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SIX

STIRRINGS

While LeWitt and Strider were together, they saw the exhibition Sixteen Americans at MoMA. The featured artists¹ challenged long-held assumptions about the very nature of art. The exhibition attracted large crowds and much negative criticism. In a letter to Dorothy Miller, the show’s curator, the New York Times critic John Canaday wrote, “For my money, these are the sixteen artists most slated for oblivion. There is not a single painting, and very little sculpture, that I could imagine living with.”² But LeWitt reflected in 1974, “It was probably the most influential show of the decade, or of many decades, because it was the opening of many new ideas.”³

At the time, LeWitt was still trying to discover his own direction and vision but confined by the past, still copying Renaissance masters and thinking within strict artistic boundaries. Abstract expressionism was ebbing, but what would replace it? The answer took years to develop, and LeWitt would be in the middle of it. But in 1959, when Sixteen Americans opened, he was just a bystander, struck by what he was seeing.

Among the most notable works in the exhibition in terms of the attention they received and the impact they made were those by the young Frank Stella, who at that point had exhibited only two paintings in two New York City shows and who apparently considered black the new primary color. Jed Perl described it this way: “The very look of this downtown bohemian world—its streets, its homes, its style of dress—was anti-picturesque.”⁴ Ad Reinhardt, another artist who influenced LeWitt, had experimented with shades of black. But Stella’s work was more intense and stark, and it was eventually considered by critics to be the beginning of minimalism—though at the time it was considered by some to lack minimal qualities of art.

As the critic and historian Robert Rosenblum wrote twelve years later, “To most eyes [the paintings] appeared monotonously simple and inert, a bewildering impoverishment of art.”⁵ He quoted the critic Dore Ashton, who had asked, “Is it really important for the public to see the work of a 23-year-old boy who has been painting for three or four years?”⁶

Artists in attendance admired the work, as it seemed to signal a new freedom. Blackness was a theme that LeWitt would use in different ways over many decades.

The exhibition also featured Jasper Johns, whom LeWitt also held in high esteem. As he later said, in the 1950s he often went to Tenth Street, where galleries showed the new and unconventional, to see Johns’s work, and he remembered in particular seeing the early versions of American flags: “Of course I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t know what it was all about. [Even so] I was really a big fan of his.”⁷

A LeWitt work from the middle of his career, Wall Drawing 599, at the Jewish Community Center on New York’s Upper West Side (his twentieth New York public installation), more than hints at the influence of Johns’s bull’s-eyes. Just as important, perhaps, was Johns’s artist’s statement in the catalogue for Sixteen Americans, especially when taking into account LeWitt’s later pronouncements about the making of art. Johns related how he created his paintings: “Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.”⁸ The comment signaled his freedom from traditional thinking and exposes the folly of explanation—a view that LeWitt often expressed.

None of the negative comments about the exhibit in the press mattered to LeWitt or to other young artists who saw it. The question of inspiration is of course an important one. There is the kind of inspiration that comes from seeing the work of Johns, Stella, and fourteen others at MoMA, in the studios of friends, or on Tenth Street. This sort of inspiration can include the charge, earned or not, of stealing ideas. Indeed, such a charge would be leveled at LeWitt many years later when, as may be inevitable in art, the lines blurred between inspiration and piracy.

There is also the kind of inspiration that is intensely private, a product of the artist’s mind and heart when they are free to roam into dark or light corners whenever the mood strikes. And there is the unpredictable phenomenon of happenstance and good luck. What would have happened to LeWitt as an artist, for example, if he hadn’t had certain pieces of luck? For example, would he ever have gotten himself out of the doldrums if a person he had never met hadn’t left behind a rare book in the crevices of a couch while moving out of his furnished downtown apartment?

It was LeWitt’s old Syracuse pal Russell North who found the book after he moved into the apartment. He showed it LeWitt, who in later recounting the episode, said, “I borrowed it. I should return it. I hate to return it.”⁹

The book was a first edition of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer with the camera who had been born in England but lived most of his life in America. The volume showed photographs as LeWitt had never seen them before: in series, creating a narrative structure. For example, there was a horse running in several sequential frames. LeWitt had been born in an era when the motion picture was well established, but he knew that it was composed of still frames, and that Muybridge’s work seemed to have been a precursor. Indeed, he was sometimes referred to as “The Father of the Motion Picture.”¹⁰

In the 1880s, at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge worked on a series of photographs that would make up a sort of encyclopedia of motion. This included photographs of 20,000 positions assumed by men, women, and children, sometimes clothed and sometimes naked, and by birds and other animals. All this and much more was done before Thomas Edison began his experiments with motion pictures in 1888.

“At that time [North gave him the book] I had never heard of Muybridge,” LeWitt said in an interview in 1999, but after that he was “always trying to think of ways to incorporate [some of Muybridge’s ideas] into the making of art.”¹¹

“I think that Muybridge was really the biggest influence on my art of any older artist,” he told Paul Cummings in 1974. “The logic of the serial image was the important thing to me. At first it was the image, but then it became the fact of seeing things from three different angles, as they emerged and changed. It had a beginning and an ending. A kind of philosophical realism…. He called his work a figure in action, in motion, or animals in motion. Of course they were still photographs…. It was right on the edge of photography and motion pictures.”¹²

In the early 1980s, LeWitt expanded his view of Muybridge’s influence, when he told Andrea Miller-Keller, curator of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s new Matrix Gallery, that the photographer offered a way of creating art “that did not rely on the whim of the moment but on a consistently thought-out process that gave results that were interesting and exciting…. [It was] a precise way of making art which was logical rather than rational” He said that up until then there had been two systems of making art: making decisions at every moment—“a circle here, a square there”—or spreading painting everywhere (as in the work of Jackson Pollock, for example). But “Muybridge offered a third system.”¹³ In short, the most important part of the artist’s anatomy is not the hand but the brain. And to the brainy LeWitt, this was a revelation that, after a period of failure that made him question his abilities, gave him a new path to pursue.

What struck him, as well as other members of the circle that developed around him, was that somehow art was at a dead end. They felt that the role of artist was to invent, not copy. But invent what? As LeWitt explained to Gary Garrels in 2000, what happened next—the development of what was called minimalism—was not some new advance on what had come before but, in a sense, a going backward, stripping art down to its bare essentials.¹⁴ In effect, it was a process of looking at art, and the idea of art, as if it had never been invented.

In the early 1960s, LeWitt experimented with the idea of applying Muybridge’s ideas to his own developing interests. It was the first time he had had a sense that, though inspired by the work of another artist, he could create something all his own.

In 1961, he made several pieces, including Muybridge 1 and Muybridge 2, using photographs. For the first one he made a box about ten feet long, one foot high, and ten inches deep. He divided this into ten compartments, and in each he inserted a photograph of a model walking toward the viewer in sequence. “It was a process of enlargement,” he explained.¹⁵ (The process and the result would become notorious three decades later in a prominent public debate.)

He started expanding his work that featured one figure in action. A running figure, for example, was repeated, and often in three-dimensional paintings that included words of explanation and symbols such as arrows. In the documentary film by Michael Blackwood, Sol LeWitt: 4 Decades, the artist describes the conception of the work. He started with the running figure by Muybridge but added elements of depth and dimensionality: “Receding color, something introduced by Joseph Albers, was important here. In this piece, color and form played with one another in terms of recession and advance, the idea of objectivity rather than subjectivity, in three-dimensional forms.”¹⁶ As a result, what the viewer saw in this piece and others that followed was not a flat canvas but one that receded or came forward toward the viewer at various points in the work. Even so, this was just a step on the way to a more inventive use of this process.

Early structures, attached to walls, were simple. LeWitt used basic forms. The idea of seriality developed as time went on and was represented in Autobiography and so much of his work later on, with “the idea that each individual part was equally important, and that all parts were equal, with nothing hierarchal. A man running in Muybridge was the inspiration for making all the transformations of a cube within a cube, a square within a square, a cube within a square, etc.”¹⁷

The cube became the primary building block of LeWitt’s structures, which in itself created something of a visual riddle. As he would write in 1966, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is it is relatively uninteresting. Compared to any other three-dimensional form it lacks any aggressive force, implies no motion, and is least emotive. Therefore it is the best form to use as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed. Because it is standard and universally recognized, no intention is required of the viewer.”¹⁸

In terms of evolving images, the process by which LeWitt turned ideas of Albers and Johns into his own involved addition and subtraction, though his explanation seems like a riddle:

The thing about Albers that I couldn’t grasp was that if he has colors that were receding they should, I thought, physically recede … rather than [serve as] an illusion. This, I think, was partially from [my] understanding of what Johns was doing…. Then I thought, well [Johns] should be applied to Albers. In the meantime I had all these Muybridge ideas in my head, so it actually came off much more simply than it seems. They had just too many things going on, too many ideas in them. Then I discarded the figure, and the word, and the symbol, and just started doing three-dimensional things…. I just had to make decisions and the main decision was that one had to simplify things rather than make things more complicated. One had to figure out what one wanted to do and then simplify it in that direction.¹⁹

Simplicity, he thought—what a remarkable concept, particularly after the anything goes, look at me and what I’m doing abstract expressionist period.

■ At the time of Sixteen Americans LeWitt was once again collecting unemployment benefits, or the Rockefeller grant, as they were sometimes referred to by the cultural crowd. The reference was to New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who by then had also earned the unofficial title of governor of the arts.

The city entered a new cultural era in terms of infrastructure and momentum. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, twenty years in the planning, finally opened on Fifth Avenue. Lincoln Center was in its nascent stage and eventually would become the home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. And the Rockefeller family collectively gave about half of the $25 million needed to expand MoMA, the cultural temple that the family had helped found and fund in 1929.

MoMA had earned a reputation of connecting modern life to art. It elevated the idea of design—industrial, graphic, and so on—allowing it to be recognized as a legitimate art form. The museum had architecture, photography, and film departments, which was unusual for the time. As Thomas B. Hess wrote in 1957 in ARTnews, “The Museum is the sum of its Christmas-cards and upholstery-fabric competitions, Mondrians, automobiles and Pollocks, Latin-American watercolors and Picassos.”²⁰ Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s founding director, was still there, and its employment policies helped promising young artists willing to take entry-level jobs.

In that time, making a living as an artist in New York was an arduous task, even for some of those at the top. For example, though Pollock’s canvases eventually sold for millions of dollars, during his lifetime they seldom were sold for more than $1,500. For younger artists, the economic outlook was far worse.

LeWitt was first mentioned in the New York Times in an article by Nan Robertson that was published in July 1961. Robertson wrote:

The public view of painters and sculptors often focuses on two extremes, both sentimental. One is the glamorous beatnik sipping espresso into the late hours on Macdougal Street. The other is the artist struggling, starving and suffering alone in abject, but poetic, poverty.

The truth is that even the most dedicated artists in New York waiting for discovery must and do work part-time as teachers, illustrators, museum guards, house painters, carpenters, salesmen, antique restorers, truck drivers, waiters, bakers, barbers, masseurs, plumbers and fashion models.²¹

Robertson’s piece cited a study made by Bernard S. Myers, a professor at the City College of New York. Myers had discovered that over a five-year period only 8 of the 112 artists he tracked had earned more than $3,000 annually.

LeWitt was among the many artists that Robertson interviewed. The Times noted under the photo of the artist in his studio: “Sol LeWitt earned $1,000 last year, the first money he has ever taken from sales of his paintings.”²²

When he applied to work at MoMA in 1960, LeWitt was thirty-one, near the end of the “young” range. He contacted his cousin, Pell LeWitt, who worked in the museum’s publicity department, and who helped arrange an interview.²³ And the idea of entry-level work didn’t faze the artist. He recalled in 1993: “I asked for the job and got it. That was great. I wouldn’t have to come to work until 5:30 p.m., and I’d work until about 10 or 10:30 p.m…. This job was the best one I got because it was sitting at the desk in the office building part in the evenings and after the offices were closed. There was nothing to do but read and be there. So I saw every exhibition that they had at the time and saw a great deal of film.”²⁴

In all, from 1960 to 1964, he served in a variety of capacities: bookseller, night receptionist and watchman, and all-around clerk. In the last year he worked at the museum, he was recruited to teach a class in drawing “to mainly suburban housewives” in a school run by Victor D’Amico, a tenant in the building: “I had all to do [my own work] and I made enough money, living very frugally, to live fairly well.”²⁵

LeWitt recalled a time of great worry at the museum during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when it seemed as if the United States was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union. At the time, LeWitt was stationed at one of the desks. One night “they were taking paintings out, the Picassos, Matisses, Schwitters—all the great masterpieces—and substituting a sort of the second string. Alfred Barr was coming through and I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Barr, where these paintings are going, that’s where I want to go, too.’”²⁶

The coterie of low-level MoMA employees banded together artistically. Others with entry-level positions (including serving as guards) included the young artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Gene Beery. The circle also included Lucy R. Lippard, who worked in the library and eventually became a writer and art critic who documented the minimalist and conceptual periods. Lippard wrote that MoMA became “the hub” and “the beginning of our art world lives.”²⁷ In 1993 LeWitt said, “It was an important little cell of art at that time. The ideas that were talked about amongst ourselves turned out to be of some significance, because at that time art was changing a great deal, and some of the more important people of that generation happened to be here at that time.”²⁸ In the same year he recalled: “The discussions at that time were involved with new ways of making art, trying to reinvent the process, to regain basics, to become as objective as possible.”²⁹ This idea was in direct contrast to the highly subjective and self-aggrandizing abstract expressionist movement.

A different form of influence developed in this circle, which expanded beyond MoMA employees: artists wrote about each other’s work in art journals. Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, for example, wrote about LeWitt, who in turn wrote about Ruth Vollmer. Many of the artists curated shows in new downtown galleries that included the work of their colleagues.

Because these artists got to know each other and began to gather in their respective lofts, it is tempting to think of scenes from La Bohème, with young impoverished dreamers struggling for their art and love. Indeed, there was even a tragic Mimi figure, Eva Hesse. But reality offered its own drama. And the jobs the artists secured gave them living wages, even if low ones, and time during the daylight hours to tend to their own work and invite their museum colleagues into their studios.

One of LeWitt’s first close relationships from that period was with Flavin. Together they explored a simple idea: simplicity itself. This would be clearly manifested in Flavin’s work, in which he featured arrangements of fluorescent lights that baffled many viewers.

LeWitt recalled that Flavin often quoted philosophers when he wasn’t expressing his own opinions. LeWitt listened, apparently endlessly, to his new colleague: “One didn’t talk very much with Flavin; one listened.”³⁰

LeWitt often went to Flavin’s house for dinner, as the latter’s wife at the time, Sonja Severdija, was an excellent cook. Flavin was “always interested in art and would talk about it. These weren’t always one-sided conversations, but his egotism was not fully developed at the time. He was working on it.”³¹

Loquaciousness aside, Flavin became a big influence on LeWitt, who in a 1993 interview said: “Flavin’s piece [Nominal Three] using a progression of one, one-two, one-two-three [fluorescent lights], was an important example for me. It was one of the first system pieces I’d seen. [Donald] Judd’s progression pieces of that time were also very important. I began to think of systems that were finite and simple. This was the basic difference between the idea of simplifying form to become less expressive, and the idea that the form was the carrier of ideas.”³²

The LeWitt-Flavin relationship developed at the same time that pop artists, as they would be referred to, were producing work that—in contrast with the general response to what came before it—was crowd-pleasing stuff. In a self-contradictory recollection, LeWitt said: “I always liked [Roy] Lichtenstein, and I still do. And I like [Claes] Oldenburg and [Andy] Warhol, too…. On the other hand—the theoretical sense—I didn’t care for the whole idea of what they were doing, but I could see they were very serious people who were doing something really interesting.”³³

The momentum of pop art and then op art,³⁴ a spinoff that featured optical illusions and abstractions in contrast to the former’s recognizable images, helped create the belief (at least in some circles) that the art world was on the brink of nothing less than revolution. The critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, champions of the old ways, were passé. Pop art was among the phenomena that helped build a bridge from what had come before. As the BBC art critic and author Will Gompertz wrote in What Are You Looking At? a capsulized history of modern art, “Lichtenstein’s paintings were a very long way from Abstract Expressionism. Where the art of Pollock and Rothko had been all about existential feelings, Lichtenstein and Warhol focused purely on the material subject; removing all trace of themselves in the process.”³⁵

Still, how would these young artists—LeWitt being the oldest, and something of a father figure to the others—contribute to this new momentum, as they weren’t interested in turning Brillo boxes into subjects? And how would they do it without falling prey to what they despised, the self-congratulatory, celebrity-driven marketplace that ranked the artists’ lives as more important than their work? How would the work of the LeWitt circle become noticed? A significant part of the answer would be in the slow and steady process of relationship building.

■ There is some uncertainty about how LeWitt met Eva Hesse. In Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, Veronica Roberts credits Robert Slutsky with introducing the two to each other. Lucy Lippard writes in Eva Hesse that Harvey and Ellen Becker did the honors. But there is no doubt that from the moment LeWitt met her, Hesse affected him deeply.

In some ways their work seemed very different from each other’s. His was primarily finished when the plan was finished. Hers depended heavily on decisions made during the process of putting pieces together. But they shared common goals otherwise and were intellectually in sync.

The art historian Kirsten Swenson argues that this relationship is a microcosm of change: “Throughout the 1960s Hesse and LeWitt were engaged in an ongoing dialogue and artistic exchange, navigating the era’s social and political upheavals as well as the changing values of the New York art world.”³⁶ She also notes that “the work of Hesse and LeWitt insisted on open-endedness and ambiguity; irrational or absurd art rejected interpretation.”³⁷ The two sympathized with each other about the difficulties of their formative years, and Hesse’s deeply affected her mentor.

As a child, she had emigrated from Germany with her sister in the Kindertransport and was later reunited with her parents, who came to America to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. Her grandparents, however, did not survive the Holocaust. And when Eva was twelve years old, her mother committed suicide. After that Hesse’s life went in two directions, that of an art prodigy and that of a person burdened by family history and her own self-doubt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One day Wapner discovered that “I was missing a piece from my [sculpture] work. There were a lot of scraps I had been putting together. I was sure I had this piece there somewhere, but couldn’t find it. Two weeks later, Sol showed up with box of primary colors on the outside, and little holes to peek through.”⁵¹ On the bottom it said, “The most important thing is on the inside.” It was her missing piece. Three years later that missing piece was still in the box that LeWitt had borrowed from her so that he could include it, titled Cube with Random Holes Containing an Object, as one of two pieces in his first gallery show—a piece that, obviously, asked the viewer to go beyond what could be seen.