Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt (Hartford, Connecticut, 1928 – New York, 2007) was an American artist of Jewish origin, linked above all to minimalism and conceptual art. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of conceptual art and one of its most prominent theorists. Although he worked in painting, drawing, photography and printmaking, he is best known for his "structures", a term he preferred to "sculptures", and for his wall drawings. Since 1965 he has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world.

Born to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he earned a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949. After travelling to Europe, where he was exposed to Old Master paintings, he served in the Korean War. He moved to New York in 1953 and worked in graphic design at Seventeen magazine. In 1960 he took an entry-level job at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where his colleagues included Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Robert Mangold. Dorothy Canning Miller's "Sixteen Americans" exhibition, with work by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, generated lively debate among the artists around him. The sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge were also an early influence.

In the mid-1960s he began working with the open cube, twelve linear elements joined at eight corners, which became a basic building block of his three-dimensional work. From 1968 he devised sets of guidelines and simple diagrams for wall drawings that other people executed directly on the wall. More than 1,200 have been made, and most are destroyed when each exhibition ends. His essay "Sentences on Conceptual Art", published in 0 to 9 magazine, became one of the most widely cited artists' writings of the 1960s.

MoMA gave him his first retrospective in 1978-79. His legacy lies in treating the underlying idea as the core of the artwork, and his wall drawings are still being made today, even after his death.