Despite its makeshift and provisional beginnings, Minimalism
has survived, endured and prospered. These days, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt,
Brice Marden and Richard Serra hold
big reputations. They all have been the subjects of retrospectives at major
museums as well as assorted scholarly dissertations. To see their artwork,
once thought to be ungainly, their fans have chalked up thousands of frequent
flyer miles. Who doesn't know someone who knows someone who has flown to El
Paso and then driven three hours to get to Judd's sprawling art campus in Marfa, Texas? And Dia:
Beacon has become another destination site for indefatigable art pilgrims.
Yet, as Dorothy discovered, there is no place like home. With
"Sol LeWitt on the Roof: Splotches, Whirls and
Twirls" currently on view in the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, and a pair of sculptures -- Circle with Towers and Curved
Wall with Towers -- installed in Madison Square Park by the Flatiron
Building in Manhattan, it's a good time to review the fact that scattered
across Manhattan are a dozen sites with wall drawings by this mild-mannered,
thoughtful 77 year old. East Side, West Side, all around the town, there's probably
a LeWitt on view in your neighborhood.
About his wall drawings, LeWitt once
stated, "I wanted to do a work of art that was as two-dimensional as possible."
And, in the same declarative sentences published in Arts Magazine in
April 1970, he noted, "Different kinds of walls make for different kinds
of drawings." That is part of the pleasure of visiting the "New York 12" in a short period of time. They're
tall. They're wide. They meander. They're interrupted by doors, a coat
check, elevators and air vents. They are geometric shapes, clusters of
lines, a rainbow of colors. Your grade school art teacher probably
would have found them too elemental; and your arithmetic teacher might
have shrugged her shoulders.
Still, it is clear LeWitt has achieved
what he sought almost 30 years ago when he wrote, "It is the desire of
artists that their ideas be understood by as many people as possible."
Today, these ideas convey joy and ebullience.
