britain. The food was something of an education for Strider, who had been brought up Presbyterian: “There was only one Jewish family in Guthrie.” And she had never tasted anything from a traditional Eastern European Jewish kitchen. Borscht and brisket were revelations.

The fact that she had been brought up in a town segregated by race and ethnicity left a mark: “It flabbergasts me that I never questioned it.” But the time with LeWitt opened her eyes to a world well beyond anything she had known: “New York is total diversity, which is wonderful.”

Strider remembers LeWitt experimenting with his work during this period: “He was painting with a flat palette knife, small paintings, with color put on thickly.” How his work developed after that remained a mystery to her. After two years, their relationship ended. She was ready to be married, and LeWitt, still smarting from his venture into matrimony, couldn’t bring himself to play the groom again.

Strider never saw him after that, though she followed his work—even, on one occasion, all the way to Bilbao, Spain, on a trip she made with her daughter (LeWitt had provided a work, Wall Drawing 831, Geometric Forms—for the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Bilbao). However, she retained an important souvenir from the time she’d spent with the man who showed her life’s possibilities.

LeWitt had just gotten a new job—one that would lead directly to the break he needed—but he hadn’t forgotten her. For her birthday, he sent her a drawing of plants in his loft with the word “Joy” on top of it. It would become a gift that she could eventually pass along to grandchildren—who, Strider hoped, wouldn’t have to wait as long as she had to take advantage of opportunities to grow.